Sunday, July 13, 2008

Boise Anniversary



Well, Friday marked our one year anniversary of arriving in Boise. So much has changed since that time - shall we recap?

we got here and moved in with my parents until we could find a house. Nick & I really expected to only be with my parents for about a month, hopefully less. Unfortunately, our credit was worse than we expected and it took some time to clean up. Thankfully we made a killing on our Enumclaw house and had enough money to pay off all our debt and be credit card free. I started my job at Cunnington Leavitt towards the end of July (and since then have gone through numerous changes at work, including a name change - we're now Cunnington & Associates). Nick started his job at EDS in August I believe and then started school just after that.

We finally started looking at houses and ended up putting bids on 3. The first one the sellers came back with a ridiculous counter offer and we walked away. In hindsight, I'm glad we did. It was a cute house, but where we ended up is so much better. The second house we bid on we loved and the seller accepted our offer. We got some terrible news at inspection - water in the crawlspace. And not just a little water - a lot of water. We finally ended up walking away from that house (but we had to go to court to get our earnest money back, as the seller felt she was entitled to it and we disagreed). FINALLY we bid on the house we're in now and we couldn't be happier. We love our house, it's perfect for us.

Yesterday we spent doing some HGTV type fixs to our house. Lots of brass fixtures - the fireplace surround, the light in the front hall, all the doorknobs. Brass doesn't fit with our style or our decor. So, off to Lowe's we went and bought some Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint and started covering it up. We did the fireplace surround, two sets of doorknobs and the light in the front hall. It is SUCH an improvement and so much cheaper than replacing all the knobs.

Well, continuing on with our events since last July - Nick's family came up from Florida in November to do our annual Christmas at Thanksgiving. It was great to see every one. We've been attending lots of sports games of my nieces and nephew - I love watching them play and decide what they want to do. We were hoping to go with the Beesley's to Europe to visit family in May but we decided that a trip of that expense ought to wait until after school. We're just juggling too many financial balls right now. It was hard to pass (especially when I saw all the fun we missed out on) but it was the adult thing to do.

Nick's doing incredibly well in school - he's often one of the first (if not the only) in his class to pick up and understand the more complex ideas, several of his classmates email him for assistance with the home work, and last quarter he pulled in straight A's. I know it's hard for him - he works from 6:00 am to 2:30 pm M-F and then attends school from 6:00 pm to 10:30 pm 3 nights a week, plus he has to make time for homework, housework, oh and ME.

I guess that's about it. We'll see what this next year brings us!