Branden and I celebrated two whole years of wedded awesomeness on the 31st. Well, actually on the 30th, since he had to work on Monday. We went to Outback for dinner and had super yummy steaks and baked potatoes. And we also went to see Paranormal Activity 3. It’s sort of our anniversary tradition to see a PA movie. haha. We saw the first one the night we got married. We went with our wedding party and some friends and got the pants scared off of us. Then on our first anniversary we went to see PA2. I’m actually kind of hoping they make a fourth one so we have something to see next year. (And because I LOVE these movies. It’s one of the only series that I find genuinely scary, mostly because it seems SO real.)

News on the baby front, we’ve decided to see a reproductive endocrinologist. If everything is fine, AWESOME. If not, I’d rather find out sooner than later so we can work to fix it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that she’s a nice lady who is understanding so I don’t have to search around even more for another RE. As it is I have to drive an hour to get there. I’d like to not have to drive further!

I’ve been working on clearing out our front spare bedroom to make it into the future babies room. I’m about halfway done, but until we get some more storage space there’s not a whole lot left I can do. I’ve got to get some shelving for the garage to store our totes of out of season clothing and other misc. items. We have cabinets in there but they don’t fit our totes inside them. I’d like to ditch the lower ones completely so we can put a freezer out there. Right now there’s no way we can fit a freezer and a car in there, and we can’t have both cars in the driveway all winter due to the extreme slope it’s on. Any hint of ice and even with the e-brake we could have one of our cars sliding down the hill. NOT GOOD.

Speaking of cars… we’re thinking about buying a newer one. Nothing brand new, since there’s no way we could afford that. But something a few years newer than my ’01 or Branden’s ’96. (We’d be trading in his car, not mine!) We’re looking at a mini van. We figured that even if we don’t have a large family, a van is still a good investment for road trips and vacations. Or even hauling stuff around. We don’t want a truck because of our small driveway and also because neither of us like very large vehicles.  An SUV wouldn’t be awful, but they’re still bigger than what we’re used to. A van will drive pretty much exactly like my Malibu does, just a bit bigger. This might not happen for a while, but it’s definitely going to happen eventually. We found an ’06 Dodge caravan at a local car lot that looks perfect on the outside. They were closed so we haven’t seen the inside up close, but just looking through the windows it looks nice too. If it runs well/is a good price, it might be the one we go with. (Which is funny because my sister just got an ’06 caravan as well, the same color. haha.) The good thing about a van is that we’ll be able to park it in the garage even though it’s a bit wide. We can always climb through the van to exit via the sliding side door if the front doors won’t open all the way. (We have a very narrow garage.)

If you’ve been missing me, I do blog several times a week at NaturallyMamas. Sometimes I just can’t think of other things to blog about aside from the mommy/living green type stuff. I’m going to try to do more personal blogging, though! <3

So, in my last post, I told you guys how I was going back to school. Well, that’s not actually gonna happen. I had a meeting with financial aid, and it turns out that private universities are FUCKING EXPENSIVE. *insert string of other expletives here* Like, really fucking expensive. I was approved for a $9500 unsubsidized stafford loan. I did not get approved for a pell grant. I also did not get approved for ANY private loan, even with a cosigner. So my total out of pocket expense for one academic year at this school? OVER TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Yes. I nearly had a heart attack too!

And the sad thing is, that didn’t include my books. *head desk* So, school is on hold indefinitely. But it’s really ok. I can still work the way I’ve been working, and it will all be fine. And, the best part is… we can finally really start trying for that baby! I wanted that more than school anyhow!

We’re hoping for a 2012 baby, but hey, if it takes longer than that I’ll be ok. For now we’re going the natural route, and if we need to we’ll speak to a doctor about conception assistance. SO. That’s my life right now. Oh, I forgot to mention… IT’S FREAKING OCTOBER! Branden and I have been married for almost 2 years already! Holy cow! Time flies, right? :D

I’m also officially applying to school on Tuesday. I’m going to meet with admissions and financial aid and everything. :D I’m excited and nervous at the same time. Excited to finally get started, but nervous because … what if I’m not good at it?! lol Which is stupid, I know I’m good at photography. Not in a conceited way, just in a… that’s what people tell me way. haha. I don’t know. I just have stayed at home for the past year and a half and I think I’m out of practice with people in general. I’ll get over it.

