Posts (page 2)

This morning Aaron (my husband's name - I think) & I were woken up by the sound of a Southern man knocking on our bedroom door.  Not our apartment door, mind you, our BEDROOM door.  I jumped up and was like "uhhh... hello?" thinking that maybe in the South everyone had everyone else's house keys and it was considered "polite" or something to just let yourself in so that the people who were inside, sleeping, wouldn't have to get up... I was really tired so this made sense at the time.  I told him to hold on so that I could put on something a little less comfortable.

It turned out that he was the repair man (I hope) coming to fix our air conditioner/put something in the window so that there aren't gaping holes on either side of it.  So, the nice man with the keys just pounded a whole bunch, popped out our AC, and left with it in his arms.  I wasn't entirely sure at the time that he would ever come back. 

Then the fun with wasps began again because the whole in the window was WAY bigger now (the windows are painted open around where the AC used to be).  I shut Aaron in the room with the wasps and yelled through the door to ask where they were before I would come in, grab clothes, and run back out again.  Twice Aaron didn't hear me (or purposefully didn't hear me) and I opened the door and got, what I lovingly refer to as, "wasp in the face."

Pluses & minuses:

+ The repair man referred to lunch as "dinner" & said "over yonder"
- Now that the AC is back in, the wasps have no way to get back outside.
+ Aaron just walked out the door carrying a big plastic jar with an angry wasp in it!
- I just heard a loud noise from outside - I think that wasp may have eaten/flown away with Aaron.
- Now the AC blows a white cloud into the room.
+ The cloud smells like lemons.

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

I was going to write my first blog but then I saw the "question of the day" link and got curious.  I think it's really funny that the question for today is basically what I was going to write on anyways.... Thanks a lot for all the help question of the day.

I had only lived in two houses before going to college.  Our big move happened when I was six and involved moving straight down the street about 5 blocks.  (My dad moved around a lot more, but I only visited him on the weekends so I don't count that).  I moved to Provo, UT for college and loved, and hated, how different it was from Portland, OR.  Portland, OR is the greatest place on Earth.  Going from such a liberal place to such a conservative place provided nearly endless opportunities for both entertainment and reflection.  How it is possible that two communities with such drastically different outlooks on life can both be so sure that the other is wrong blows my mind.  After I graduated college, my husband & I moved to Portland so that he could experience living in the greatest place on Earth too. 

Last week he & I packed (almost) everything we owned into our car & a crappy U-Haul trailer and drove to Oxford, Mississippi (our car couldn't handle the trailer and we went anywhere between 25 & 75 mph depending on the inclination of the road).  Going through the Rockies sucked.

We encountered a pretty bad tornado in Nebraska and intense lightening storms lasting all the way to Mississippi.  It seemed fitting that my first trip to Nebraska would correspond with my first tornado.  We went through 11 states total - I had never been to 6 of them.

We moved into our "new" apartment on Sunday June 1st and have already been warmly welcomed by a friendly host of cockroaches, wasps (complete with a nest on the wall above our bed), a weird shiny blue wingless fly/ant thing, and a monster bug my husband referred to as having "glowing eyes."  The windows wouldn't close around the AC unit and so the rain came in and peeled the paint off the walls and down onto the carpet. The apartment had obviously not been cleaned when the last people moved out and there were random pieces of furniture laying around in the most awkward places.  I smashed my toe by dragging a dresser over my toenail and now I can't wear real shoes because it hurts too bad.  So the first night in our new apartment my husband kept waking up (with random bursts of screams) because he thought my pillow was a cockroach running over his face and I kept waking up because I was too hot or too cold and the throbbing in my toe wouldn't stop.  It was pretty great all around.

So far, Oxford seems to be the creepy lovechild of Portland and Provo.  It is hot like the desert in Utah but humid like Portland.  It has trees all over (Portland), but instead of just sitting their looking cool they making it really hard to find your way around campus because it is impossible to see around them.  People are less uptight here (Portland) but also really formal (Provo).

Mostly I'm just still trying to get over the grumpiness that comes with a long, crappy road trip so that I can start to enjoy my new home. 

+ My first day with the MTC folks was fun.  I actually really enjoyed hearing about Mississippi's history and what it means to live and teach here.  I am also so, so, so glad that my husband is here with me - mostly because if I were alone I would have to kill so many bugs it's not even funny.

+ Another plus, I'm really enjoying playing with my new MacBook.  I also really enjoyed writing a thank you note to Morgan Freeman for buying it for me.  I've never been one to write celebrities and I feel like now I've finally accomplished all of those really important goals most middle schoolers set for themselves (although I'm aware that Morgan Freeman is not a boyband).  I wanted to tell Morgan Freeman how much I enjoyed his performance in (insert random movie title not featuring Morgan Freeman here) but then I decided that that would be stupid and disrespectful.  Now that I'm in the South I need to learn to be more polite.  I'll work on that.