OHIO!?!?!?

Well, we are all moved in and most of the boxes are unpacked…..Perfect time to move again right??? Andrew and I have been here less than a month and this weekend we are going on short term TDY to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio. We will be there almost a month. I have 3 reasons to be excited about this 1. We will be living in a hotel that has AC!!!! It has been quite hot here in the Springs and we have no AC. 2. I will be back on the same time zone as the East Coast. The 2hr difference is killing me….I either get early morning phone calls that wake me up (remember I have no job J) or I want to call friends in the evening and it is too late. 3. I can blog about our continued crazy adventures!

Andrew leaves at 4am this coming Sunday the 6th and I take off 7th . If anyone of you is around Dayton, feel free to stop on bye. My Mom and 3 of my brothers will be visiting for a night as they will be driving near Dayton on their way back from a in-line hockey tournament in Chicago. I think I am going to check out an amusment park near Dayton for a day with them. If you know of fun things to do in and around Dayton, please let me know….Andrew will be taking a class all-day, everyday but I will just be hanging out alone.

After 3 weeks in Dayton we will be flying to Norfolk, VA for my brother’s wedding. One year ago my parents had 7 single children and 1 with a new girlfriend and now they have 1 married and a second about to be married….Quite the exciting year for them! (2 down, 6 more to go J ) After the wedding we will be heading to Williamsburg to spend time with my maternal grandmother and check out Jamestown/Yorktown/Colonial Williamsburg. Then right before labor day weekend we will be flying back to Colorado Springs and return to getting settled in.

We will keep you posted on our adventures in Ohio….

Colorado Springs - adventure cont'd

We came back to our place around 9am….Andrew went in first to check for mice (MY HERO!!! J ) The movers were supposed to be coming as well as our new car. (We bought a Honda Pilot in FL while on the roadtrip. Anyone looking to get any type of car should use our guy Tony ….www.ibuycars4u.com. He does all the searching, haggling and then you just sign the papers – which we did via UPS while in MN) Andrew had to go to the base and fill out some paperwork and then he would have the next 8 days off to “househunt” - That is another interesting side story – His base either forgot he was coming or thought they had told people he was no longer needed out here and to re-assign him, so they were not expecting him and had no job lined up for him!!!! They gave us 8 paid days while they scrambled to figure out what to do with him/us.

So after checking that the mice were not visible Andrew took off for Schriever AF Base. As I am standing in the kitchen wondering what I should do, I HEAR the mice! Moving to a different place is sounding like a great idea!!!!The movers showed up around 10am and were 3 awesome guys. After working with these guys I now realize how bad our movers were in Boston. It was super hot and really overwhelming to watch all the boxes fill up our place knowing I was either moving again or had to unpack them! While the movers were here, they saw over a dozen mice and in 3 DIFFERENT colors…we had black ones, tan ones and grey ones….(we are a house of color diversity!) They were in the basement, kitchen, garage and backyard. By the end of the day I offered the guys $10 for each dead mouse!

Andrew came back after a couple hours, but had to leave immediately to take the guy who drove our car out to CO from FL back to the Denver Airport. (also a good thing to know ….This guy named Gary is retired and drives cars around the US for people….He was $500 cheaper than a trucking service and brought our car on the set day to our doorstep…not something a trucking service would do) The movers finished up late afternoon after searching for 2 missing boxes, one of which had our sound system and DVD player in it!!!! (the boxes are yet to be found a month later) Andrew got back and we left to get poison, mouse traps, light bulbs, and dinner. Between Monday night and Thursday morning I was at Lowes at least twice a day…..I am actually considering working there part time since I like home improvement projects. Back at home Andrew put poison out EVERYWHERE and traps all over the garage, basement, and 1st floor. (again MY HERO!!) Around 10pm after much debate I decide I was okay staying here because we had our bed frame (which makes our mattress extremely high off the ground) and we had not seen any mice upstairs. Shortly after lying down, fire trucks, ambulances and police cars were filling our neighborhood and making our room as bright as day….We figured out something was wrong with a neighbor and eventually were able to drift off to a restless sleep. Second night and the adventures continue.

Arriving in Colorado Springs

First Night -
So after a blast traveling around the US together (are we crazy that traveling almost 5,000 miles together was like a second honeymoon?!?!?) We arrived in our new state on the evening of July 9th. Like last time I was in C. Springs the weather was rainy and overall yucky….(I really was thinking that the 300 days of sun was a joke) We pull up to our “gated community” to find the gates wide open…. That was bad sign no. 1. We pull in our little driveway and there is a HUGE ugly bush right in front (mentally I am thinking that will be gone by tomorrow!!!) We mess with the lockbox and finally get the door open… Mind you at this point we are both tired and feeling emotional since this is the “end” of our trip…..We wander through the place, discovering light bulbs missing, upstairs toilet running, kitchen faucet sprays water everywhere, main floor carpet is nasty and massively stained and we begin to feel a little unsure about everything.

The movers are supposed to be coming the next morning, so we unload our car, use the cooler as a table and set up the aero bed on the first floor by the door to the backyard so we can get some breeze. (No AC and no fans!!!) We sit down and eat our P.F. Chengs take-out and draw a deep breath. Around 10:30 we finally get to bed. I knew myself well enough to know I was over-tired and emotional, so as we are talking in bed I tell Andrew that most likely I will cry over something in the next few days and just to be patient with me, he said he understood and that was ok.

I had set-up the bed with a bottom sheet, a top sheet and a light small blanket that Andrew’s grandma had just given us ( this is an important detail….the sheets were dark blue and there was fringe on the blanket) Andrew started falling sleep much quicker than I did….. As I am drifting often I feel something crawling on my skin (more specifically crawling on my arm that was near my face!!) . I “saw” the thing and it was big and black!!! I immediately scream and jump up…..Andrew freaks because he was mostly asleep and I had just scared the living daylights out of him….We shake out the blanket and top sheet and find nothing…then he takes off the bottom sheet and lifts up the areo bed…still nothing…. By this time he is asking me if I imagined it…did I actually see something????Anyone who knows me, knows I have lots of “issues” especially with texture, so I knew without a shadow of a doubt it was big, black and real (and not the fringe of the blanket and sheet like Andrew was suggesting) I did think it was a bug though which I was wrong about…After putting the bed back together and looking around the room, Andrew goes to the corner of the room where his jacket and some clothes were and picked them up…..Out runs a BLACK MOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I start screaming hysterically and Andrew starts yelling for me to get upstairs so he can kill it…. I run upstairs and stand up there sobbing and screaming, with my skin crawling, knowing it was a MOUSE in my bed, CRAWLING on my skin!!!!!!!!!!! My suitcase was upstairs so I quickly put on clothes and start yelling to Andrew I am going to sleep in the car…..He watched the mouse run into the fireplace and tells me it is safe to come downstairs to grab my pillow and purse and wait in the car….As I come downstairs and am talking to him another BLACK MOUSE comes running out from a hole in the bottom of the stairs…. I freak out all over again and go running outside. Andrew is so angry at this time and wants to immediately move out and light all the mice on fire (I was not opposed to that idea) We leave our place and go find a hotel at 11:30 at night! So much for our first night!