Branden is making me dinner right now. Such a good hubby. He’s making a variation of one of his only recipes- steak fajitas. He usually makes steak, but tonight he’s cut it into strips, marinated it, and is going to cook it with peppers and onions. And we’re going to serve it with refried beans, cheese, and some sour cream. :) I love not having to make dinner, since I’m usually the one doing it.

I think I’m going to go keep B company while he cooks. He does that for me sometimes. Makes it less boring. Please take a minute and check out my new project, I would REALLY appreciate it. <3

So why must we wait until Friday to have two working cars again? Well, because yesterday on his way to work in MY car, Branden had a tire blow out! Luckily he was going very slowly at the time, so he wasn’t in an accident. But he was late to work because he had to stop and put the spare on, and then because that was flat, he had to drive on the interstate going like 20 miles an hour. Poor guy!  He stopped on his way home and filled up the spare tire, and on Friday afternoon I’m going to go have the tire replaced. Luckily there’s a place in town that has EXTREMELY inexpensive tires. (Tire Barn, y’all!) We were able to get Branden’s tire replaced last year for about $50 with installation. That’s pretty good, in my opinion. We’re also probably going to need to replace the rest of my tires before winter comes, but we shall see.

I’ve been thinking about making cooking videos to post up here, but I don’t know if anyone would actually be interested in seeing them. lol. I am going to be trying a bunch of new recipes soon, to see if we like them. And if we do like them, they’ll be going into my quick and easy or freezer meals categories. We want to get a freezer to put in our garage here soon, so that we can start doing once a month cooking. (Or close to it.) There are days that I just don’t feel like cooking anything, so having an arsenal of freezer food is going to be nice. :P

It’s time to go start dinner, since the hubs is on his way home from work. Fun times.

• We have come to an agreeable conclusion on the insurance front. While it’s not exactly what we wanted (deferred down payment) it does work for us. Our mortgage company has agreed to make a lump-sum payment to State Farm to cover the whole first year of insurance. Then, for the next eight months or so, our mortgage payment will go up roughly $85. After we pay back Chase for the advance, our payment will go back to normal, and escrow should kick in as planned next March. Yeah, it sucks to have to pay $85 more than we were expecting per month, but at least we’ve got insurance again. Or, we will, when I can call Chase and have them make the payment. They refuse to let me do it since my name isn’t on the loan, even though my husband is. And of course, they’re not open 24 hours a day, so having Branden call is a huge hassle.
• I have started drinking a meal replacement shake in the morning. Well, MY morning. (Between 3:30 and 5:30pm lol) I used to just crack open a can of coke first thing after waking up, but that’s not really healthy. And I figured since I never really eat anything good for me until about lunch time (8:45ish), I might as well make my morning ‘meal’ somewhat healthy. I’ve been using the slimfast 3-2-1 powder, since it was inexpensive and tastes relatively good. Though I mix it with 12 ounces of milk instead of 8. It helps the powder dissolve better. I still only use one scoop, though. As soon as Branden gets paid next week, I’m ordering a different type of shake powder. I’ve decided on IdealShape. It was the highest rated protein shake out of all the ones I found, and also fairly inexpensive. Hopefully it’s just as tasty. :)
• It is hot as balls lately. I haven’t been outside in like two days. Our air conditioner seems like it’s running non-stop, even though it’s set between 72 and 75 most of the time. In the early morning, our windows are fogged up because it’s so hot and humid outside, but cool and nice inside. I’ve been dreading turning the oven on for any reason because it makes the house SO HOT. Poor Branden doesn’t get a break from the heat while he’s at work. It’s an air conditioned plant, but due to certain factors, the temperature inside can not go below 77 degrees. Usually it’s MUCH hotter. He’s been drinking water like crazy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he lost a few pounds just from sweat this week.
• I have a wedding shoot coming up on the 10th of September. As soon as I get paid (the week before the wedding) I’m applying to school. There’s a start date at the beginning of October, and I want to start then. I wish we had the money for me to apply now, because there’s a mid-start in August and I could take 2 online classes to get them out of the way. (Usually math and english.) But between everything going on, and Branden not getting as many hours as we’ve been used to (stopped overtime because of the earthquakes/tsunamis in Japan, they couldn’t get parts.) his checks aren’t quite as big. Which means they don’t stretch as far as they used to. Luckily overtime should start again soon, and he’s getting a raise in August as well. I can’t tell you how awesome it will be once he’s maxed out his pay. Almost $26 an hour at that time. We might actually get to SAVE money!
• Speaking of that wedding, I have yet to meet with the bride and go over the contract. Her future mother-in-law was the one who contacted me and booked my services. Aren’t brides usually more hands-on? I’m going to email her today to see when she’d like to meet to discuss the contract, and I hope it’s soon. I can’t put myself in a situation where I go into the wedding day NOT knowing anything about the wedding. lol As of right now, I don’t even know the location of the ceremony. Not good!

