A Graduation and A Vacation

With the house sale pending, it was time to take in some relaxation!

Come May it was time for another special event: Hannah (college graduate) graduated from Texas A&M University. We all convened in College Station to celebrate.

On Saturday, we headed down to Sugar Land for the day to find a place to live. After a long search, we settled on a 2 bedroom 2.5 bath townhome in nearby Stafford. We'll hang here for a while until we know where I'll be working and we get to know the area a bit better.

Then it was time from vacation. Travis had just left his company and spent some time with his family in Iowa. I went to Miramar beach with my family. For a week. It was wonderful.

View from the deck of our beach house for the week!

Mom wins best decision for vacation: coconuts for coconut drinks!

Sunsets on the beach!

Some fun extracurricular activities! It's a....table.

Our beach house for the week!

Couldn't pass up a little crafty baking! *Note the awesome shark attack cupcake top right.

Beautiful!

Travis started with his new company right after returning from vacation while I stayed in Lubbock to get things packed, sold, and wrapped up with my work commitments. Came home to this lovely dust storm. Yay, Lbk!

Experienced some awesome weather a few days later...

This was the night I got locked out of my house: in my pajamas, at 7:30 at night, in a thunderstorm, while my husband was in Houston. Thank goodness I had my phone with me. I was saved by a rather large pacific islander in flip flops who emerged from the smallest car I've ever seen an hour later who didn't need to see my ID with address, because he didn't think anyone could/would make up the story I had.

And again a few days after that...

That's 105* outside in early June. Wasn't even the hottest part of the day yet. Unfortunately, I left my unopened diet coke in the car. Came back and it was opened...by the sun. Thankfully, the diet coke only ended up in the cupholder directly behind the can. Somehow, there was none anywhere else. Yucky WTex weather.

Ok. We'll move.

Staging and Selling

Now what? Sell the house. Ugh. I loved that house.  Not everything about it, but the big living room, new appliances, big patio, pergola, and new backyard landscaping? Yes. I loved that. Sigh.

We had a wonderful real estate agent who we had used twice before. Met with him and spoke about our situation and goals for the sale. He told us that there'd weren't a lot of comps in the neighborhood our size that were completely move-in ready-which was a good thing. We were looking at pricing on the higher end of our range for financial reasons and for the fact that we had done so many updates (wood, tile, trim, bathrooms, appliances, pergola,  patio, etc.).

He let us know average market time in the LBK was about 60 days with closing around 75 days. We were looking at exactly 60 until my last day of work and proposed moving day. A little tighter than we had hoped, but we were ready.

He was on board and gave us a few things to work on before we listed. These were minor things like paint touch-up, replacing our standard vanity mirror with a new framed mirror, and checking light bulbs.

After those minor repairs, we started in on the cleaning/staging/storing leg of our adventure. Of course, I was worried about making the house perfect. Hoping to make an easy sale so we didn't have overlap in two cities. I also wanted to get everything set because we knew Travis would be moving to start his job before I moved down. 

Here's a few of my tips for staging:

1) Get rid or move into storage 1/2 of your "stuff."
No joke. Think of it like this: the more you get rid of, the more someone will want your house. You want to show off your house, not your stuff when staging. The less "stuff" you have, the more spacious your home will feel. Empty space is good.
We rented a storage space (for what ended up to be 3 months) to store our "stuff." We allotted half of the space to "plan to keep" and half to "garage sale/craigslist."

2) Price as you go for garage sales/craigslist items.
Ugh. Who wants to think about that when you're planning a move? Trust me. Buy some neon dots, grab a sharpie, and price your heart out. It makes you decide in the moment whether you're selling it or not (lean towards sell-sell-sell). Also, prevents the mass-pricing frenzy that comes with prepping a garage sale. This also allows you to pre-sort as you stage.

3) Exchange most photo frames from personal pictures to generic scenery.
Buyers don't want your vacation pictures. They want their vacation pictures in your house. Make it easy for them to see their things in your home. I used some pictures of our succulents, sunsets, and scenery pictures to replace our family photos with. Leave your pictures in, just put the new ones in front. That way when you get to your new home, you just flip the pictures and you're good to go.

4) Clean baseboards. With a terry cloth towel and 409.
Never realized how much baseboards contribute to the "clean feeling" of a room. Turns out they do. And if you live somewhere dusty (like we did), those suckers are icky. Don't forget to clean the other frequently-missed places like window sills, fans, etc.

