Beth's Contradictory Brain

So Grateful!

The closing is done, I've got the keys to our new home!

Our mortgage man called this morning saying that although there had been a problem with our loan being FHA due to the earlier appraisal issues, everything was fine, it was converted to a conventional loan instead. That lowered our monthly mortgage payment another $20 bucks or so. (From what I understand this is highly unusual and gracious on the part of BB&T.)

I just want to say how grateful to God I am for everything about this whole process. There were time things could have gone wrong, or cost us more money or something in this process, instead things worked out in our favor. I believe God's hand is in that.

I also want to thank all you wonderful people here online who also said words of encouragement and prayer for us. It means a lot. Truly.

Tonight is moving the cats into the new house, once I can get the second one out from under the bed. Then the movers show up at 9 am tomorrow. I won't have internet until Monday at the house, but I'll go somewhere and get some wifi over the weekend.

On The Verge

There's something that feels weird, yet maybe cathartic about moving. About packing and unpacking your life. It's been nice to have plenty of time to pack. I'm still at about 95% done. The kitchen is always the hard part. I've spent weeks visualizing where the boxes go, where the limited furniture we do have goes, unpacking things, getting a real feel for the house. I still haven't even ventured around the back yard.

So it's been really frustrating to not be able to feel excited about all of this because I'm worried there will be some last minute glitch. The closing is at 4 pm tomorrow and as of 4 pm today the people handing the closing don't have the instructions yet. I'm mostly sure everything will be just fine, but again, it's frustrating having to worry.

I'm also really sad Nerdstar isn't here for this. It's a big event and she's away. Now, yes, we could have delayed all of this until she was done with her Army stuff, but part of me also wanted to have this to do while she was gone. (See the title of this blog if you're confused!)

I'm really looking forward to not being in an apartment. The complex we've been in these two years has been really nice. We never hear our neighbors. It's safe. The people, when we do see them, are nice. But I'm tired of having people so close all the time. Poor Ramen dog wants to be social and he barks when he hears anyone outside. It's annoying. I'm looking forward to having the deck in the back yard, and sitting out there. I'm ready for some place that's actually home.

So tomorrow we do a final walk through at 3, the closing at 4. Then I'll come back to the apt. and get the cats and a few things to take over to the house. I don't want to have to deal with the cats the morning the movers come, so they'll be the first to spend the night in the house.

I'll find out tomorrow what time the movers are showing up on Friday. It always amazes me how it'll take them about thirty minutes to load everything we own onto a truck, and then another thirty minutes or so to unload it.

I think the weather's supposed to be decent for Friday. Keep your fingers crossed.

Slow Weekend

Not really much going on for me this weekend. The weather really heated up. It's 90 yesterday, today and tomorrow, but thankfully only 30% humidity. What's so funny here is that people who live here think it's humid, but in Texas we got temps over 90 and over 85% humidity for six months of the year.

I took Ramen to the park yesterday and let him run around until he was tired. Later today when it cools off some I'll either take him for a long walk or let him run around the little fenced area in our apt. complex.

It's also been nice this weekend to have conversations with Nerdstar that last more than five minutes. Her weeks are pretty sucky, but at least she gets to go out to eat and get some better food and get some rest on the weekends!

Other than that I finally packed all the stuff in my big desk.

Mostly I'm just being bored and boring. Watching a little tv. Surfing around the net.

Tomorrow I take Ramen to get his annual shots and will probably go buy the few more boxes that I need to finish packing.

Things will start to pick up a little bit on Wednesday. There's another project in the work from home stuff I'm doing that has the preliminary part on Wednesday.

The forecast is for scattered thunderstorms Wed. through Sat. so pray that it's clear when the movers are here.

Anyway - hope your weekend was more fun. Mine will be much better next weekend!

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary to my Nerdstar Dorj Snuggle Bunny Cutie Pie!!

Wow. Ten. Years. That's a long time. It's been a crazy ten years, as you can tell from the post I did about all of our travels and such.

And it sucks a lot to not spend this day together. I'd bitch and moan about how much it sucks that we weren't together today, that we didn't get to go out and eat some great meal somewhere. But I got to thinking about all the other military families out there who go through deployments and crap like this all the time. While I've got a category over there called "military wife" - I don't usually feel like one. You know, that whole DADT bullshit. But days like today really bring home the reality of being a military wife.

I won't make my anniversary post a rant... sigh.