That’s all for now.

So Monday was spent like this: Wake up, trip to Walmart. Paint, paint paint. Another trip to Walmart, more painting. Then removing of all the plastic sheeting from the furniture and the floors (I totally felt like Dexter for a second.) and then a shower, trip to the golden arches for some food, and then back home to collapse.

Today we’re both feeling the pain of being up and down a step ladder over and over all day long. My hamstrings are killin’ me! (Did I mention we have high ceilings?)  But it’s all worth it, because the living room looks GREAT now. I’m really looking forward to getting the decorating finished. I’m thinking about hanging up some of the photos we’ve already got framed, just so the walls don’t look SO bare.

The color is what I would call a dark, faded denim. It was supposed to be a rainy sky gray, but I don’t know… it looks way more blue to me than gray. Which is fine, because it actually looks really good with the white trim and the brown furniture. (For reference, it’s Behr Dark Ash. Looks gray on the paint chip. Looked gray in the can, and gray on the sample that was on the TOP of the can. But blue on my walls. lol) We’re going to add some brighter blue/turquoise and yellow accents. I’ll post some more pictures when we get some things up on the wall.

Hope you all have had a happy July thus far. ^.^

Then I get a call from my agent at my insurance company. Alma tells me that they’ve never received a payment on our homeowners policy, and that if we don’t make a payment TODAY, it will be cancelled- leaving us without home insurance. (Which is a requirement while we pay our house off.) Uh, what? Our insurance is set up so that when we make our mortgage payment each month, a portion of it goes into escrow to be paid to the insurance company once a year as an advance payment for the whole year of insurance. The first payment was supposed to be paid at closing, by the title company.

So I call Chase, because I had thought that it was their error. It turns out it’s not. Chase, though they oversee our escrow account, should not and will not make a payment to the insurance company until NEXT April 1. (Which will cover until April 1, 2013. See how that works? Our escrow builds up over the year to make the payment.) They have nothing to do with the payment that should have been made at closing.

Then I call our original lender. (The type of loan we got was first financed by company X, then bought out by Chase.) Patty tells me that the title company should have sent the payment to the insurance company. She has the receipt and HUD statement that says it SHOULD have been paid. But because errors occasionally happen, she calls the title company for me to figure out what the issue is.

The title company says that when they were tying up the final bits right before closing, they got a receipt from the insurance company saying that the first years payment had already been made. The thing is… it had not been paid. Not by me, not by anyone. So because the title company didn’t know otherwise, they thought we had already paid it, and told us to bring no money to closing. Which also meant that they didn’t send off a check to the insurance company, because why would they pay 2 years in advance?

Patty called me back to let me know all this, and I’m freaking out because I can’t make a $700 insurance payment with no notice. I had the money for it when we closed, because we thought it was supposed to be paid at closing. (We were told by the title company that it was taken care of by what the seller was paying. The seller paid all our closing fees.) But when they said we didn’t have to bring any money to close, we spent that $700 on stuff we needed for the house. (Plus it’s not like we would have saved that money for next year, escrow would have paid it.)

So I call Alma at the insurance company and let her know that I can NOT make a years payment today, especially not with no notice, and most especially when it’s not my fault it didn’t get paid in the first place. She says that they can set up a monthly payment plan, but that they need the back payment- what’s been due since March 31- so our policy doesn’t get canceled. That’s $300. Today. Or, if I set up a direct debit with the bank, it would “only” be $240. I told her the absolute soonest I can make a payment at all isn’t until July 15. We have other bills, and while all our stuff is paid and we live comfortably, we still live paycheck to paycheck. We have no savings. Bam gets paid July 1, but our mortgage is due, and we HAVE to pay that, no matter what.

