Baby's Room

I think our baby's room is finally ready (except for a few little things, like a laundry basket and diaper disposal) so Gummy Bear can come any time now!  Not that he'll even be sleeping in his room at first... he'll be in a bassinet in our room for the first little while.

Before we know his gender, we planned two color schemes for the room.  It would be turquoise and orange if he turned out to be a boy, and turquoise and pink if he had been a girl.  So we were able to start getting turquoise things for the room pretty early on.  And we went with white furniture (more details about the changing table here, in case you missed it), so that the color would really come from the accessories and bedding.  We painted the room a neutral-ish blue ("Quiet Rain") when we moved in and decided not to repaint for this baby.  It's probably not the best wall color for the color schemes we chose but it's not the worst either.  Too much work to repaint, since we're hoping to not be in this rental apartment long term.  And the curtains we have in here don't match the new color scheme... oops.  Maybe we'll get around to changing those.  But maybe not.

View from the door.  His room is also the computer room.

View from the rocking chair.

View from the crib.

The changing table.

The crib.

My mom made this awesome quilt too and I think it ties the room together really well!  Thanks Mom!

The quilt.

*Update:  I redid the glider rocking chair so it would look better and be more comfortable.  Click here to see it.

New Couch!

So up until the end of October, we were using these:

This set is about as old as me.  Now, I know I'm not THAT old, but for a couch... well, they needed to be replaced.  My parents bought this couch and chair new years ago, and until it moved up here with us, they were sitting in my parents' basement, seeing little use.

Well, we put them up on craigslist and found a new home for them at the end of October, because we bought a new couch!  (Side note, when we were moving the old set out of our apartment, we found a duplo block rattling around in the base...  how long it's been in there, I have no idea...)

I love it.  It's so comfy and pretty, and even came with the leather ottoman!  Now I just have to figure out what to put on the walls above it!  (Suggestions welcome!)

Hurricane Irene

Not only did we have an earthquake this week, but a hurricane too!  What excitement!

I guess I could have been more prepared for this storm, but I was convinced that it wouldn't be as bad as everyone was saying.

And in a way, I was right.

The worst part was being without power for about 20 hours.

It was a pretty violent storm, but not a scary storm.  The wind was blowing hard and the rain was coming down fast, but Aaron and I were safe and warm in our apartment.  We spent Saturday evening watching a movie and playing on the Wii until the power went out around 11:00pm.  After telling each other a few ghost stories in the living room, we went to bed.

We slept in on Sunday, knowing that church had already been cancelled because of the storm.  We worked on decorating the apartment a little bit, but that got boring quickly.  It wasn't raining anymore by noon.  There was still some light wind, but the sun had come out, taunting us for not having electricity.  There were leaves all over the parking lot, but no real damage that I could see.

After much boredom and dissatisfaction with the food available, the power came back on at around 6:00pm, just in time for dinner!

My facebook status after the power came back: "I have never been so happy to see a lamp turn on. We have power!"

Aaron's facebook status after the power came back: "The worst part about Irene was the melted ice cream =("

My office doesn't have power right now though, so I'm sitting at home wondering if it'll come back anytime today.  Those of us in the office are very limited without access to our computers so we're just waiting it out.  Aaron's work is still going on though, so I sent him off with the car.  If the power comes back and I need to go to work, my coworker Heather is going to have to pick me up.  I have a bunch of things I'd love to get done while I'm home, but I can't go much of anywhere without the car, and I don't feel like I can do anything that I couldn't stop right away and leave if I need to go to work.  That means I feel like I can't work out because then I'd need to come home to shower and everything really quickly if I need to go.

So I guess my shopping is going to have to wait until Aaron gets home tonight.

Long Post- to Catch up

I'm going to apologize in advance, because I think this is going to be a loaded post.  I keep meaning to go back and write individual posts about things that have happened since we moved here, but I just don't think that's going to happen.  The only reason this post is even happening is that my office doesn't have power at the moment, so I'm at home for the day (or however long the power is out).

So we moved in at the beginning of June.  We had driven out here with as much as we could fit in the car and everything else was left in a storage unit in Provo, knowing that Aaron's work would be moving all of our stuff for us.  So here we were, in this grand apartment... with no stuff.

Ok, we weren't entirely stuff-less.  My parents were generous enough to give/lend us a bunch of stuff.  So in addition to the stuff we could fit in the car (mostly clothes, food, computer, wii, and basic cleaning supplies) we had a couch and chair (about as old as me- I grew up with it), an entertainment unit and TV, a round folding table, 4 really uncomfortable metal folding chairs, a desk, 3 old bookcases, and the bedroom set that we bought cheap.  The china cabinet didn't come until later.

