Dear Sir,

I'm sorry Mr. Neighbor, but I'm not going to shovel up the bunny nest in my yard with three tiny baby bunnies and dump it in the gutter.

I appreciate your concern for our yard. I understand that the "soil will die" and our grass will be brown in that spot. I understand that we are over run with bunnies and many people see them as pests. But the hippy in me can not stomach the thought of shoveling breathing, living, baby animals into the sewer.

While I'm not going to go to the extreme and bring them into my home and bottle feed them as Samantha wanted to do. I'm going to put the nest back together, leave it to nature and hope that the mother will come back despite Henry's* scent all over the place. Google says that the mother will in fact still come back to care for her babies even though the nest has been tampered with.

On a side note. I know I've neglected posting pictures of the house. I was going to do a big "before" post. But now I think I'll do before, and after pictures in the same blog post. That seems more fun. ;)

Stay tuned!

(yes I feel better after my mini rant)

*Samantha and Chris's black lab

Hopefully this will be the last.

That is, the last rent check I will pay to a landlord. (I have to add the disclaimer that Mark is actually paying this months rent, so technically the last rent I paid was in....April? This way we don't have to give the mortgage people an explanation as to where that random sum of money in my account came from when mark deposits money for the months bills. Nothing like having your checking account watched by big brother. Thankfully Mark works with our Mortgage guy so he's been taking care of this aspect.) Anyways, the point is, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

No more rent!

No more rent! 

La La La, La La La!

Yes, we bought this house. This lovely 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath, 2200 sq ft house built in 1912. With a three season porch off the front, large dinning room, living room, and kitchen on the main level, original woodwork, brick fireplace (non working), half finished basement, fenced in side and back yard, and a 2 stall garage in the back.  

Yay!  We close in the middle of June and plan on moving the last weekend in June.  Yay!

I didn't really want to bore you guys with the suspense of house hunting, offer making, inspections, appraisals, etc like I did last time.  Although that would have given me something to blog about in the last few months instead of leaving you guys hanging.

Long story short, I've been tired of paying rent for a while now. Tired of not having a yard for Brooke to play in, tired of taking my laundry to a laundry mat (correction: tired of sending Mark to the laundry mat), and most of all tired of not being able to do what I want to my surroundings. 

A coworker happened to be looking online at houses for sale in Owatonna one day and I thought, hey, I can afford that. And with the deadline of the $8,000 tax credit looming Mark and I jumped into house hunting. I believe it was our second day out looking we found a house that I fell in love with, and after a few minutes of convincing, I had talked Mark into it. I really fell in love with this house. I even started mentally decorating it. So we made an offer. They countered. I continued to mentally decorate. We made another offer. They countered again (Here is where I put in a mini rant about how they kept countering higher than their original counter and at one point had their counter offer over the asking price). It essentially came down to the dang barn garage and the couple thousand dollars that it was going to cost us to repair the roof to satisfy FHA financing appraisals. We backed out. 

A couple of days later we did find our house. Coincidentally it's only two blocks over from the first house we put an offer down on, same house number even, and on the same street that we live on now. Initially it didn't have the same charm for me that the first house did. But it quickly grew on me when I looked past how they had it decorated and laid out to how I would decorate it and the thing we would do to it. 

We made an offer and they accepted. It was inspected and nothing major was found. Thankfully the inspector put Mark at ease with buying a 98 year old house. He said it was a very structurally sound house and he even knew the previous owners who had it for 30+ years.  The appraisal happened with only a slight hiccup when it came to the garage roof. He wanted to see the damage to the south side of the roof repaired.  Mark and I chose to just have the south side replaced and the sellers agreed to pay the cost. So now the south side of the garage roof doesn't match the rest, but we'll worry about that in a few years. It doesn't look tooo horrible. ;)

Now that just leaves us with packing up, closing, and then we'll start some painting projects before we completely move in at the end of the month!  

I'll post some "before" pictures when we close and even more "after" pictures when we complete our projects.

Ok, that ended up not exactly being a short version of the story.  Sorry. :)

Easter Weekend

Easter weekend is hardly half over, but I couldn't resist sharing some cute pictures from the first part of our Easter weekend.

Saturday turned out to have some sunny warm moments so we took advantage and headed to the park.

Brooke thinking she's pretty funny.

She's right.

Saturday night the Easter Bunny came and left a fun looking basket.

Sunday morning Brooke had fun discovering what was in it. When Mark first brought her into the living room and set her down, she did her trade mark "Zzsssat? Zzssat?" pointed, and ran....straight past her basket to the remotes on the couch.

Well, not the reaction we were looking for but she soon saw the goodies that waited for her and had fun pulling each thing out.

We spent the morning playing with bubbles,

eating yogurt covered raisins,

and bunny fruit snacks.

