Memories are made of this...

Me and My Aunt Nancy at her wedding in 1985. I was 4 years old and the best flower girl that ever there was.

I'm heading home to Alabammer for Thanksgiving this week. It's got me all sentimental. 

I "scanned" (scan = took photos of old photos with my phone) these photos while I was home over Labor Day weekend.

Enjoy the awesomeness of the 80's.

Once a Brave's fan, always a Brave's fan. Sorry TB Rays....I believe these were souvenirs brought to me by Daddy. But we went to Atlanta a lot when I was little so they could be my own choosing. I also think this photo was taken pretty late at night which explains my face. I promise I really liked the Braves.

This was the Christmas I woke up to find a playhouse in my living room. A FREAKIN' PLAYHOUSE!! Well played Santa. I was estatic over the "office" that was already set up for me. A phone, a mickey mouse chalk board, a strawberry shortcake table and chairs set and a typewriter. Yes, that's right, a typewriter.

 

 

 

 

 

Photographic evidence of my sweet typewriter. When I was little I wanted an office SO SO bad. My 3 year old sefl would be very impressed with my current set up at USF. Also, note my sweet footed Alabama PJs.

 

Ain't never been nothin' but a Bama Fan. Roll Tide. Christmas 1984 - I am 3 years old. About to turn 4 in March and gain a baby sister in May.

This was my "baby" that I carried everywhere. She has a safe spot in my house in Tampa even now.

Andrea an I apparently got a kick out of the Llamas.

This is me attending to another one of my "babies".

Me at a Brave's game in the 80's

Me and Daddy surveying the snow damage around my Grandparent's house.

Me and Bradly - This was when we visited the hospital when Andrea was born.

Me with my Alabama pom poms. I look worn out - probably from cheering too hard.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Election Day!

Have you voted today? 

I did! 

Don't forget!

More Mexican

 

Sunshine behind the clouds.  

None of these photos are in any sort of chronological order - but I don't feel like changing them around. It IS a Monday after all.

We went out on a catamaran on Thursday. It was a wonderful way to spend the morning. Tropical Storm Sandy was churning past the Bahamas at that time so she had kicked up some of the currents and silt in the Caribbean. Visibility wasn't great - but there were TONS of fish. More than I had seen in the area before. I think the combination of currents and low visibility helped us see more fish than normal.

 

You can see the little dots of stuff in the water that clouded up all my underwater photos. 

 

 My clearest photo of the day.

The Monday after we arrived we headed to Xplor, an outdoor amusement park set in the Mexican jungles. You can zip line across the trees, swim or raft through underground rivers and ride ATVs along paths and through caves. It was a blast. Our friends - who came along to Mexico for the first part of the week - were there with us and we had an awesome time. 

This was a great activity to do off-season as the lines and crowds were much smaller than normal.

The park has several cameras that automatically take your photo in spots throughout the park. You can purchase a USB with all your photos at the end of the day. We had a blast with the automatic cameras.

Zip-lining across the jungle. You can see Matt in the background zipping along behind me.

 

Me and Jon on front of Explor's heart. This was at the center of the park. They played a constant beating noise which was annoying but it helped you find your way back to the center of the park (and the food).

 Me, Jon, Matt and Bob in one of the caves on our way to swim in the underground rivers.

Me and Matt - (and you can see Jon in the background)

 

Swimming in the caves.

 

Heading to the rafts.

 

Driving under a waterfall and getting soaked.

 

Rafting through the caves - my arms were tired.

 

Sunrise on the first day we were there. The glow on these iridescent clouds was beautiful.

 

Sunset from the plane ride home.

 

Farewell Mexico - See you next year!

Halloween Decorations

Halloween in our neighborhood was absolutely amazing. We had 100's of trick or treaters and could have had 100's more - had I not run out of candy at 7:30 p.m. We had kids lining up on the porch. Some poor kids got fortune cookies in the Halloween bags because we couldn't get our house lights turned off fast enough - and that was all I could find in the pantry that could pass for a treat (I don't think they wanted an old can of baked beans or some sweetened condensed milk).