So, here's to my Army Girl :-) I love you and I'm proud of you. Food doesn't taste good without you. I'm not having any fun. There's no point in yelling at the tv with you gone. Having the bed to myself gets old fast. (Well, you know Little Man is happy having your side.) There's no one here to say "bed is great."

We've had a lot of adventures these ten years. I think the next ten will be even better.

Nerdstar Update

From an email I got from her:

Today has been easier duty wise... even though we had spent the majority of the day outside. I saw the captain who said that he was going to send me home but he didn't say anything to me when he saw me... so I don't know and stay tuned. Sometime tomorrow we are supposed to bring everything back and at 3 am friday morning, we are supposed to get tested in land navigation... must get 5 out of 8 target or fail and that's another way to go home. I'll be walking around from 3 to 10 am... and I hope that I can find these targets!! If not, then you'll have to pick me up and head home! Lots of planes are flying overhead because they are trying to give airborne school students their day and night jumps. I took a shower in the dark tonight because the power went out in the shower tent.

If you had any idea how bad Nerdstar's navigation skills are... We've joked that we can't buy too big a house or else she'll always have to leave breadcrumbs to find her way around it. But, she also seems to come through when necessary - so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for her.

10 Years

Thursday is our 10th anniversary. There's too much in those ten years to cover in one long post, so I thought I'd write a couple and see where they lead.

Up first:

Ten Years By Locations

Cities we’ve lived in: Austin, Kansas City, Johnstown, PA, and now DC.

Cities we’ve visited: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Waco, Lake Charles LA, New Orleans, Biloxi MS, Raleigh, Atlanta, DC, New York, Piscataway NJ, Buffalo, Toronto, Seattle, Tacoma, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Atlantic City

Military Bases Both of Us: Ft. Hood TX, Camp Zama Japan, Ft. Lewis Washington, Ft. Leavenworth KS, Ft. Belvoir VA.

Military Bases Nerdstar: Mosul Iraq, and somewhere in Kuwait.

Other Nerdstar Travels: Hawaii, Taiwan, China, Utah

We've got a big wall size map of the highways of America and have marked all the road trips we've taken. I love looking at it and seeing where we've been. I actually had to order a new one so we can color coordinate it better because now we're getting into re-driving places we've already been to. We travel together a lot better than we used to, but we'd still kill each other if we ever tried to do the Amazing Race.

Part of all that traveling though is also time we've spent apart. Mostly, but not exclusively due to the Army

16 months when she was deployed to Ft. Lewis and then Iraq.

3 months when she was in Camp Zama.

2 weeks twice she had AT in Hawaii.

Various weekends she spent in Houston with family.

1 week she went to Taiwan for her father's funeral.

This current 5 month stint for Officer Training.

Nerdstar Update by Me

Yes, it's 3:15 a.m. and I'm writing on my blog. Figure if I'm this awake at this time I might as well do something semi-productive.

I was hoping Nerdstar would have a chance to update her blog this weekend, but she got a little busy.

Last week was not her favorite week in life. She had to do a lot of physical training - even extra training because she's older and slower than all the other Army peeps who are in their early 20s. Evidently one of her company commanders is giving her a hard time. Frustrating. Then they had weapons training/qualifications. On that day she had to be at guard duty at 4:00 a.m. Then there was the daily PT, then briefings. Then she was at the weapons range until 11 p.m. And it was wet and muddy and smelled gross. And because that wasn't fun enough, she had to go back the next day and finish qualifying on weapons. (You'd have to ask her exactly what all that means - I don't know the types of weapons or what targets they have to hit.)

She's stuck eating either chow hall food or Subway. The chow hall isn't even open after 6:30 p.m. and most of the time they're finishing their day a lot later than that and Subway is the only place within walking distance. For those of you who know Nerdstar at all, you know food is the most important thing in her life. So this just adds insult to injury - having to put up with all this AND not get any good food.

Saturday after she had more extra PT time, she and a couple other army chicks went to a renaissance fair. When she texted me that's where she was heading I knew the biggest reason she was going was to eat some turkey legs. Sure enough, the text I got later was a big picture of the turkey leg stand. After that the chicks she was with decided to do driving all over Georgia. They ended up running out of gas at one point and almost driving off the road from being tired as well.

My two cents on that is that I wish she'd been smarter and not stayed out until after 1 a.m. because she'd had a long week and needed to rest up. But I know when you're not the one driving/making the decisions, sometimes you're along for a ride that goes farther than you'd like. Sigh.