A week after we moved in, Aaron left to spend a month in Utah, working at his old job and hoping the movers would come get our stuff.  We didn't know it was going to be a whole month, but that's just how long it ended up.  Meanwhile, I was starting work at a metal recycling place, handling the exports for the company.  Also during that time, my parents came up to help me paint the apartment and I spent pretty much every weekend down in Manassas.  In mid July, hubby came home, just on time to see Harry Potter with me!  (I'm going to have to write a separate Harry Potter post, to say goodbye.)

2nd bedroom- "Quiet Rain"

 

 

Living Room- "Dapper Tan"

 

  

 

Master Bedroom- "Muted Sage"

No painting party is complete without root beer floats

At Harry Potter

However, Aaron came home... without our stuff.  The movers were apparently super booked and super understaffed, so they wouldn't be able to get our stuff moved until the beginning of August.  UGH.  So Aaron was home for a couple of weeks and then he went back out there for a few days to get our stuff loaded and turn in our storage keys.

The movers came on August 21st to deliver everything.  Let me remind you that we didn't have all that much stuff.  We lived in a furnished apartment in Provo, so we had almost no furniture.  Well, the movers came in a big tractor trailer.  We were the last ones on the load to be delivered, so it was our 4 feet of packed boxes in a 53' trailer.  Nice.  They were supposed to be there at 8am but they didn't end up at our apartment until like 10:30 or 11:00.  Anyway, it all got unloaded and carried up to our third floor apartment in a few hours.  And then the mess began.

That was a week ago.  Aaron started work on Monday, and we've spent every evening and all weekend this past weekend unpacking everything and trying to figure out where it all goes.  Well, we're finally done!  The only stuff that still needs a place are the decorative things and our board games.  Oh, and my sewing/craft supplies, which needs a desk.

Phew.  Congrats.  You made it.  Next up:  Earthquake and Hurricane.

New Apartment!

So right after Natalie's wedding weekend,  Aaron and I moved into our new apartment in Odenton, MD!  I love it.

Let's compare and contrast the old and new apartments, shall we...

Old apartment:

• 1 bedroom
• 1 bathroom
• 2 windows
• Icky paint color that we couldn't change
• No soundproofing between units
• loud upstairs neighbors
• Oven 100° too hot
• Swimming pool

New apartment:

• 2 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms
• Lots of windows- corner apartment
• Paintable walls
• Completely sound proof
• No upstairs neighbors
• Properly functioning appliances
• Several outdoor pools, indoor pool, 2 weight rooms
• Private balcony
• Vaulted ceiling in living room
• Separate dining room
• Laundry room

Is it just me, or does the new apartment sound WAY better than the old one?  :)  I'll have to put up pictures sometime.  We painted and it looks awesome.

My parents gave us some furniture, and let us borrow other furniture to hold us over until we buy new stuff.  Aaron will be starting his new job next week and we'll be able to start getting some nice new stuff soon!  We already got a mattress set from Costco, a complete bedroom set from the ReStore (only $180!), and  a china cabinet from the ReStore.  I'm so excited to get the rest of the furniture- too bad the good stuff is so expensive!

Anyway, it's definitely an upgrade from our last place and it's great!

The Great American Road Trip- 2011

We are very behind on posting our recent adventures, so I'm just going to do my best to catch you up on all we've been up to recently.

On May 20, we had to be out of our apartment in Provo.  It was insanity trying to finish all the packing, loading the car and the storage unit, and cleaning the apartment to check out.  Especially since Aaron was at work until about 3:00 that day and I had to be at work before 6:00.  Yikes.  We ended up getting some great helpers (our home teachers and their wives) to help Aaron with the last minute cleaning while I was at work.

My (former) coworkers at the Covey are awesome.  They threw a little party for me in the box office while the show went on.  I really do miss working there, although I have to admit I don't miss working late in the evenings!

Anyway, Aaron picked me up after work and we spent the night at our friends' apartment (Mike and Michelle- thanks for letting us stay!) since we had checked out of our place.  First thing in the morning, we headed out toward Arches National Park.

We spent the day hiking in Arches.  The weather was beautiful and the scenery was magnificent too.  Aaron and I had a really good time.  The sunburns we both got weren't so fun, but it was worth it!  (Remember you can click on the photos to see them bigger.)

The next day we went to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  It's one that a lot of people don't know about, hidden in Colorado.  It's actually really neat.  It's a huge canyon (obviously...) and you have to get a permit to hike into it.  It's apparently really difficult and dangerous to hike down there, even for really experienced hikers, so we decided to just go around the rim.  There are various lookout points along the rim that you drive to, and most of them have a short hike from the parking lot to the actual lookout platform.  It was awesome.  We were really impressed with the view at each point, though we had been hoping for a little more hiking than we got.  That's okay though, because in the middle of our last hike of the day (a 1.75 mile hike)  it randomly started hailing on us.  We were almost to the end, so we rushed to the lookout point and almost immediately started running back toward the car.  Of course, 5 minutes later, the hail and rain had stopped and the storm clouds were blowing away.  So strange.

