HI!  How are you?  It’s been a very long time, hasn’t it?  Well let’s see here, I’ve uprooted my family from Washington, stayed with my mom and stepfather in the boonies of Pennsylvania for 3 months, and bought a house in a sort-of suburb of Philadelphia.  I’VE BEEN BUSY!  Being without a reliable internet connection was torture for me, and it killed me to watch the rankings on MWC and SMP fall to nothing.  Now I’ve got to work to get those damned things back up to something.

Ok, so what have you missed?

The plane ride from Seattle to Philadelphia was the longest plane ride of my life.  I will never ride in a plane with a toddler again.  Ever.  Then getting Lukas adjusted to life in a huge house full of breakable things was equally awful.  Jessie’s drive from Seattle to the boonies of Pennsylvania was awful and I’m sure he’ll never want to do that again.  Ever.  Then Jessie had a 3 hour commute EACH WAY to his job.  That means he was spending 6 hours a day in commute.  THAT SUCKS.

Lukas turned two while we were in internet limbo.  Jessie’s parents and brother and sister-in-law and their daughter came and we had a nice little party.  The kids had fun playing and the grown ups had fun catching up and eating ungodly amounts of food.  I made Lukas a dinosaur cake.  It was cute.  He got a million presents as always.

We went into Clarksburg to see friends and family we hadn’t seen in three years.  We brunched with the Canon’s and had a nice visit.  We visited my father and his parents and had a nice and slightly uncomfortable visit.  And then we met up with Aschlie and the rest of a visit was an absolute hoot.  Aschlie and I went to my grandmother’s grave and instead of crying, we told morbid stories and laughed.  My grandma liked to laugh and I think she would have appreciated laughter over tears.  Then we went to the Hussmann’s where I got to hold itty bitty beautiful babies and get slobbered on by Riley.  We had good food, had great company, and felt completely at ease with super nice people.  I was happy for Helen and Mary that their husbands are just super nice guys, to the point of being disarming.

We visited with Aschlie and had great talks and B.S.ing.  It was so nice to talk face to face.  We had breakfast the next morning all together and then said goodbye.  We headed to Morgantown to see Jessie’s brother’s new house.  It is ENORMOUS.  Then the long-assed drive back to the boonies of Pennsylvania.

Somewhere in there we decided that we needed to at least look at a few properties in the area and get an idea of what our budget could afford us.  We found a WONDERFUL realtor and set up a viewing day with three houses.  The first house was dirty and scary.  The second house was on a gorgeous tree-lined street and was fantastic.  The third house needed to be condemned.  We went back to the boonies and talked about looking at other houses.  Then we decided that we actually really liked the second house so we asked our realtor to talk to the listing agent to inquire about it further.  The listing agent said that the price had been reduced recently and they were getting a lot of foot trafic through the house.  We talked about it some more and decided it couldn’t hurt much to put in an offer (after Jessie had about 20 panic attacks).  We put in an offer, got a counter, countered back, and were under contract in one weekend.  It happened really fast.  Then Jessie had another 20 or so freak outs.  We got the place inspected, was told everything is in great shape and after the mortgage company dragged their feet until the last effing minute, we closed.  So yeah, we now own a house.  We looked at three houses before buying one.  The whole process was not as stressful as some people make it out to be.  You sign a zillion papers, you fax a zillion papers, and then you sign a zillion more and then they give you a set of keys.  I’ll be posting pictures later, right now I’m just catching up.  Trust me, I’ll be talking about this place a LOT on the future….and you’re going to read it and like it or else!

On a little side note here, I feel that I should post something funny.  Two nights ago, we went to Home Depot to get a big garbage can for recycling.  It was too big for our car, so we had to readjust everything and ended up having to recline the front passenger seat and setting it in there.  Well with Lukas in the back, there was no place for me to sit besides curling up into a ball and smooshing myself into the space behind the reclined seat.  Our car is tiny and sucks sometimes.  Anyhow, Jessie was talking to me and turned his head to say something and I heard a loud *THUMP* and then him yell, “OUCH!  I just punched myself (I’ll tell you the rest in a second).  Believe it or not, I hear Jessie yell “I just punched myself….” about 3 times a week.  Sometimes he punches himself in various regions of the crotch, and sometimes he punches his chin.  He does this a lot, so it wasn’t a surprise to hear him yell the first part.  It was the second part of this yelp that put me into hysterical laughter only because it was so unexpected.

“I just punched myself in the face with the trash can!”

You tell me where else you would hear that exclamation.  Where?  Who else would say that besides Jessie?