We took the dogs on a walk around the neighborhood after we closed up our candy shop. There were huge groups of kids and adults walking in packs along the sidewalks. Apparently our neighborhood is THE PLACE to get candy in the Tampa area. Folks would just drive up and park at the end of one street and kids in costumes would just pour out of the cars.

There were houses with smoke machines, strobe lights, elaborate characters you could have your picture made with and lots and lots of decorations. We saw funny tombstones in yards, ghosts, pumpkins, spiders, purple and orange lights, gargoyles and bats. As we walked around the neighborhood the folks sitting on their porches would wave and greet you with a "Happy Halloween!". It was like being in a movie.

We were visited by an adorable Spiderman who was obviously on his first trick or treating expedition. He carefully approached our porch and said "Tick or teat!". I wanted to pour my entire bucket of candy into his pumpkin. We had babies who were terribly cute in pumpkin outfits and skeleton onesies. I gave candy to a Lucy Ricardo, several princesses, pirates, several Ironmen, a bride, a bee, a flower, 2 nerds with pocket protectors, a female Finn from Adventure Time, Bumblebee the Transformer, a dinosaur, vampires, robots, zombies, and some kids just in jeans and t shirts - and there were more than that I just can't remember them all. The weather was perfect: chilly enough in FL to feel like fall - but you were fine in short sleeves and thin layers.

I'm going to have to get a LOT more candy for next year - but I look forward to it. It was so fun to see the kiddos run from house to house. I got a lot of "Thank you"s and the kids were very polite. We overheard lots of nice comments on our Halloween decorations. Even some of the kids were impressed with our spiders and pumpkins. It was a very fun day and I was even more glad to be a part of my fun neighborhood.

I am late getting these photos posted - but my mom has requested them and I must comply. Here's the house with the Halloween decorations. I usually decorate for fall in September - add in some spooky Halloween stuff in October - and then go back to just leaves and plain pumpkins for November. So here's our first Halloween in our new house:

 

We hung spiderwebs on the porch, plants, porch lamp and the wreath on the door. They swayed in the breeze in a very spooky way.

 Front Door

Walking up the front walk.

 

I hung Jack O'Lanterns and black, orange, purple and white ribbon streamers in the tree in our front yard. The streamers flowed in the breezes and wrapped around the branches. 

 

I cut out pieces of felt to make my "fake" pumpkins on the porch have scary faces. I didn't want to carve them so this was a great substitute. Plus now I can change my patterns each year.

 

A witch, a rock star and Stevie surrounded by bats.

 Boo, a standard jack o'lantern face and Wil surrounded by bats.

 

The mantle inside was lit up by orange twinkle lights. I covered the entire thing in spider webs. It looks very cool in the dark.

 

More spiderwebs and pumpkins on the hutch in the dining room.

Punkins in the TV room.

I bought this little "Day of the Dead" puppy in Mexico when we were there last week. I loved his bucket full of candy and his candy corn top hat. 

Now I'm looking forward to being home for Thanksgiving and getting our house ready for Christmas!

I'm on a Mexican radio....

Do you have anything here besides Mexican food? 
-Dusty Bottoms - "Three Amigos"

Just got back from a wonderful vacation break in Mexico. It was SO nice to have the time away to relax. We had friends join us for the first part of the vacation and we had the resort to ourselves (well, not to ourselves - just no one else we knew was there).

We went snorkeling, we went to the Explor adventure park and did zip lines, cave swimming and ATV tracks. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. We only had one day with showers and those only lasted a few minutes. It was a WONDERFUL week.

It's good to come home on a Friday so you've got the weekend to get back into the swing of regular life. You'd think we'd been at the resort for months. It's like I forgot about groceries, bills, laundry - work - :-) You mean I have to stop reading by the beach all day? But I still have books left on my Kindle! What is this craziness?