5) Stage what you don't initially see.
Our real estate agent told us people would open everything that wasn't locked. I took this with a grain of salt, but staged the inside of our refrigerator, freezer, junk drawer, pantry, closets, bathroom cabinets, etc. I mean, I wouldn't do that when touring a house. (Who wants to see someone else's underwear drawer? Ew.) After the first showing, my hope chest drawer was left open. That was a piece of furniture. Not for sale with the house. Tacky. Hopefully they rummaged through the freezer, too.

6) Deodorize your house.

Now, I like to think my house isn't smelly. But, I do like to cook. With garlic. All the time. Also, we have two fur-babies that, despite their cuteness, do tend to stink up the house with their -ahem-
facility partaking. We reduced down to 1 litter box, I unplugged my wallflowers, and we used a natural "home deodorizer" recipe. There's lots from the fun WS store like this one or these. Worked like a charm.



Alright! We were ready to list the house. Photographer came, signed the papers, and met our real estate agent once more. He seemed pretty pleased with how the house looked. I made my list of all the short errands I had been putting off for the last 3 weeks. These, I thought, would be my small 30-minute trips when the house was being shown. I was prepared. 

Here's the actual listing description:

Adorable 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage home with numerous updates and upgrades. Great backyard with pergola, recent paint, wood floors, fixtures, appliances, tile work and more. Included with the home are washer, dryer and fridge. Call for your private showing today! 

*GUSH* The first word is "adorable"! Not even really sure if I read past that at the time. 

So we listed on a Wednesday evening.

Thursday: 3 showings.

Friday: 2 showings.

Saturday: 2 showings (one that fell through).

Sunday: 0 showings.

Monday: 3 showings (at least 2 of which were repeaters).

Tuesday: Offer.

Wait. What?! I thought we had an average of 60 days? I thought I'd have to leave the house on a moments notice. But I didn't even get to run any errands! What about all the stuff I had been putting off?

Listed the house and 9 showings and 6 days later had a full cash offer willing to wait until end of June to close.

Ok. We'll move.

Sugar Land

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If you want to make God laugh tell him you want to move anywhere but Houston.

Yup. Lesson learned. Don't make plans ahead of God's.  Also, don't mention city names in your prayers. Turns out I had no clue what I was asking.

Travis received a wonderful offer for a job opportunity in Sugar Land, TX.

Wait...that's in Houston,  right?

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Sugar Land Fun Facts

• Sugar Land, TX
• Fort Bend County
• Population: 84,511
• 25 miles SW of Houston
• Home of Imperial Sugar
• Minor League Baseball team Sugar Land Skeeters
• Humid Subtropical Climate (that means hot and humid)

We went to visit one weekend. Of course it was 75° and sunny with a light breeze and like 20% humidity. Maybe Houston isn't all that bad! Love how God can make it all ok to push you in a certain direction. I knew summers were awful, but it was gorgeous at the time. Great community.

Decision was made.

Ok. We'll move.

Chaos and Change

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Wise words. My last post was way back in October.  Wow. Here's what was working at the time:

1. One of my wonderful friends was about to have a bouncing baby boy. He came in early November and is beautiful! (I have lots of details for his shower still to post, including some super cute invitations!)

2. Per #1, Work was about to get harder because my friend was also a coworker. She needed time to enjoy her new little one, and unfortunately my workplace did not "cover" her leave. This meant my heavy caseload would increase by half a heavy caseload. Ew. Post-acute brain injury cases can be very intense. Especially in as an intensive program as I was with.

3. At work, we were looking at overhauling our service delivery model to accommodate a few issues: 1)Scheduling had become a hot mess, 2)Understaffing, 3)Evolution in billing/reimbursement issues in post acute rehab, 4)Functional treatment was giving way to routine, 5)Teamwork was declining and communication was an issue. This change came in the form of transdisciplinary teams. Not something commonplace in rehab or something to easily conceptualize.

4. Travis's work was rolling along with the usual stressors including anxiety about end/beginning of the year evaluation/raise/benefits mess.

5. My Nonnie was living in a memory care facility as her vascular dementia had progressed significantly after my Pops passed away from cancer last early summer. I was worried about holidays and all the speechie stuff that one worries about when changing environments/routines of someone with dementia.

6. A position at my alma mater opened up for a clinical instructor position. So....I ended up reducing to part time at my full time position and accepting the CI position. Post-acute brain injury in the morning and clinic/supervision/charter school in the afternoons. I will forever be grateful for that opportunity.  I learned so much in the time I was there from some  amazing therapists and clients.

At my morning job it became apparent that no one had any idea about what/why the service delivery change was. In order to keep my sanity I dove in to research and documentation development. Ended up learning a TON about transdisciplinary principles and procedure development.