About halfway between the visitor's center and the highest point in the park

The other 3 days were mostly uneventful, as we were pretty much just driving.  Although we did get to see Aaron's brother, Steve, while we were in Columbus, Ohio for the night.  But we mostly just listened to a lot of Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  We got through the first 2 and a half books of the series before we arrived in Manassas on May 25th.

Stay tuned for the next installment of our moving adventures: "Pre-Wedding Festivities (and crafts)"

Packing...

is a pain.

We are so excited to move but packing is taking forever!  It's pretty much taking over our whole apartment as well as all our time.

Oh well- we'll be heading out to Virginia in 4 days!

Contract- Sold! (And some trip planning)

I am happy to announce that our contract for our apartment has been sold!  This is so exciting for us because we were starting to get worried that we would have to pay rent here even after we were gone and paying rent somewhere else.  But that's not an issue anymore!  Yay!

So now that we have that taken care of, we're working on finalizing the details of our road trip to my parents' house in Northern VA.  Right now we're planning on spending a day in Arches, spending a day driving to and hiking in Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and then a 12 hour day driving to Omaha, another 12 hour day to Columbus (where we're hoping we can meet up with Aaron's brother who lives there, either that evening or the next morning), and then a shorter 7 hour day to Manassas.  It's a lot of driving, but at least we have 2 really fun days in there.

We're also working on packing up our apartment, since we're going to be checking out of our apartment in a week!  It's looking a lot emptier in here, with most of the pictures off the walls as well as a lot of stuff in boxes and already in a storage unit.  The problem is that now we're getting to the stuff we don't want to pack up until the last minute since we use them.  Like clothes and some bathroom and kitchen stuff.  It's exciting though, even though it's a lot of work getting ready to move.

OH!  In other news, Austin and Mariko had their baby on Monday!  His name is Harrison and I haven't met him yet (I will once we get to VA) but I've seen pictures and he is adorable!  I'm so excited for them!  So I now have 6 nephews, 2 nieces, and two on the way (gender unknown!).  Wow!

*Check out our countdowns on the right- everything is getting so close!*

Someone buy our contract!

We are selling our apartment contract because we are moving soon!  Leaving Provo, leaving Utah!

We have a couple people who are interested in buying it but they haven't decided yet.  And we want to sell it ASAP.

So if you know anyone looking for an apartment in Provo for the summer (or longer) let them know about ours!

It's listed here: http://provo.craigslist.org/apa/2374995251.html

And here: http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=475&ad=15499865&cat=276

Life Lately

Things have been a little crazy recently.  A little explanation...

You may not know, but Aaron got a "conditional" job offer a while back.  This is super exciting!  It's a government job and it's only about an hour and a half from where my parents live.  It's not his dream job, but it's in a great location, good salary, and it's a great stepping stone toward what he really wants to do.  It's "conditional" because it's not official yet- not until they finish the background check and polygraph testing and whatever else they have to do to get his security clearance.  And obviously he can't start work until that's all done, but they're trying to get it all done so he can start soon after graduation.  So the week of my birthday, the background checker was in town, talking to Aaron's coworkers, friends, boss, etc., and Aaron (of course).  And then Aaron flew out to the east coast this past week to do some more stuff for this job.  On the way to the airport, our check engine light came on.  Yikes.  So we had to get the rest of the way to SLC and I had to drive back to Provo with the light on.  We haven't noticed anything too weird though, but we took the car in tonight to get it checked out.  Fortunately there wasn't anything really wrong.  Apparently our car just didn't get as hot as cars normally do when driving under the conditions we were.  So good news!

Our apartment also got painted last week, right before Aaron left.  This was the most ridiculous thing ever.  First of all, we had to get everything off the furniture so they could move everything into the middle of the rooms.  OR we had to move everything ourselves.  Now, we don't have all that much stuff, considering this is a furnished apartment, but this is also a very small apartment, and there's just not a whole lot of room to be moving things around.  We decided to move most things ourselves since last time our maintenance guys moved our bookcase to fix something in the ceiling, they broke it.  So we have little faith in other people moving our stuff around.  So all of our stuff was in the middle of the rooms and I spent the day with Johanna and Rosie while the painters were here.  When I came back to my freshly painted apartment... It looked just the same as it did before.  I mean, the nail holes and stuff were all filled in, and all the little imperfections were gone, but the walls were still that sickly off-white color that looks like it was white once upon a time and has since faded and yellowed into what it is now.  Gross.  Ok but my main problem with this is that our apartment management decided it would be a good idea to paint every apartment in our complex between January and March.  Not only was it so cold when they started that I'm sure some of the apartments froze in their attempt to air out the space, but all of us have to live here!  I just cannot understand why they don't paint in between tenants rather than interrupting everyone's lives to refresh the nasty color.  Sorry for the rant, but my apartment is still not completely put back together from this insanity and the whole thing just frustrated me.