Anyways- I'll be better about blogging. The Facebook absence is harder than I thought it would be. Who knew so much social life was on there. I'm going to have to put forth some effort and start emailing folks to check on them.

The holidays are upon us!! We're planning to play spooky music and hand out candy on Wednesday night to any trick or treaters who come our way. I think I'll even cook up a tasty pot roast in the crock pot.

The weather is finally getting cooler here in Tampa. Our high today is 82 and the high tomorrow is 79. I know those are still pretty warm - but that's about as "fall" as it gets down here so we'll take it. After being in the tropical Mexican/Caribbean heat for a week - these temperatures are downright cold. I'm going to have to break out 3/4 length sleeves so I don't catch a chill! ;-)

Today's plan is for cleaning - gotta work through my list to get it all organized, dusted, swept, mopped, vacuumed, disinfected, febreezed and washed.

Zip line in Explor

Cave Swimming

Our House - In The Middle of Our Street

Our house it has a crowd
There's always something happening
And it's usually quite loud  
-Our House by Madness

A few blogs ago I decided to list items that would be in my dream home. Shortly after that blog post we found a perfect little house, on a perfect little street in our favorite Tampa neighborhood, Old Seminole Heights. This neighborhood is not the most expensive, trendy part of town you'll find in Tampa - It's kinda middle of the road - which is one of the things we really liked about it. The Hillsborough River is nearby, there are beautiful oak trees lining the sidewalks on just about every street. The entire area reminds us of the neighborhoods just a few blocks away from downtown Florence, AL or Tuscumbia, AL and that's probably got a great deal to do with why we love the area so much. It feels like home to us.

Tampa is divided up into several small neighborhood areas and there's a lot of neighborhood pride in each one. I love it because even though you live in this HUGE city - you still have a small, hometown feeling in our neighborhood. There's lots of porch parties where the entire neighborhood is invited. There's picnics and ice cream socials. There's a farmer's market on the lawn of the high school just down the street from us that's open on Sunday afternoons. There's an elementary school around the corner from our house. There's a Starbucks down the street and there's an adorable dog boutique next door to a sandwich shop/catering place on the other corner. We could not be happier with what we found.

I loved the house we purchased in Tallahassee. I was homesick and having a home that was all my own to paint and fix up as we pleased went a long way to ease my homesickness. But this house in Tampa is the kind of house I always wished I could have. We've been in it since May and I'm still in love with its cute porch, hardwood floors and its charm. It's a great place to call home and come home to.

I've got some plans to post before and afters of the house as we've fixed it up. Of course, it's a constantly changing work in progress - but that's the fun of it isn't it!?

Our house before the builder/remodeler purchased it in August 2011. I believe it was a 2BR/1BA with no central heating and air.

Our house in the listing after the builder/remodeler had done extensive renovations and upgrades. It's now a 2BR/2BA Bungalow. Those stone/masonry walls go all the way up to the roof - which is handy in south Florida where termites abound.

In May 2012 - just a few weeks after we moved in we painted the door and window casings with a blueish purple - hung our star and set out our plants.

The living room pre-renovation.

Matt started painting the wall the day we closed. We moved our mattress over that evening and never spent another night at the rental house.

The living room after we moved in. The builder added columns to divide the large room in the middle of the house. He also added a china cabinet next to the fireplace by reversing a closet in the kitchen. We moved the living room to the area around the fireplace and the dining room to the front of the house.

The living room after we had lived in the space for a while and gotten more settled. We found the replica of the original "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster in the United Kingdom pavilion in EPCOT. My garland is made from pieces of driftwood. The photo above the mantle is one I took of Elizabeth Lake when we were in Glacier last summer. Curtains are from ikea and homemade. The chairs in the middle are from a thrift store in Tampa.

Here's the mantle decorated for fall. The halloween decorations are up now - but those pictures haven't been taken yet.

Our Fall front door.

We've got some cooler temperatures here this weekend. Our highs in the low 80's and lows in the high 60's - that's about all the fall you're going to get here in Tampa. The best part is the break in the constant humidity. You finally don't feel soaked after walking from your house to your car.

