Myers' Christmas Update

(I just copied and pasted this from what went out with our Christmas cards to family)           

 So much has happened the past year for us, that I do not believe that we can fit it all into a one page letter! Therefore,  instead of trying to tell you everything, we will give you the highlights of the past year.

In January, we began looking into the possibility of purchasing a home. We found a real-estate agent, thankfully very easily, as we go to church with him. He gave us leads to a mortgage officer and various other places we would need to go. By mid-February, we were pre-approved and official shopping for a home. We looked at around 25 or so homes in total. The last home we fell in love with! We closed April 9th, and celebrated by cleaning and having a picnic dinner in the dining room that night. We officially moved in a week later, with the help of church friends and have been so happy in the house-despite some issues that have come with it.

In June, we celebrated our first year of marriage in our new home. In September, we took a vacation to Panama City Beach, and enjoyed the time we had of relaxation and beautiful weather.

Tim is doing well with his job. His manager is very happy with his work, and Tim is still enjoying is job greatly. In October, I became a Thirty-One Independent Consultant, and I am still doing freelance website design and maintenance.

We are so thankful for the many blessing that God has bestowed upon us. We are now very settled into living in Huntsville, have made wonderful friends, and love our church and the family there.

On other news, we do have a blog. I have not been very good at updating it, but one of goals for 2013 is to update the blog at least weekly. This was you can catch some of the stories that will not make it into our Christmas Letters.

            We pray that you have a wonderful, blessed, and safe Christmas and New Year.                        

Ephesians 1:3

We Bought a House!

As most of you know by now, we bought the house we were under contract for. Not without any issues of course, of which I will give you the short version of in this post.
We put in our request for repairs and the seller agreed to all but one thing, which we accepted. This is were things began to get more interesting and we were thankful we had a 44 day closing instead of only 30 days.
The crew that was doing repairs started a week later than they were supposed to. We came out one day to get measurements of rooms and also to see the progress and at that time were impressed with what the crew was doing. They were also doing somethings we didn't ask for, but had come up on the inspection report. After the they were done working, we came out again to check things out along with our inspector, only to find things we asked for hadn't been completed.
They hadn't done anything noticeable with the crawlspace issues and hadn't fixed all the rotting wood and other things like that. So David called up the selling agent and we were told that they would have people out there to finish it soon. They did everything but the crawl space problems, which we kept getting the run around on. "The ductwork guy was supposed to do that." And things like that.
The week of closing date, (April 9th), we did a final walk through. Not everything had been fixed once again. At this point, Tim and I felt like we should go ahead and sign the final walk through paperwork, and get our own people in to fix the things that were left.
Closing day dawned. Excitement and nervousness filled us up both throughout the day. Then, just two hours or so before scheduled closing, we thought we weren't going to be able to close due to some things that we had just found out we still needed to do. David rescheduled our closing for an hour later originally scheduled. And then we sat at least thirty minutes before signing even begun as they were needing finalized paperwork on things that were being done at the same time.
We did start signing paperwork, even though things had not been HUD approved and final paperwork was still being sent in. Thirty minutes later, everything had come through and had been finalized! We were signing our last signatures before the keys!
Hands were shaken, keys were handed over, and Tim and I were home owners!!
We made phone calls on the ride back to the apartment. Then changed clothes, got Scottie and cleaning supplies and headed out to the house. That night, thanks to Publix, we had a picnic dinner of friend chicken and fixings in our new kitchen!

Life gets in the way

I am rather behind on the post I want to write...so over the next couple weeks I am going to be playing catch up!
There is so much to tell since the last post. Let's hope I can catch up!

Under Contract

We are under contract to purchase a house, and I am not sure that it has fully dawned on me yet. I am very excited, so that's not an issue, but I don't think it will feel like we are until we sit down at closing. We've had a few people ask us, "Why are you buying a house?" The answer is simple really, the time is right. If we were to renew our lease in our apartment, the rent would rise at least $100, interest rates are low, and other reason.

Like our engagement, we haven't rushed into this. We've prayed about it and asked for God's will to be done. Let me tell, so far He has bestowed many blessings on us in this process. We have been blessed with an awesome realtor, who has hooked us up with some another amazing people, such as our mortgage specialist and home inspector.

The house that we are under contract for, was one we never really intended to look at. We had seen it online when we first started looking at house online, but never seriously considered it. We had looked at around twenty houses before this, and had found one we really liked. Yet, that one went under contract before we could draft an offer, so the search continued. We came across this house again online and said "What the heck, the price is good, and we're going to be looking at other houses in the area, so let's just take a look."

It was the last house we looked at that day, and we are so glad we did. I walked into the kitchen, and didn't like it, because I LOVED it. We were concerned with the fact that the history said the house had failed pending twice. We then found out that this was due to lack of funding by the same person. So we continued through the house, liking what we kept seeing.