Holidays went fairly uneventfully. Nonnie made it through fine. Although we knew it would be her last holidays with us at the house, we were so very glad we got to spend this time with her.

End of January brought some more news:

1. Travis was allowed to develop and lecture a course about engineering and the law. Right up his alley. Lots of work involved, but a great experience.

2. Other job stuff for him wasn't going so great. We were fast approaching decision time. He started exploring other options with other companies.

3. On the other hand, my job situation was calming down. Service delivery change was rolling along and they had recently hired a wonderful SLPA who would move to full time after graduation. My work at the University was picking up, and I was getting the hang of multiple-location-population therapy. 

In March my Nonnie passed away in her sleep. It was a progression of the vascular dementia that slowly started shutting down her body systems. I was heartbroken. She hadn't been my Nonnie as I will always remember her in a while,  and I know what she had gone through must have been very scary. Just before I learned that Pops had passed away I received a strong feeling that he was telling me he had to go now so he could be waiting to dance with Nonnie as soon as she arrived. At the end, I am at peace that she is now dancing with Pops in paradise.

Needless to say, with all this going on I was not really feeling the crafty/bloggy world. I also was probably a pretty crummy friend during this time. Sorry about that.  I'll try to make it up to you.

However, there is absolutely no way I could have done this without support from so many. My husband is an amazing blessing and has held my hand and supported me through all the rough times. My family has been a constant source of support and encouraging words (thanks, mom and dad, for all the support and fun facts). My best friend, whom I miss dearly, listened and supported all my word-vomit about the situation even if it meant moving across the state.

Whew.

What a beautiful mess life is.

Cute as a Pumpkin!

Just a quick stop in to share the CUTEST diaper cake! I may be a little biased, but this one is just too sweet!

Update! I added a tutorial here. 


Yup! It's totally made of diapers (even the stem)! It's wrapped in orange and sparkle brown tulle for a pumpkin-y finish. I was surprised how easy this was to make. Just roll diapers like a regular cake and use flat diapers on the outside to shape. Add some tulle and curly ribbon for a vine. Ta-da!

Sunday Night Dinner

Well, the first two weeks of college football are behind us! I am proud to say that our Texas Tech Red Raiders are 2-0! Our first tailgate was last weekend which was lots of fun. Pretty low-key.

A cool front moved in this weekend, and the high yesterday was only 78. Beautiful! That made me think about how much I love fall/winter food. Now, I do love grilling in the summer. There is just something about smoky/nutty fall flavors that I find delicious.

This is a recipe my mom made originally. I've tweaked it just a smidge to work with crock pots nowadays. I've found the instructions in the recipe don't accommodate the advances in crock pot technology. This is a true "slow cooker" recipe. Not a fix it and forget it. You have to do some stove-top cooking prior to putting it in the crock pot.

But...it is totally worth it! The stuffing turns into a nutty, crunchy, and spicy masterpiece. I could eat just the stuffing for a whole meal. No joke.

This was a perfect opportunity to use some of our jalapenos from our container garden. Look at this beautiful pepper!

Pork Chops with Jalapeno Cornbread Stuffing
(Adapted from 365 Favorite Brand Name Slow Cooker Recipes & More)

6 boneless pork chops
4-6 c. cornbread stuffing (packaged)
2 c. chicken broth (+extra as needed)
3/4 c. onion - chopped
3/4 c. celery - chopped
1/2 c. pecans - chopped
1 jalapeno - chopped (more or less to taste)
thyme
sage
salt/pepper
1 egg - lightly beaten

1) Sear pork chops in large pan just until sides are browned. Set aside. They will be raw in the middle. No eating!
2) Saute onions, celery, pecans, jalapeno, and spices until soft.
3) Combine stuffing, veggie mix, and chicken broth in pan and stir until combined. Don't over-mix as this will make mushy stuffing. Add the egg and combine.
4) Spray slow-cooker with non-stick spray (or olive oil spray). Put stuffing in bottom of slow cooker and arrange the pork chops atop the stuffing. Cook on low 5 hours, stirring stuffing after 3 hours. You want the edges to get some crispy parts, but you want this to be throughout so stirring once will ensure even cooking.

Sky, Sky, Sky

There is nothing like the W.Tex sky. On our way home from our trip to Iowa we were, again, reminded of how big and beautiful the sky is. There's nothing quite like red dirt and a stormy sky.

Just thought I'd share a few pictures we shot just as we re-entered W.Tex.

PS-This one is my favorite!