Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Halloween 2018

Halloween this year was a Harry Potter theme, with more villains! I'm afraid this may be our last family theme year... but I will continue to encourage them to try to keep going. After the trunk or treat, the kids said, "Maybe we can, you know, do our own costumes next year?"


Dobby the Elf



Professor Umbridge - how can she be a bad guy? She loves pink and cats! 


Harry Potter - classic! 


Belatrix Lestrange - evil? Nah, she can't stop laughing! 


Professor Snape and Professor MacGonagal

Betty came to our Trunk or Treat

Halloween at school this year

We went trick or treating in our new neighborhood and met some of our neighbors too!


Friday, October 5, 2018

New House!

Earlier this year, Matt and I were asked by our company to move to Reno to help grow that new office - we seriously considered it, looking at homes and talking to friends who live there. But it just didn't feel right... we even looked at Texas and other states. We felt a serious urge to make a change - something, but we weren't sure what...  In the end, we felt we should stay in Vegas, and that looking to buy a house would satisfy that itch. So... we started looking and found a house I liked... but then, just when I was driving by the house changed its status to sold. I saw a house down the street that I liked, with a for sale sign out front... but it wasn't on Zillow. Just then, someone drove up to the house and started to pull in the garbage cans. I of course rolled down my window and asked if the house was for sale. They were super nice - an older couple - and explained their son had lived in the house and there was some issues with his divorce keeping the house from being listed. We came back later that night to look a the house and really, really liked it. The owners said they would call us when they were ready to list it... I thought, yeah right.

Well, they did call us! They said they were going to list the house the next day but wanted to see if we wanted to buy it first.  Matt was traveling for work though, and it had been months since we had seen the house. We didn't feel quite ready - so we told them to go ahead and list the house. We continued to look for other houses, mainly in our ward. We found one that we liked but it was a foreclosure and it was taking forever to get... just for fun, we asked our realtor to check on that original house. It was still available! We put an offer on it and it was accepted the very next day! This house just seems like it was waiting for us. I took this photo on the day we got the keys - a rare, beautiful cloudy day.


Moving in town is kind of rough - I think I would have preferred an all in one swoop awful few days than this dragged out almost month of moving things back and forth. We only moved about 5 minutes west, so we just filled up the mini van over and over and over. Then we moved all the big stuff in one weekend - moving in with our beds and furniture only to find out that the water and gas was shut off... so that was a fun weekend of filling up water jugs at the old house and pouring them into the toilets at the new house. 


We also moved Matt's Chevy Nova... Someday, someday.