December 24, 2006:  Just a quick update tonight, it's late and we've been working on house stuff for about 18 hours straight.  The week was as crazy as any other lately.  Monday and Tuesday we spent our evenings unpacking, setting up furniture and generally organizing things.  Wednesday evening as it started to rain very hard we noticed a new sound coming from the broken skylight, it was rain pouring on it, lots of rain.  After a little investigation it turns out that the branch that broke the window also wacked the gutter on its way down.  This caused all the water in the gutter to flow to the low point which happened to be right above the broken window and not the down spout at the corner of the house.  Lucky for us the inner glass is still intact but unlucky for us that didn't stop the water from getting in, it was getting into the window casing and seeping out everywhere.  We did the best we could to sop it up all night and I called a gutter repair guy to come out and look at it the next day, he wrote a quote to replace the entire piece which is 40+ feet and I got it to the insurance company for approval, since we already had a claim open and this repair was preventing further water damage it was quickly approved.  He was at the house fixing it Friday afternoon, not before it poured again and I had to get up on the ladder to put a tarp where the water was all landing.  The gutter is better than it was when they built the place now and we got the final quote for the windows so we hope to have it all buttoned back up by the end of January, the key word there is hope.  Other than all that excitement we just did more of the same really.  We built a shoe rack for the closet and installed some of that white wire shelving, we went to the dump to get rid of another huge load of cardboard, did groceries so we can stop eating so much fast food, and even finished unpacking the kitchen stuff.  Today we tackled the garage and got most of it done, I still have to sort out all of my tools and stuff but that's for another day.  Lisa works tomorrow and I'm going to try to bust out a few more projects, we picked up one of those multi purpose folding ladder things so I can clean out the gutters and get the branches off the roof that are still there from the storm.  After I get the roof cleared and the yard raked I get to load it all on the trailer and haul it down to a compost pile a few miles from here.  It will be good to be done with that mess though, we have a huge pile of branches to get rid of and it looks kind of messy.  I'll be doing some other stuff around here I'm sure, it seems that no matter what direction you look there is something that needs to get done.  We'll have more pictures up soon, probably not until we paint some of these rooms though, the stark white is starting to get boring, time to change it up a bit.  We aren't doing much for Christmas, we got each other a house this year!  Have a safe and happy holiday and as always we'll talk again soon. 

December 17, 2006:  Sorry it's been so long since we've spoken but things have been insane around here.  We moved into the new house last weekend with a lot of help from our friends and spent most of the week putting together furniture and trying to unpack some stuff.  We did a lot of driving around searching for the right pieces of furniture for the house and found most of it.  We were able to get some of it now but the rest will be picked up over the next month or two.  We also picked out, brought home and installed a new dishwasher, over the range microwave and gas range.  All of the old ones the original from 1991 and barely worked.  I patched a bunch of holes in the walls this weekend and we'll be trying to paint a few rooms in the next couple of weeks.  That brings us to the weekend, we got back from some shopping for the kitchen on Thursday evening around 8pm and we knew there was going to be a big wind storm that night.  It was going to be so bad that the news was telling people that if they slept on the south side of their house and there were trees outside that it would be a good idea to sleep in a different room.  In our case that was true so we were going to sleep in one of the other bedrooms until the power went out at about 830pm.  We slept in front of the gas fireplace to stay warm and listened to the house getting beaten by branches falling from the trees.  At about 230am a branch landed on one of the skylights in the kitchen and smashed it.  There are more pictures to see if you click the picture on the left.  It looks like the entire set of windows will need to be replaced but we should hear from the insurance company this week.  It was a long night but when we got an AM radio working in the morning we found out that 1.4 million households were without power and 4 people had died from wind related accidents.  It's now Sunday afternoon and the power came back on a few hours ago.  We made it through the weekend alright, we were chilly but the gas fireplace kept us somewhat warm.  We only lost a little bit of food that was in the fridge because we haven't really filled it up yet.  So other than all that it has been a pretty normal couple of weeks.  I'm sure I forgetting lots of stuff but I'll throw up another update if anything comes to mind.  Check out the pictures and have a great week! 

December 1, 2006:  Hi again, we're back, well sort of anyway.  Thanks for all the kind words you sent, they meant a lot.  Things just haven't been the same around here without Isis but we're starting to be ok with it.  We're definetely keeping ourselves very busy so we don't think about it as much.  Lisa has been taking a bunch of extra shifts at work and I went to Denver for a few days to install some new equipment at my company's office there.  A couple weeks ago we started looking at houses, in fact we looked at a lot of houses in a very short time.  We ended up finding one that we really liked and put in an offer on it.  The seller countered the offer and we accepted it, had the inspection, made an offer based on the inspection results and accepted their next counter offer.  A bunch of things have happened since then but the end result is that if all goes well we will be closing on the place next week and hopefully moving in next weekend.  We've been doing a lot of searching for furniture in our little bit of free time and I think we have most of the rooms picked out.  The move should be pretty easy as we really don't have all that much stuff here to move.  We are really anxious to get out of the place we live now and get our lives some what back to normal again.  As soon as it's official we'll get more pictures up for you to check out, stay tuned.  I'm not sure that you would have heard about this but Seattle got a little snow on Monday, basically during Monday Night Football.  Well, a little snow here apparently paralyzes this city.  I know that is a strong word but it's the truth.  It took me 4 hours to get home and it's only a 29 mile drive.  It took Lisa just under 8 hours to get home and her commute is less miles than mine!  The freeway that she usually takes was closed because too many people abandoned their cars and blocked the way.  Some people didn't get home from work until 10am the next morning and oh, I never said how much snow we got did I, it was under 3 inches!!  The locals tell us that this doesn't happen very often so hopefully they're right, this week sucked to drive in.  Lisa had to work all week but everyone at my company worked from home for two more days after the storm, madness I tell you.  Well, I'm sure there are a bunch of things I should be telling you about but nothing is coming to mind.  Lisa is working this weekend and I'll be trying to get the few things that we unpacked packed back up to be moved next weekend if everything goes through as planned.  Have a great week and keep watch for more updates.