Why hasn't Julie been posting?

Because my living room looks like this:



And my dining room looks like this:


And pretty soon it will spread to the other rooms in our house.

Our offer on the New Jersey house was accepted last weekend, so we have been freaking out about getting our house on the market. So much to be done to a 90+ year old house. It's amazing what we've put up with for the past 10 years or so. In order to get everything done as quickly as possible our contractor has had his crew coming over to our house to work after their day on the job they are currently working on. So around 5pm for the past three days I've had workers showing up and working until 8pm or so. And before all this started up this past week we had quite a time trying to pack up boxes and boxes of excess stuff and take it over to the storage building we've rented.

In addition to all the excitement with the move, I finally had this show up in my back yard:

The plumeria that started as about a six inch cutting from my friend Jaimie probably 8 years ago or so has FINALLY bloomed. I kept telling Jim to wait it out, that the plant that he hated would some day make it all worth while with amazing smelling blooms. And it finally did. Here's what my tiny plant has grown into:

Jim doesn't like it because when we bring it in for the winter it sheds all it's leaves and is just a great big stick poking up out of the pot. At least it grew a couple branches a year or two ago. Until then it actually was one great big stick over the winter in the house. I can't wait for the other three blooms next to that one to finally open up!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Well, here I sit in the Westfield, NJ, Best Western. For those of you not in the know, we are moving to New Jersey sometime in the near future. Details are still up in the air as to the actual move date - lots of stuff to do to the house in Dallas before we list it, need to find someplace here to live. But once we decided to NOT try to get it all done before the school year starts I started to feel a little better about things.

Jim was offered an awesome opportunity with his company in their New York office (apparently you can see the Empire State Building from the windows there) that just couldn't be passed up. And so my dear husband has endured countless tears from me in our decision to do this. Not hard to leave the 102 degree weather in Dallas, but VERY hard to leave all the friends and family. We're up here for a quick trip now to check out some houses in a few New Jersey towns (yes, living in Manhattan would be nice, but we'd be in a shoebox that we probably still wouldn't be able to afford).

On a side note, I had the best night of sleep last night than I'd had in a long time. Jim tried to attribute it to the New Jersey air, but I think it is due more to the fact that I didn't have two kids and a dog waking me up all night. And a nice big king size bed.