Today she finally got to sleep late. She spent a lot of time re-packing gear to head out into "the field" this week. My understanding is that for four days they head a little further into the woods for field training, land navigation and such. These are not Nerdstar's strengths. And while out there they'll be staying in what are basically large warehouse rooms with bunk beds - but no co-ed.

What's made a lot of this more bearable is that she's had her blackberry with her and we can text back and forth. I'm kinda surprised the army lets them keep them during all of this.

One other thing that's my two cents. I've always said that in theory the army should have one set of standards. If you can do X,Y and Z as is necessary to perform any certain job in the military, then I don't care your gender, sexual preference, height, weight, age, etc. Qualify and the job is yours.

Well, 90% of the people in this course with Nerdstar are in men in their early 20s. And there's just qualify or don't qualify. So it's naturally harder for her sometimes. But so far she's done fine. And I'm proud of her for that. I could not have made it through 2 days of what she's had to do. I couldn't even stand all the noise in her dorm, or the constantly being around all those people, or even just being awake all the hours she's had to be awake.

Keep her in your prayers, she's got five more weeks of this class.

More Live and Let Live

This is sort of what I'm talking about when I say I used to feel government and I had a live and let live agreement. And that more and more I feel government is getting way to involved in my day to day life. As a lesbian I don't want them in my bedroom. As a Christian I don't want them saying their two cents about what I believe. And the one I really don't understand is how in the name of "climate change" and "saving the Earth" we've let not only the government, but also "Big Evil Corporations" such as GE tell us what light bulbs to use, what type of bag to take our groceries home in, etc. Why are people so eager to let all this stuff be regulated for them?

Week 2

Time still goes slower with Nerdstar gone. It was a pretty good week though. I did a little more packing and cleaning. In two weeks I'll be unpacking stuff I haven't even packed yet.

I think I ended up catching a cold from going to the DC Tea Party the other day. Maybe it's an age thing. I felt pretty bad yesterday but fell a lot better today. It was 80 and sunny today so I took Ramen dog to the park and then took the motorcycle out for a short ride. I'm looking forward to riding around the new neighborhood soon and learning my way around. I find it a lot more fun to do all that on a motorcycle.

I'm not that excited about moving into the house yet. Partly because it still seems far away, and partly because there are so many details to take care of and I don't feel I can relax until the keys are actually in my hand. I've got the cable and internet and electricity scheduled to be turned on. Waiting to hear back from the water company. The movers are scheduled. The day before closing I'll fax all the info to my bank for the wire transfer.

I'm mostly waiting until I get moved in to start looking into the things that will happen after, like buying the few things the house needs, finding a new dog park, finding the library, seeing what all restaurants are in the area. Things like that. I'll have three weeks from when I move in until I drive back down to GA and then Nerdstar and I drive to her next Army class over in AZ.

So yeah, on top of getting everything together for the house/move, I'm kinda planning a 9 day road trip.

No complaints though. Just gotta not stress and keep moving forward.

My Best Tax Idea

I posted this as a comment over on CaliValleyGirl's blog:

I have always wanted there to be a way on our tax forms for us to at least be able to say I want X amount of my taxes to go to X,Y and Z. That way we'd have some sort of say in how our tax dollars are spent. Even if we could only designate half of our tax dollars - then we'd have a much truer voice in government.

My First Protest

Yes, today was my first political rally/protest. Yes, I have always had lots of opinions on politics, but as I recently wrote, I also felt it was a live and let live situation. Now, I feel the current government is getting close to implementing too many policy changes that would be detrimental to this country, it's economy, and my life. Not to mention, as long as Geithner is Treasury Secretary, then the rest of us paying our taxes just seems wrong.

Anyway. It's 50 degrees with a steady rain here in DC today. At 10:15 I got in the DC Metro to head over to Lafayette Park across from the White House. Just in my train car alone there were three families with kids headed down there as well.

I got there about 11:15 and there were already over 1000 people there. (I've read there might have been 3000 there.) The weather just kept getting worse. They had a stage and speakers but I never could really see or hear whoever was speaking. That and the weather is why I didn't stay for the whole thing.