And now I’m waiting on yet another call back from Alma, because I told her there was no way I could make a payment today, and I couldn’t even make a full $300 payment on the 15th. (We could swing maybe $100 and our budget would be tight.) I’m so worried that we’re going to get in trouble through Chase because of a policy lapse, and it’s not going to be our fault. I thought all this shit was done with and that we’d get to enjoy our house and our lives until we decide to sell this place and move again. But apparently, the world had other plans.

I need a margarita… in a serious way.

I really don’t know why I’m awake. I’m extremely tired. Friday I didn’t sleep at all, and Saturday I had a little family get together because my cousins were in town from Portland. Then I came home and had a little nap, got up and then went back to bed at about 6am. I didn’t wake up until almost 6pm. And I was dragging ass all night, until about 5am, when I got the bright idea to read a little before bed. And of course, I was so close to the end of my book, I figured I’d go ahead and finish it, even though it was after the time Branden had fallen asleep. And then when I finished it, I was so engrossed in the story that I just had to start the next book. And then I started to get hungry because it had been over 6 hours since I’d last eaten, and c’mon. Fat chicks get hungry, y’all.

And now here I am. I’m about to go lay back down and try to sleep, which should be easy now that I’ve torn myself away from the book to eat. But I know I’ll sleep until at least 6pm, if not later which bums me out a bit. I’d just got my sleeping schedule back to a relatively normal state. Damn my love of reading. Damn you, Sookie Stackhouse. (And Charlaine Harris!) Darn you all to heck. ;]

I’m going to down a glass of water, hope like hell I don’t wake up 50 times to pee because of it, and then go snuggle up to my hubby. But not too close. He gets pretty hellacious sleep breath, not gonna lie. lol.

But this time, I don’t know if it’s that it’s such a small wedding (30 people) or that the ceremony and reception are different days, or that it’s an actual friend from highschool or what. But I’m just not stressed. I also think that having done a wedding before is playing a big part in my non-stress. lol I suppose it’s good to not be stressed. Last time my stomach was in knots all week, and I was about to have a nervous breakdown. I had a panic attack at my parents house, which is awful. So I’m happy that this time I’m feeling quite zen about everything.

So I’m procrastinating. Just like I do all the time. ;)

I am super excited that the wedding and reception are on two separate days. That means I will have less photos to sort through at once, and I’ll get longer to finish them. I’ll definitely have the ceremony shots done before the reception, though. It’s not until June 11, so I’ve got plenty of time. lol It also means less time spent there on both days. My last wedding was a 13 hour day, with no food. For some reason we weren’t offered food. This one should be about 5 hours in total each day. Which is far more manageable!

Anyhow, I’m thinking about having an apocalypse movie marathon to ring in the rapture. (Seriously, I do not buy into all that crap. *points to self* Atheist.) I’m gonna have fun laughing at these movies. ;)

(And don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the giveaway. It’s coming soon, I promise!)

And now we’re working assembly line style to get their cd cases stuffed for their upcoming show. It’s hard work! One person has to have a ruler and an Xacto knife and cut each tray insert and booklet out of the sheet it was printed on. Then someone else (it was me) has to fold the booklet in half. Then the tray insert gets to be put into the back of the case and then the tray snapped back in. Over and over again until all 100 of them are done. At least now there are more done than there are undone.

We’ve been here for so long today. I’m really ready to just go home… but the guys are now screwing around with editing some of the songs again to make them perfect for the EP. Which I can understand. If you’re going to sell a product, it needs to be perfect, or as perfect as it can be. Which is why there’s been all this fuss over the cd cases. And then deciding what’s gonna go on top of the discs themselves. (Currently they’ll all be painted white and then stamped with a black stamp.) I just hope it all gets done in time, since the show is next weekend.

At least I got to eat at my favorite restaurant today. :D We took Bam’s mom out for mothers day, and she picked La Casa, which is this awesome mexican restaurant here in town. We eat there at least twice a month. Sometimes we eat there every time we come to town for practice. lol. They have the best food. Today I finally got something other than my usual burrito. I got shrimp tacos. THEY WERE AMAZING. I’ve never had such good shrimp tacos. I think I have a new ‘usual.’ lol!

I think I’m going to go bug Bam to leave. It’s almost 2 and we’ve got an hour and a half drive home. Luckily I drove here, so I get to sit back and relax on the way home. It works out well, since I’m usually really tired on the way back. Especially today, since I was sleeping earlier. Meh.

xx