Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving we had the pleasure of having dinner and fellowship with our pastor and his family and some friends from church. The food was outstanding, we had a blast playing Cranium and Taboo, and then finished off the evening watching "The Last Samurai". We have so much to be thankful for!

Saturday ramblings

We finally woke up to snow this morning! Last year, we got our first snow (and by first I mean the one that was a lot and stayed for good) early in the 3rd week of October. So, this year we were blessed with a few snow-less and oddly-warm-for-November weeks! It was 43 degrees yesterday; 47 the day before. That's really, really not normal for this area. Actually, as I look at the window at this moment I see the snow has turned to rain...perhaps I'm being hasty in calling this our "first snow" as it well may be gone by the evening at this rate!

Also, last night was another "first" and could have only been experienced in Alaska!! Two male moose were fighting in the neighbors yard across the street!! They were circling and clashing their horns and making these really odd whinny noises that I had no idea were moose noises. I attempted to get a picture, but being across the street and in the dark (and believe me, I was NOT going to get any closer than that) made it difficult to capture, but here it is anyway! in this particular shot they look like they're both walking away, but what actually occurred is the moose that is farthest from the camera was actually trotting away but then right after I snapped the picture he turned and ran towards the other and clashed horns!!Our neighbor across the street got a lot of it on video as they were right off the side of his house, so his upper deck was the perfect place to film from. My understanding was that he was alerted to it because one of the moose had thrown the other one against his house and he went outside to investigate the noise!!

5 Years!!

The title of my post reminds me of Grosse Point Blanke when Jeremy Pivin's character was smoking pot and telling John Cusack's character how he couldn't believe it had been "10 years...10 years...10 years...10 YEARS!!" since they had graduated high-school!! He hilariously emphasized every word differently each time he said it...I don't know, maybe you have to see it to know what I'm talking about.

At any rate, it has been FIVE YEARS since Jeremy and I were married, and boy what a 5 years it has been!! We usually do something pretty upscale (our 1st we went to Seattle and had dinner at the space needle and then drove the limo that Becky rented for us back to our hotel) but since we're going to Hawaii in December, we kept it pretty low key and just went to dinner and then watched some of Seinfeld season 6!

There are SO many things I could list, but here's the hi-lights of the last 5 years:

• We've moved five times.
• We've owned two houses (sold one).
• We each inherited one sibling-in-law and have two nieces and one more niece/nephew on the way (congrats Becky and Stew!).
• We've owned two VW camper Vans (sold one).
• We've had seven room-mates (Jenn, Stephanie, Sam, Kendra, Jamie, John & Barb), not all at once of course!
• Since Anchorage we've each made one job change.
• I (Olivia) has started her own business (I do scrap booking, custom greeting cards, wedding invitations, birth announcements, you name it! Currently making Christmas cards for this year if anyone is interested, just email me).
• We've had three pets. One cat who tragically ate himself to death (no kidding, but that's a long story for another time) and two dogs.
• We've come into a great church family and have inherited too many wonderful relationships to count!

I am sure I could come up with so many more things worth mentioning if I had the time to really think them out...however I'm on my way out the door to a massage client's house (oh yeah, I do that as a side business, too!) and so I have to go.

In short, God has been SO good to us; we have greatly enjoyed and cherish all the blessings and memories we've made the last five years and are eager to see what good things God has in store for the next five! Thank you to everyone who loves, supports, and prays for us ~ we love you!

Hallelujah Party!

Our Church had their Hallelujah Party (alternative to Halloween) for the kids on Tuesday the 30th and Jer and I volunteered. I ran the craft table (we made little blue whales!) and Jer ran the bean bag toss. Afterwards we went to Jenni's house and had our own little costume party!!! My family never did this kind of stuff growing up, so it was fun. I think next year Jer and I will either be Mulder and Scully from the X-Files, or Jack Bauer and Audrey Raines from "24"!! We have a whole year to decide! Here's Kendra & I.

The next day at work we got to dress up, too. My friend Jennifer and I dressed up as twins!! We got blond wigs, but then blacked out one of our teeth...you know...hot from behind, "oh I was mistaken" from the front!! Hahaha! People who don't know us well actually couldn't tell us apart!

Hot.......

Or not...!!! :)

The full effect!

Update

Quite a bit has happened since our last post - I think an update is in order!

• John & Barb left for Ketchikan the first week of October. The first few days without them were strangely quiet!
• We've been asked by our pastor to start hosting our church's young adults group, which we've agreed to do. We are going through a curriculum by John Bevere called The Bait of Satan. It is about staying free from the bondage of offense. It's a pretty hard core, grow up in spiritual maturity study; we're excited to see the growth it is going to spark.
• I've volunteered to help out with the Children's ministry at our church; I will be helping with the 5-12 year old's two Sunday's a month.
• Jeremy has been laid off for the next two months in order to attend the classroom portion of his apprenticeship. This was his first week; he is currently at the top of his class - I am very proud of him!!
• We are going to Hawaii for two weeks in December as sort of a Christmas/Jeremy's Birthday/our 5 year anniversary treat to ourselves. We're very excited. We are going to be in Maui. We will be renting a VW camper van for one week and driving around and camping Maui, and then we'll spend one week in a condo.
• I've been working my "real" job at full steam and also doing a little massage on the side as well as some scrapbook, card making projects in my spare time.

We've been getting little bouts of snow here and there but nothing has stuck yet. Mostly it snow/rains and then freezes as night, which makes the roads dangerous in the mornings. Thank God for studded snow tires! All of the above have kept us pretty busy. Hopefully something a little more interesting/picture posting worthy will happen! :)