I spent a lot of time watching different, mostly small, media people talking with people at the protest. I'm never sure the people who WANT to talk to the media are always the best representatives of the majority of people there. Of course, the 3 women from Code Pink got lots of media attention. The first "media" people I encountered had "whitehouse.com" on their mic. I heard one of the women telling the other - "Just cut them off, these people tend to ramble." I laughed and asked her why even ask questions if she didn't want to hear the answers. Naturally, they spent over five minutes talking with the Code Pink chicks.

I wish the weather had been better and I'd had a chance to talk to more of the people there. They all seemed very nice. Lots of funny signs I failed to take pics of.

I think for a lot of people there, like me, it's about getting out there and being counted, being heard. The media definitely doesn't represent our point of view.

UPDATE: Some good pics I didn't take

Nerdstar Update

Here's her take on her first week.

Week One

Not too bad of a first week of Nerdstar being gone. I made a little progress on packing stuff up, worked a couple of days.

Hopefully sometime this weekend Nerdstar will blog about her first week. She's had to get up ass early every morning, do quite a bit of physical training, lots of hurry up and wait, and lots of boring briefings/meetings.

I miss her, but this time seems much easier than when she was deployed to Iraq. Not having to worry about her safety 24/7 makes a huge difference. Also knowing the exact end date helps. Plus, she's got her blackberry with her and we can text a lot. She's got the laptop with her, but internet service has kinda sucked so far.

I have a work from home project that was supposed to start today, but now looks like they won't have it ready until Monday. Many years ago I scored student essays for standardized tests. A while back I found their website and saw that they now have it set up so people can do that from home and applied. It's not a ton of money, but it's better than none and it gives me something to do - which also helps my brain not get all wonky on me while she's gone.

Back in The South

I grew up in the middle of the DFW metroplex. Dallas was 17 miles one direction, Ft. Worth was 15 miles the other. Not that we went to either one other than on field trips or something. But still, they were there. My schools were diverse. My neighbors were somewhat diverse. The radio stations were fantastic. I consider myself a Texan, not so much a Southerner.

This is our second time driving the highways between DC and Georgia. In Oct. '99 we took a month long road trip from Austin to Toronto. I'd never been to any of the major cities on the East Coast. It was a fantastic trip. I loved driving through the Carolinas, they are so beautiful. Then we'd stop in some small town to get gas and the cashier would often be missing a couple of teeth.

Driving through the Carolinas yesterday, we would scan the AM/FM dials and see what was out there. Apparently, there are pretty much four kinds of radio stations - Christian, Country, Oldies and Easy Listening. Heh. Within five minutes I heard references to Satan on two different stations. Within thirty minutes we heard a caller on a station talking about handling snakes in church. I swear. Cracked us up. There is also a plethora of outdoor/hunting/fishing stores.

I also grew up Southern Baptist. I've got no problem with church goin' folks. It's still been strange to be so inundated with religion the past 48 hours. There were no less than seven stations broadcasting church services on the tv this morning. Can I just say that I'd be much more wiling to listen if they spoke like normal people instead of this over the top preacher style.

I do love the way the South is much more friendly and laid back. We stopped in Charlotte at Price's Chicken Coop for some really good fried chicken. The place was take-out only, so we opened up the back of the Matrix and ate in the parking lot. Nice!

We've traveled a lot the past several years. We spend a lot of time talking about where we'd really enjoy living. I don't think we've found it yet.

Hectic

I really don't want tomorrow to get here. I don't want my Nerdstar to be gone until Sept.

It's been good that we were both off this week to get all this stuff done. It's been a pretty hectic week. Her focus for a while now has been preparing for OBC and mine has been the house and the move.

Tomorrow morning we get up very, very early and drive down to Georgia. It's about a 12 hour drive. We'll be stopping in Charlotte to get some good grub. She has to check in at noon on Sunday and get squared away in the barracks. Turns out she'll be sharing the room with another chick. Think dorm room but smaller. Hopefully we'll get to see each other Sunday evening. Then Ramen and I drive back Monday. (Ramen dog is fantastic on road trips - thankfully - since he gets to do so many of them.)

Once I get back home, it'll take me at least a day or two to get the place back into some sense of organized and functional. Then it's 3 weeks till closing on the house and the movers show up.

I'm hoping to work some days in there. And, I got a work from home gig for the last couple of weeks of this month that I'm sure I'll write more about later.

I've got lists of things that need to be done, but it still all rattles around my brain all the time.

So, I'll update when I can over the weekend, might just send a few tweets on Twitter.