Holiday Season is here!

Hey Everyone,

Last night we went to Adalia and Erik's wedding and it was a lot of fun! Adalia is one of Sterling's coworkers and the wedding was beautiful. It's always nice to see everyone dressed up more than usual and cutting loose with some wine and beer :)

Today we were feeling rather festive so we decided it would be a good time to put up our Christmas tree :) We made some hot chocolate, jammed to Christmas music and enjoyed putting the tree together and decorating with some new stuff we bought from Walmart this morning. We will probably put a few more things on it but this is what it looks like so far. Definitely a step up from our little Christmas ficus last year - though our ficus was fun to decorate as well and it was our first tree so we'll always remember our ficus fondly :)

Our ficus, Christmas 2008 :)

Our stockings on our fireplace - Christmas 2009

Our Tree! Christmas 2009

Christmas tree!

We are excited for family to come in for Thanksgiving. Sterling got a lot of cleaning and organizing while I was at work on Saturday morning, so we don't have too too much left to do before everyone arrives. We hope everyone is doing well and getting in the holiday spirit!!

Can't wait for the Holidays!

I only have clinics this afternoon and no morning client but I got up with Sterling around 5am and made breakfast/packed lunches so now I can't really fall back asleep :(

I am still somewhat recovering from the flu....my energy level is still pretty low and I still have a little bit of a residual cough but I've finished my courses of medicines and overall, feel a lot better than I was! Sterling has been having a lot of congestion lately - mainly allergy related though.

We are in the process of gearing up for the holidays. The Hill family Thanksgiving is going to be at our house this year. Last weekend, we went to the Nutcracker market and piddled around looking for some holiday decorations. We didn't find anything in our price range that we were crazy about, but we did get to do a lot of taste testing - which Sterling of course loved :) It was all I could do to keep up with him, jumping from booth to booth tasting sauces and dips and honeys and butters and spreads.....He had a good time :) We ended up buying some really good spiced tea, some "Country Cowboy" Amaretto Honey Butter (also realllllly good), some Irish cream hot chocolate mix, and a couple of mixes that dependent upon what you add to them, they can be used to baste/flavor different meats or made into a chip/pretzel dip. I might attempt to make some over Thanksgiving...

Rice Homecoming was also last weekend. We didn't go to the game as we had to be home for our alarm system to be installed, but we did go out to dinner with some friends who were in town. We went to a pretty good Mexican restaurant called El Pueblito . The patio area is really cool. Sterling said it made him feel like he was on vacation because the fans looked like palm leaves, haha. The boys ordered pitchers of Margaritas....needless to say, it made for an interesting time.

We also got some house stuff done over the past weekend. We organized our garage (one side is our yard stuff and the other side is all of the stuff we are going to either sell in the next garage sell or donate to goodwill). We still have a lot of boxes in the formal living room but I collapsed all of the big ones and left all of the dish size boxes alone. We have room in our attic for them but we are going to check with Perry homes first about putting stuff up there. They told us previously that it could be used for some storage but not to put too much up there because it could effect the ventilation of the attic (and subsequently, our bills and the moisture content of the house). I guess we will just have to find out how much is "too much". For the time being though, it doesn't bother me too much to just have them neatly stacked against the wall of that room. It's not like there is furniture in there and it's not really being used right now anyways. We still have a bunch of miscellaneous stuff in our 4th bedroom that we will have to clear out before mom, dad, Janna, Brett, Jessica and David come down. And the room that we are using as an office definitely needs some organizing....papers everywhere! We will see how much of that actually gets done before Thanksgiving....we are aiming to at least have the bedrooms cleared out. We have one extra queen sized mattress and then a queen size aerobed...we are going to see about borrowing another air mattress or two from a friend so that we can accommodate everyone.

We haven't gotten around to buying any decorations or anything like that for the house, but I did get us some new ceramic cereal bowls on sale from Ross :) They look pretty similar to the Biltmore phoebe cream china we already have and the Biltmore china only had the wide soup bowls - we needed some deep bowls for cereal. If you've ever seen Sterling go after some Reese Puffs or Cocoa Krispies in the morning, you know why :)

For Thanksgiving, I already bought our turkey and ham (great deal at HEB - buy the half spiral ham, get the 12lb turkey free!). Now I just have to figure out how to cook them :) I am also planning on making some of my mom's mashed potatoes, some sort of green bean casserole dish, stuffing, some bread/rolls, double layer symphony brownies, and roasted chicken pie florentine (sounds fancy I know, lol :) I learned how to make it from a lady giving out samples at HEB. It's pretty good!)

