New Beginnings...

Well I came home from work today and was getting ready to go to class tonight and found something hiding in my purse. My wonderful fiance had put a card in there for me and it was a card that just seemed like it was made for us. It almost brought me to tears to read it and see the way he truly cares about me and loves me for who I am, even though I may not always be someone who is easy to love. I really am thankful that I have such a great man in my life who is willing to stick with me through thick and thin and I really know that no matter what happens in my life I will always have him to turn to. What a wonderful thing it is to be given a second chance...

Could it be snow?

Thought I would give a little update to all my "Yankee" friends up north about our call for "winter weather"...if you can even call it that! Many people say that southerners are crazy when it comes to snow and bad weather and today that is just proven more. Don't get me wrong I love ya'll down here but some people do go a little over board with the snow thing! We are calling for the possibility of some wintry mix over night of rain, sleet, and snow. Let me tell you everyone down here is just talking all about school closings, delays, and trips to the store to pick up some milk and bread...even if we do get a day off I highly doubt the stores will be out of milk and bread come tomorrow afternoon when everything is melted and gone...but we better stock up just in case! Haha! Oh and the other crazy thing is that they don't build in any bad weather days down here so if we DO happen to have school called off then we have to make it up on one of our work days, what's up with that?!?!

I guess there is also no better time then this to post some of the pics from my trip up to Illinois over Christmas break where we actually did get a few inches of snow! I know that Tara and Matt will agree when I say that once you are away from the snow for a while and finally get to see it you feel just like a little kid in a candy store...it's all about sledding and snowball fights! I don't think I was ever that excited to shovel snow as a kid when I had to but this time I was all about it! Even though everyone does get a little crazy down here I really do hope we get a little snow because I love it just as much as the next person and truly miss it when I don't get to see it every year not to mention I would love to hear what my students think of it given they probably have only seen snow once or twice in their short little lives. Anyways i'll keep you all posted on our "winter weather"!

Mom was pretty excited to get on the tractor...to bad by the time she got it running we were almost done!

My Uncle Bill and I preparing some snow balls!

A Wii little get together...

Well Friday night James and I had some friends over for dinner and to hang out and we ended up spending half of the night playing the Wii. Tara, Melissa, and I let the guys have a little "Man time" when they were first playing but then we couldn't help but to join in with them. Here are a few pics of us bowling and boxing...make sure to check out the video of Brian's great boxing moves at the bottom of the post (that's assuming I can figure out how to get a video on here)!

Tara and I celebrating after a strike in bowling!

Tara bouncing with the boxing moves

Matt and James worked up a sweat doing some boxing

A.J. taking a little nap on his new pillow and watching all the fun

Definitely an interesting night...

Well here's the thing...James and I came home tonight from school planning on taking A.J. for a walk, making some dinner together, and then going to bed early so we could get up for our 5am gym run. Apparently someone else had different plans for our evening. We went on the walk with A.J. and took him to the park to throw the frisbee and on the way back we found a lost dog. He is white and some other color (can't tell if it's brown or black since it has been dark since we found him) and he appears to be part Jack Russell...maybe one of A.J.'s long lost cousins. Anyways something just drew us to this dog and we went over to try to see him and gave him some treats and left...well then we went out to grab something at food lion and he was still there and we just couldn't leave him. So to make a long story short instead of calling it a night early tonight we spent our evening figuring out how to get this dog back to the house so that we could make sure he or she was safe. We finally got it back to our house and it is currently hanging out in our back yard with a box and a blanket and some food and water. For right now we have decided to call him Benji because he has that scraggly look to him! We tried to introduce A.J. to Benji and Benji did not seem to thrilled about that.

We called the sherrif who put us through to disbatch who then put us through to the animal control office and when we got to them we got the lovely answering machine saying that they will be available during their office hours of 8-5. We are going to call them tomorrow and post some flyers but in the mean time we would like to do whatever we can to help this little guy or girl get back to its home so please if anyone has any ideas on how to help us do that or has happened to have heard about a lost dog please let us know. We will post some pics tomorrow and see if that helps out at all.

Happy late new year, and ball drop!

I know that it seems like all the stuff has already come and gone before we post the stuff on here, but we really are trying to do better. I hope everyone had a great new year, and that it has been great so far and that it continues to be great. I wanted to take a second and post some pictures from the first ever downtown Knoxville Market Square Ball Drop! Time Square has nothing on Knoxville. Who needs to wait until the wedding to hang out under the arch! Not the two of us:)
Sure, they look nice and cuddly! Beware they do bite. Just another prime example of me protecting Anna!
That is a pretty impressive and large tree. Maybe when we get a bigger house, I can have that in our house too.
Just another happy random picture of us. Look at the background and you notice the clock counting down to a jolly ole midnight kiss.
Hmm!!! What is this tasty little morsel here. It just happens to be a fried Twinkie! Yummy, yummy. I have no clue how many points that might be, but it sure was good.

A nice goodbye to 2007, and a hearty hello to 2008.

Christmas all year long.

I thought I would create this post for all the people that have already begun buying Christmas presents for Christmas 2008. Christmas is truly all year long, at least the meaning of Christmas, and its not all about presents and all that. Anyway I wanted to upload some of our pictures that we took at Christmas. These are various pictures that I hope you will enjoy. I hope everyone had a great Christmas.

This picture was taken at while visiting Anna's folks. We had a good time, even though we had to learn to use the self timer correctly.

I liked this picture of the two of us. Hope you all do also.
This is a picture of our mantle in our new home all decked out for Christmas.

This is a picture of our first tree in our first house.