Happy Fall Y'all!!

Goodbye Facebook, it's been real.

I bid farewell to Facebook.

I was checking it too much and spending way to much time worrying over other people's political beliefs, moral beliefs, life events and wherever else I was sticking my nose into where it didn't need to be. It was too much. It was time to move on.

I feel like, in a way, it was time for me to grow up. I don't mean that people who use Facebook are immature or not grown up - that's just how it related to me. Lots of folks use it to stay in touch with friends, family, etc. - I think, maybe, it was holding me back? We'll see if I'm right. I'm going to keep in contact with folks in other ways - this blog for instance - and some old fashioned ways. So feel free to email me anytime to say hello - or leave a comment on this blog with your email. I realize it's funny to call email "old fashioned" and if you prefer a hand written letter I can certainly write you one. Now, whether or not I ever get a stamp for it is a completely different issue.

Facebook gives you the option to download all your Facebook data. I'd recommend this as we had lots of photos that were lost when our hard drive crashed and pulling them off Facebook was the only way we had them for keeps. It's a smart thing to do. It even archives the comments on your photos and the entire history of your profile page. These archives save as HTML documents, but I converted them all to PDFs and have saved them in our Google cloud. It's a nice little way to have it all saved even if you don't plan to quit The Facebook anytime soon.

We'll see how it goes. If I come crawling back because I just can't stand not knowing about folks - please be kind. I'll feel guilty enough on my own.

So, dear Facebook, keeper of all relationship statuses, blurry sonogram photos that keep me from recognizing the married name of an old friend, updates from Honey Boo Boo, instagram photos, status re-posts for causes, political commentary, college football commentary and Farmville - I bid you adieu.

Photo by Hannah Sumner

Our New House

Funny how blogging about my perfect home brought the discovery and purchase of our Tampa home just a few months later. Believe me - there were a lot of dead ends, paperwork and signatures between the blog post and the move-in.

I LOVE the house we bought. I drive up and still can't believe I get to live here. I looked back over my perfect house list to see what I ended up with in the new house. I did pretty well. No carpets, a fireplace, storage, a huge backyard, parking, GREAT neighborhood, trees and a huge well shaded front porch.

We were pretty thick into the house offers/looking business and decided to go out to eat one Friday night with a Bonefish gift card. We furthered our Friday night "shenanigans" by deciding to just drive over to the neighborhood we really liked and look for "For Sale" signs. We found several - even found new areas of the neighborhood we hadn't explored before. We came home and one of the houses was fresh on the market and had an open house on Sunday. We got to the open house the minute it started. I really liked the house and so did Matt. Even as other folks walked through I remember thinking that they needed to leave my house. :-) We put in an offer the next day. It was accepted and we set the closing date.

The seller was going out of the country in early May, so we were able to move our closing date up by 2 weeks. We closed on May 2nd and moved in that weekend since Andrea's wedding was coming up and May was a VERY busy month for us.

We have painted all the rooms our personal color choices, we have hung roman shades and replaced blinds, we have removed the one square of carpet and painted the floor, we have painted the door and the windows. I am IN LOVE with this cute little house. It's smaller than what we orignially thought we wanted, but there is room to expand and plenty of room for kiddos someday.

We met with an adoption agency last fall - they talked about the home-study that would be done before you could adopt. Matt decided that he wanted his home-study to be in an actual home he owned - not a rental. So we started our search. I am happy to say that whenever we have that home-study - our home will not disappoint. :-)

 

Come visit us in Tampa anytime!!

(these photos are old - I will do a before and after post on the house as soon as I get new photos taken!!)

Where have you been?

So...I have gotten behind again.

But I have a good excuse! Really!

Ever bought a house, pack, move and helped plan/organize/decorate a wedding all in the span of 3 weeks?

I have, now.

I don't recommend it.

Although the month of May DID fly by.....

I will post details and photos soon.