My greatest weaknesses are books. You trap me in a room with a good book, and I am lost to the world for however many hours that book has me enthralled.

So to Jared’s dismay, last year I fell head over heels for the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. She’s got to be my new favorite author (basically adding her to the list of my other top favorite authors). So imagine my pleasure and hearthrobbing when I checked her website today….

stepheniemeyer.com

And the cover and a teeny part of the first chapter have just come OUT!

Ahhh! Thank you Stephenie Meyer and Co!

Thank you for all sharing my inner teenage girl-ness.

Yes. The Twilight Series and The Host have infiltrated my very soul. I am hopelessly in love… (but don’t worry Jared, I still love you, too!)

I figured we have been here in Texas long enough that I should put some pictures up.  So here we go.

This is the view of our balcony from outside the apartment. Our front door is pretty boring, so no pictures there.

🙂

Here’s the kitchen before I put stuff in it (still working on that organization thing).

Here’s the dining room, to the right of the kitchen. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with the back wall- Thinking about a mirror or a bright, happy picture of sorts. Any ideas out there?

In the right of the dinning room picture, you can see there’s the little computer desk space. we didn’t know what to do with the shelf above, but then we went to Ikea and found this to use:

Last but not least, the living room!

And just for fun, here’s the cake I made for Jared’s birthday. It’s not as pretty as the one i made as his grooms cake, but it was a last minute surprise. 🙂

So, I tried typing this earlier, but apparently my blog was stupid and wouldn’t save.

Jared and I got ourselves a dog! His name is Stevie, he’s about a year old, and he’s a darling Italian Greyhound (smaller than a regular greyhound!). Here are some pictures of our new family member!

This is one of my favorite pics of him, playing with some unwanted sweatpants.

this one is pretty cute too! Jared and Stevie are so cute. I love the two men in my life. 🙂 Just note, if you get an IG, it will want to sleep in the bed with you. IN the bed. Under the covers. And they have long, gangly legs, so that can interfere with your sleeping as well.

Note those long, gangly legs!

Anyways, we’re finally getting settled here. We have furniture in our bedroom now (Ikea rocks our world!), I have gotten to read and reread several of my favorite books (like A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of Madeleine L’Engle series) and new books (The Host by Stephenie Meyer and The Kite Runner) and Stevie is pretty much housetrained!

Life is good. 🙂

We never figured out what was wrong with my head. Oh well.

Good news is that I am with Jared again and we are now in our lovely apartment in Austin, Texas!

The craziest part about driving from Utah to Texas was that we went through a large part of utah, some of Colorado, and across New Mexico in one day. Then, from the outermost part of Texas to the middle (Austin) took us another entire day! Yes, Texas is big.

So, my main job right now is to be the live in maid (you know, unpack boxes, organize stuff, clean, and cook), in exchange for Jared letting me live here. I’m a bum! I don’t have any income and it will be a bit before I can get my Texas teaching license, so until then (or finding another job that is just happy about me graduating from college), I am the live in maid! It’s been cool. I like cooking, so that’s been fun, and in my free time, I’ve just been reading things like the Twilight series (I <3 Stephenie Meyer!!!!) and other older classics that I have ignored during my student teaching time.

Speaking of student teaching, my last day ended quite well. I loved it. My B3 class was the best- they brought in all sorts of treats to send me off. I even got a couple of thank you cards! It was really sweet. Apparently, they liked me. Which was kind of a nice feeling afterall. 🙂

Hmm… well, I should go clean more now. blech.

I was happily grading research papers (ha)… and when I realized Gmail kicked me out of my account that I was logged into and chatting with people. When I tried to get back in, I got the heart-stopping message, “Sorry, service is currently not available. Please try again later.”

What?! No.

So it’s been about a hour and I can’t get in. How pathetic am I to be so completely dependent on EMAIL. Silly. Really.

I’m moving on…

And it’s four more days til I see Jared and literally “move on” to Texas! Yay!