Now it's off to Forest Lake and St. Paul to see our families. I see more food and more candy in our future.

Happy Easter everyone!

Miss Brooke

Just a few shots of Little Miss Brooke taken with my new (to me) camera. They aren't perfect, but it was fun to play around with some photoshop brushes and Pioneer Woman actions.

Remembering Old Traditions and Creating New

I know it's been pretty quiet around The Single Sister lately...ok, it's been neglecto-blog of epic proportions. It's been a busy couple of months starting with meeting Pioneer Woman, then Mara's Birthday Party, Thanksgiving, the Mega Recital/Twin's Birthday Party/Bergeron Christmas Extravaganza, and lots of cooking, Christmas shopping, and pottery classes in between (hopefully I'll have some fun projects to share with everyone soon). And through everything Mark has been a trooper, going along with the crazy plans, and enjoying every minute of it. I hope. :)

Since I've kind of taken over the last two months with my family's plans I told him he had me all to himself over Christmas. We decided to have a quiet Christmas Eve in Owatonna, then Christmas Day head up to the cities to pick up Brooke and spend the day with his family. Well that quiet Christmas Eve didn't start out so quiet.

It started with waking up to someone knocking on our front door and ringing the doorbell at 1 in the morning. We didn't make it to the door, but saw a police officer walking back to his car. Whaa? It had snowed quite a bit and our cars were parked on the street. See, Owatonna does even odd street parking during winter to eliminate the need for snow emergencies. It takes some getting used to, but it's really not that much of a hassle. Till this morning. It was the 24th so we should have been on the even side. But there has always been a No Parking Thursday Morning sign (for the street sweepers)....and the 24th was a Thursday so we were parked on the other side of the street. All we could figure was the cop was warning us that our cars were going to be towed if we didn't move them. After some sleepy grumbling about No Parking signs vs. even odd parking Mark decided to move our cars to the back driveway of my apartment. (awww, my hero! LoL) We wanted to be sure that we wouldn't end up starting our Christmas Eve day with getting our cars towed...

Which leads to Marks part of the story...

How I became the 'talk' of Walmart Owatonna on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. I met a coworker at Walmart this morning so we could carpool to work this morning in her Honda Pilot (I was going to WM after work). Since the snow was covering the parking lines, I made sure to park next to the cart corral. When she dropped me off after work, I couldn't find my car. Fearing that my car had been towed, I walked into Walmart to ask customer service if they had towed any cars this morning completely expecting them to have no idea what I'm talking about. When I asked the woman at customer service, she immediately said, "oh no, are YOU the owner of the green Taurus?" Then, another customer service rep (mid-customer mind you) says, "oh wow, I think someone must of hit your car this morning and pushed it into the lane of traffic. It was backing up traffic for about a half hour this morning...customers were all complaining and everyone was talking about it!" She continued, "let me call Greg the Manager up here, he knows all about it". She calls Greg, "Greg, the guy with the Taurus is here". I meet Greg. Greg: "I think someone hit your car and pushed it into the lane of traffic". I explained that my car, with it's many dents and holes just looks like it had be hit, but that it probably wasn't. He then said, "we figured the car was stolen or abandoned based on how it looked and the fact that the doors were unlocked"..."we have you on video tape parking at 7:30am and leaving in another car"...Long story longer... apparently I must have parked my car in the middle of the traffic lane in the WM parking lot this morning, which caused several customer complaints, and got the attention of what seems like every WM employee, which resulted in my car being towed. I was most embarrassed when Greg said "you were right in the middle of the lane! I couldn't believe it! I even took a picture if you want to see it!"

He didn't want to see it. After getting his car out of the impound lot (thank god we were able to get it out before they closed for the day and closed for Christmas....and the weekend...that would have been one hell of an impound fee...probably more than the car is worth!) I said you should have asked to see the photo....and asked to get a copy to put up on peopleofwalmart.com. I love Mark, but his car fits right in with the things you see on peopleofwalmart.com.

Mara put it best: "So after getting up at 1am (!!) to move cars to not get TOWED, it got TOWED from the Walmart lot???? The event is unfortunate, but the timing is hilarious!!"

After the excitement of the day we settled in with some wild rice soup (made from a mix, easy, nothing like my Mom's) to watch A Christmas Story (I still stand by my thought that CJ looks an awful like Ralphie). We did some cooking for Christmas Day with Mark's family; raspberry rave, and pecan pie. Later we ate cookies, drank homemade egg nog, and opened presents. All in all it was a good day despite the bumpy start.

This morning we opened stockings (yes, we were cheesy and did stockings for each other) and are hoping that the weather will cooperate and let us drive north to the cities to continue our Christmas festivities.

Merry Christmas everyone! Here's to remembering old traditions and creating new ones! Well except for the towing part, we don't need that to become a tradition.