A Little Paint goes a long way

Here are the before and after pictures of our house from when I painted. The old wood paneling is cleverly disguised behind a nice blue color. Yippie! Thanks to my Aunt Ann who inspired me and made it possible to do the make-over by giving me that cream rug. Hope ya'll enjoy.

Ahhh...Runnning

We are training for the half-marathon here in Nashville in the Spring. "Music City Marathon" I started my {relationship} with running about two years ago. I was convinced that I would never be fit like that. I mean, I used to smoke ALOT and eat horrible foods. But two years ago I went to the YMCA around January and decided to start "working out." I couldn't even run for 1 whole minute on the treadmill. Ek! After running my one minute I went to sit in the sauna and I was reading "Health" magazine or something like that. They had an article that was about setting reachable goals. One of the examples they gave was to try and run a mile without stopping. That was IT! I spent about a month trying to reach that goal and I did. The next thing I knew I was running a half-marathon in September.
I am going for it again. It is almost harder this time because I have a previous success to look back on and compare how awfull I am right now. Every step last year was one that I had NEVER done. This year it is psycologically harder. You know what I mean?
Anyway, saturday I was going to do my "time-trial", this is when you run 2 miles as hard as you can (all out) too see what your max heart rate is so you can set up appropriate training. This is harder than the stinkin' marathon in my opinion. I was going to do it at the "Zoo run" that they have here in Nashville so that the energy of the crowd could carry me through the hell I was going to enter into. It cost 38 bucks! So, jeff and I decided I would just do it at the park.
Jeff paced me through it and let me tell you...People at the park probably thought he was tourchering me. te.he. I was breathing so hard and so loud I was even crying. (I am so dramatic)
I was so happy that it is over.
No where to go but up :)

509 Morton Avenue

I wanted to showcase some "before" pictures of 509 Morton Ave. so that all of you who know our drama with that house could see what we got ourselves into. For those of you who don't know, I will re-cap it.

We moved in at 507 morton and met our very interesting neighbors. Bobby, Bobby Jr., BooGoo and Little Bob. Yes, these are there real names. They are the most red-neck people, but the sweetest too, bless their hearts. They pretty much ran a drug house over there. I was a little scared of the people I saw coming in and out of that house. I thought that I would at least try to befriend them a little, as to not be on there bad side. I learned a lot about the family.

• Bobby Sr. wife and daughter died 3 years ago. Wife of cancer, daughter of a drug overdose.
• The kids of the dead daughters Dad is in prison and the uncle who is 21 is taking care of them.
• Those kids grandmother is a drug addict.
• Boo Goo was pregnant when we met her, but now she is in jail for attempted murder of the baby-daddy after  he became paralyzed from a staff infection.
• Bobby got into a car accident recently and his face came "off" he told me that he saw that movie "Face-off" and didn't believe that could really happen. He told me "That shit is real." He came to my door and I didn't even recognize him.

Anyway, This family has bad luck after bad luck. They owned the home outright, but got a second mortgage on it a few years ago. Well, they used that money to bail bobby Sr. out of jail and never fixed up the house. They were 4 months late on the payments. Bottom line foreclosure was well on it's way. Bobby approached me about selling his place. 

He offered a pretty low price and we wanted to buy. We tried to get a mortgage on the place, but with much struggle, the bank would not lend us(or anybody) money for a home that was in such bad shape. We offered them what was in our savings account(much, much less than the sales price), and they took it. 

Now, we don't know if we should level it, rent it, or sell it. We are just sitting on it for now until we get advice from some of Jeff's friends who are in this business. 

Packer Game

What a sad day it was yesterday. The packers were so close! As jeff puts it: It was like wining the lottery, bathing in one-hundred dollars bills, then having them tell you that you were one number off. This is what jeff looked like during the game and after.

What can I blog about?

I thought that blogging was whatever you felt like talking about. Jeff doesn't think that I can. So, the clock on our stove in the kitchen never read very clearly. I always thought that I was old and the lights were old or it was all scratched up. Well, I was cleaning the stove last night and looked a bit closer to investigate and to my SHOCK and HORROR it was cockroach carcasses that were blocking the lights! 

I had heard stories about how gross the people who lived here before us were. I guess the place was near condemed and they had to shovel the cockroaches up with a shovel. Nasty. I just have to wonder what kind of people could live like that and how the cockroaches could have gotten inside the clock of our stove. 

Melissa The Teacher

Last night was my first night back to school. IT WAS AWSOME! I loved every minute of that six to nine class. Statistics. The name was a little intimidating at first, but it was really fun. There were a couple other girls in the class that want to become nurses also. I was on the edge of my seat. Even better, when I got home Jeff had prepared me a wonderfull dinner of stirfry and potatoes and rolls. Yummy. I was so excited and maybe a little over zealous about class that when a student asked a question, I answered him. ek! Jeff was totally making fun of me. He was impersonating me pushing the teacher aside and taking over the class. We had a couple of good laughs. Next week I will bite my tounge. My homework is to make a frequency distribution table from a raw data set...YES! I cant wait to devour it.

Will I keep up with This?

So, It seems that everyone nowadays is blogging. Annie, Yours is great. I love all the pictures. I thought Jeff and I could start.
Jeff is back from his 4 month trip with TSO and I am so happy to have him back. We have bought another house and I am starting school. We have been busy.