And now we're in the process of applying for an apartment out east.  We originally found a townhouse that looked good, but when my parents looked at it for us, they told us that it might not be a place we want to live for too long.  They suggested a different neighborhood.  So we found an apartment that we really like.  I haven't seen it in person, but Aaron got a chance to look at it while he was out there last week.  There's just so much paperwork and it's a little more difficult since we're not there to get it done.  All I know is that this is nothing like signing for an apartment in Provo.  But ultimately, I'm okay with that since I want to live somewhere better than anywhere I've lived here in Provo.  I just hope that things work out with this one we're applying for, because I don't want to have to start searching again!

So anyway, that's life lately for the Kimblers, and my excuses for not being good about updating the blog often enough!

Diplomas and Dementors

Exciting news!  My diploma came in the mail last night!

It took a month and a half after graduation to actually get it, but I replaced the Sample diploma with the real one in the frame and boy, it looks beautiful!

We also finished the whole Harry Potter series this week.  This was exciting for me, not only because I finally get to cross something off my Summer Reading List, but because I have loved the Harry Potter books for many years and now Aaron can finally appreciate them for himself.  We listened to them instead of reading them, but it was a great way for us to do it together.  He was so funny when we were getting close to the end.  I would just sit there and watch the looks on his face change as characters he's grown to love died, hidden secrets were revealed, and everything came to a close.  Thank you, Aaron, for agreeing to listen to them even when you thought the movies were good enough, and you're welcome for proving that there's so much more to these stories than the things the movies show you.

Really, I'm glad we're done, because I was starting to have really weird dreams about Harry Potter, polyjuice potion, and the imperius curse.  Strange.  Now I'm just going to have dreams about Greek gods and their love children (I'm reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians now).

Side note:  I think we've decided to stay in our current apartment.  We've always known that our apartment is more/just as expensive than larger ones in Provo, but we blamed it on the location close to campus, the pool, and the furniture.  We did some searching, and we did find some furnished places with a second bedroom for significantly less rent per month.  However, most of them were further from campus than we want to be while Aaron's still in school, and we just don't want to deal with apartment searching and moving.  It's only 8 months right?

Uh, another side note.  Sorry.  I was just voted employee of the month at work!  Whoo hoo!  Free movie tickets for me!

Also, we're taking another weekend trip this week!  My coworker's family has a condo in Park City, so she, her husband, Aaron, and I are going up there for a few days.  I know we just had a long weekend but I'm still super excited to go.  I've never been there, and I've heard awesome things about it.  I'll put pictures up when we get back, because I'm sure we'll take lots on our adventures.

Mattress

Never have I wanted to be on Glee more than when they were all given free mattresses.

Aaron and I have both been having trouble sleeping, and even when we sleep from 10:45pm-7:45am (which is normal for us) we don't really feel rested in the morning.  I blame our mattress.

So now I really want to buy our own mattress, since we're just using the one provided by the apartment complex.  However, our old debate comes into play here.  We live in a furnished apartment.  We'll be out of here in less than a year.  We don't know where we're going to end up.  So we were hoping to postpone buying furniture until we're done with school so we don't have to move it later.

Which brings up something else.  Our rent is going up starting in September.  Yes, we're only going to be here until April, but I don't like that we're paying more for a one bedroom place than other people who have two bedrooms.  This makes me want to move, to get more space and to save money, but this likely means we'd have to go a little further from campus, which would be fine for me but hard for Aaron.  It would also mean that we would need to buy some serious furniture, more than just the coffee table and bookcases we already have.  Which means that we'll have to move it all when we leave Provo in April.

I mentioned some of this on facebook and I've already received lots of comments.  I just don't know what to do. And we have to let our complex know if we're going to renew our contract by June 5, which means we have only a week to figure out if we want to move and where to move.

And I'm going to need a new job once I finish my 910 yearly hours in August.  I don't really even want to think about that now, although I've looked at a few Provo City jobs that are constantly taking applications, and I'm thinking I'll apply for them once it's a little closer.  Really, I'd just love to stay where I am, but unfortunately I can't.  It seems a little backwards to me that graduating is losing me a great job, but it is what it is, right?  Lame.