Later that evening after much deliberating and praying about we, we decided that we wanted to put an offer on the house. We asked for quite a few things- such as seller to pay closing cost, home warranty, longer closing period. The seller gave a counter offer, in which the only thing he changed was the purchase price, so we signed and went under contract.

We had inspection today and over all that turned out pretty well. There are some issues that we are going to ask the seller to fix, but over all happy with what we know.

This so far has been a great experience, and it's only been a week since we put in our offer.

Plus it gives me something to blog about :)

Creatively Writing

I have a love for reading and writing. Getting lost in the made up worlds of the authors, and then coming back to reality. When I read, I get immersed into the book. I will giggle, exclaim, and even get teary eyed. I try to bring that to my writing.

But I miss writing…. You might be thinking “But Ruthe, you’re writing right now and every time you post on this blog.”

That’s true, I am writing, but it’s not the creative writing I used to do. I miss just sitting down and letting the story come out. Throughout high school, you could have asked me to show you a creative writing that I had been working on, and I would have been able to pull out two or three different things.

I used to carry a notebook around with me, specifically for creative writing. It would have fragments of stories I had worked on and different character profiles throughout it. Then stories would show up in my subject notebooks (especially when my attention wandered from class).

There used to be a time that I stayed up till 4 AM several mornings a week researching facts and writing my own fictional stories.

I miss it. The last part of my college career was more writing papers and news stories. Yes, they can be creative, but not the fictional type of creativity.

Along with my other creative projects (sewing, card making, scrapbooking, etc), I am going to try and do more writing. So if you see me about carrying a spiral bound notebook, though that I am carrying it to jot down plots and character profiles.

Date a Girl Who Reads

By Rosemarie Urquico (Not Robert Pattinson as some people are claiming)

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

The Honeymoon

So I am finally sitting down and writing about the honeymoon…about four months late. Better late than never, right?

Anyways, Tim bought us tickets for a cruise to the Bahamas- first time either of us had been on one. And it was awesome. I love the ocean and I love being out on the water. The day after the wedding we hit the road, for an 8 hour drive to stop at a hotel for the night, and the next morning got up and drove another four hours to Port Canaveral. I was nervously excited when we were going through the line for security and getting our Sea Passes and such. I was about to embark on a large ship and leave the country for the first time.



Once on the ship, I was amazed at how big the ship was and thought it was going to take me awhile to figure everything out. We explored and went to the buffet for some lunch and explored some more. Later on, we laughed at the fact that the ship didn’t seem so small anymore and we pretty much knew where everything was. We went through the security procedures in case something happened to the ship and then we were on our way!

We decided to dress up for the dinners and take part in the formal night as well. The food was amazing at any of the places we ate. One night for dinner we ate at the specialty restaurant called Jade, which we cooked our own food on a hot volcanic rock.

We enjoyed watching different shows throughout the week and just enjoyed being newlyweds and relaxing after a busy couple of weeks.


The excursions we did we enjoyed a good bit. On the second day of the cruise we were at the cruise lines private island, where we prepared to go on a guided nature walk and snorkel. We lathered up in sun screen for the day, and still got rather red but thankfully not majorly burnt.

The third day we arrived at Nassau. We left the boat and were a bit overwhelmed by the people outside trying to get us to go on a taxi or tour and quickly made our way out of the throng of people. We walked towards the public beach area and saw homeless people sleeping and bathing on the beach, which was interesting to see. Next we made our way back towards the straw market and bargained to get some good deals on Christmas presents.


Next we went back to the boat and took a nap. Now you are probably thinking- why take a nap? You’re out traveling. Well considering the fact that we had had a busy two weeks with wedding stuff we were tired, plus it had started to rain a bit. We had only bought one excursions for the area so we weren’t tied to a schedule since it was a museum and could relax. After the nap, we went to explore the museum, then went back for lunch and another nap, and back out to explore the city some more before our dinner reservation. We enjoyed sitting out on an upper deck that night watching and listening to the night life of Nassau.

The next day was our day at sea- we had a very lazy day. Slept in, played card games, went to get food, napped, and other newlywed activities. After dinner we decided to stay out of the room a bit longer and watched another show before going back to the room. We made sure a lot of our stuff was together the night before returning to Port Canaveral so we didn’t have to do it last minute. The next morning had breakfast and finished packing up. Then we stepped back onto US soil and went through customs without much of a problem, got our luggage, and hit the road towards home.


We took some time to stop in Daytona Beach, and I was able to show Tim a couple places I had lived there, the school I went to, and we ate at one of my favorite seafood restaurant. After lunch, we hit the road and stopped in Macon, Georgia for the night.


We made it home on Saturday around 1:30pm, after leaving the previous Sunday, happy to be home, despite the mess in the apartment from not having time to go through things from the wedding. We were tired, but had enjoyed our honeymoon getaway. And I definitely want to cruise again sometime!!