We are also excited to put up our Christmas tree and some Christmas decor outside. We have the tree (which is pre-lit) and a few ornaments (like probably 5 so far, haha)....we'll have to go find some more tree decorations and a few little outdoor decorations. We were thinking some basic outdoor lights and a nice wreath :)

When my parents come for Thanksgiving, apparently we are celebrating Christmas with them at that time also. I had previously been planning on getting presents during day after Thanksgiving sales and then just mailing them up since we won't be in TN for Christmas this year...so I'll have to add some Christmas shopping to our to do list next weekend. We are celebrating Christmas with Sterling's family this year in Maypearl :) We're a little jealous (ok, a lot jealous!!) cause they will be getting back from JAMAICA right around the time we go up there! We were invited to go but it wasn't really feasible for Sterling's work schedule. He has to be at work for at least 3 or 4 days before Nymex settle...and we also want to make sure he is doing all that he can to set himself up for a raise or a good bonus...or just to stay employed in general. With this economy, if companies think they can do without you, you'll get cut. Fortunately, Sterling has been doing a good job at work and seems to get along really well with everyone and the programs that he has written have been able to earn the company quite a bit of mula, so I'm not worried about him earning his keep :) I think they like him and want to keep him for the long haul :) Just like me :)

Other than that, we have Adalia and Erik's wedding next Saturday which should be fun :) Next weekend is shaping up to be a busy one!!!

Life is busy but good, we feel very blessed :)

November 2009 Update

Hi Everyone,

We haven't updated in a while so we figured it was about that time. Life has been really great and we have been settling into our home slowly but surely. We still have some boxes to unpack and a lot of things to take to Goodwill but we are getting there a little at a time. Progress has slowed recently as Jenn has been sick since Wednesday night. At first we just thought it was a bad cold but she's had a fever for a few days now so she went into the doctor today to get it checked out....It turned out that she has/had the flu (the Dr. thinks she is on the tail end of swine flu). But between Dr. Donna, Dr. Bui, and Dr. Sterling, we are making sure she gets taken care of. She is on antibiotics, antivirals, prescription cough syrup, a steroid dose pack (for her coughing), and her regular inhalers and nebulizer (to help with her breathing/asthma). She should be able to go back to work on Wednesday as long as her cough improves. And Donna put me on tamiflu (antivirals) to prevent me from getting her bugs :) I would be in between a rock and a hard place if I got the swine flu since I am having to take more responsibility at work and need to be around.

Work is going really well and I am learning a lot of stuff. There is a lot to know about gas trading and even though I have been working in the business for around 3 years I still learn new things everyday. I am progressing in my skills in operations, and am developing some processes and software to improve our business and deliver better quality of service to our customers / trading partners.

In house news, we got our appliances delivered and bought a dog house and a christmas tree. We got the Kenmore HE3 front loading washer and steam dryer, and an LG counter depth stainless steal french door bottom freezer refrigerator. We also got a cedar dog house from Lowe's but it leaked and the dogs got soaked in the rain. Since then we caulked it and sealed it up and put a tarp over it so it would be water proof. We also got our new U-Verse TV and internet. The U-Verse uses fiber optic cables and so the internet and TV are really fast. The TV changes channels quickly and allows you to see a live picture in picture preview before you change channels. It also has DVR capabilities, we could record 4 shows at the same time and watch them in any room in the house where we have a receiver. We also got a pre lit 9 foot Christmas tree (we got it at the same time we got our trash can because we had to rent a truck to carry it all home).

We can't currently find Jenn's cord to upload pics (packed away somewhere) so we found some online of our appliances and dog house for all to see.

Dog House looks like this (It's really big - Lady and Lucy seem to enjoy the space :)

The Refrigerator looks like this and looks great in our kitchen:Our Washer and Dryer both look like this (and we have the pedestals too, and those have drawers in them for storage which is cool).

That's all for now.