Nawlins!

Between selling our house, struggling with last-minute snafu's, finding a rental, securing a moving company, building a new house and having a husband practically chained to his work desk, we were CLEARLY looking to add something else to our lives. :) Luckily, we'd planned a vacation to New Orleans last year, so there was nothing that would keep us from our travels. It was super stressful leading up to the trip, with Rob's work schedule and a quickly dwindling timeline for the big move, we had to really hustle, but it all worked out!

Here's the standard airport self-portrait...funny enough, we were sitting in the exact seats that we were on our last photo like this, on the way to Denver last year!
We got to New Orleans around midnight and walked around a bit checking out our town. Of course, our noses led us right to the Cafe de Monde. I will tell you what, there is NOTHING better than beignets and chickory coffee at midnight. Slurp!Warning, though, don't laugh hysterically while eating these beignets. I almost met my maker choking on the powdered sugar taking this photo, ha! What a way to go, you'd have to say something about my carb addiction getting me in the end on my tombstone.

Our hotel was a recommendation from a coworker of mine, and it was great. It's the Hotel Villa Convento and was allegedly a brothel back in the day. Good times! The House of the Rising Sun song is written about it. We loved our hotel and the balcony overlooking Ursulines St - here's the view from the balcony.

Day 2 we went on a super long walk through some neighborhoods surrounding the French Quarter, we went to a killer breakfast joint called Elizabeth's that our hotel lady recommended. The walk was perfect because let's just say we ate our weight in cajun food, delicious! Check this spread out: Rob's breakfast was actually called a "Morning Chubber" hahahahaha - and mine was melted brie cheese and smoked salmon over rye...with all the grits you could shove down. I blame my current muffin top situation on this breakfast alone.
Dig my mug:

More importantly, we began the ever vital Bloody Mary tour of New Orleans. This one was just so-so, but I do love the ocra as an accoutrement. Good times.

More walking afterwards, and I LOVE all the architecture of New Orleans, it was really neat to see all the different houses.

The neighborhoods looked pretty good and fairly nicely rebuilt but we did see some residual Katrina damage (and of course we heard it was much worse the further outside of the tourist areas you got).

We came across the most random junk shop, some fantastic finds, lots of character. Questionable guy running the joint, but that seemed pretty typical in Nawlins.We wandered and checked out other neighborhoods, here's a sampling of some of the sights.


After all that walking, we needed...more booze! Onward to Bourbon Street we went...

Lafitte's was built in the 1800's, that place is literally leaning to one side, so ancient! Lots of fun, though, a must-do.

Rob had a Pim's Cup...

and I had Bloody Mary #2. Hysterical what happened, with the blood sugar meds I take, I'm not really supposed to drink, so I asked the bartender to go light on the vodka. Well her version of "light" and my version of "light" must be really different, because she honestly put about 3 shots in my little cup. ha! I learned my lesson and just had virgins after that.Rob went into a sugar coma with this drink...it was essentially a "drink this" kind of a moment from the waitress.


At the bar where Rob tried his first crazy sweet Bourbon street drink, there was live Zydeco music...it was so fun! Check out the guy with the washboard, clearly he ate his Wheeties that morning.

Honey, I don't think you're supposed to feed the wildlife.
Some other Bourbon street fun...


After all that walking, we needed more food! We stopped off for a shrimp po-boy and fried okra (slurp!) and soaked in some more live music...this time with a guy who basically phoned his performance in (thus, Rob's face):

Then we took the cable car through the Garden District for yet another bloody mary - this time at the Columns, so beautiful! (and one of my favorite bloodys of the trip, for those of you playing along at home, that's #3):
After that, we wandered up Charles St and enjoyed all of the gorgeous homes while the sun set, gorgeous!!!


I just realized this post is hella-long, so I'm going to cut it at this point and start another, just in time for some nighttime activities!

And so it begins...

The BIG MOVE is approaching quickly - we leave for New Orleans in 4 days, and will only have 3 days once we get back before the movers come. I'd say of any time for me to take up Sedatives, it'd be now (but I DID treat myself to a Slurpee today on a packing break, and that seemed to do the trick). I fully confess, however, that I've had TWO slips on my New Year's Resolution to cut out Diet Pepsi's. Can you blame a girl? I need a vice right now, and cupcakes just ain't an option!

We've been using every spare moment to pack, and we actually have most of it done except the bare essentials and furniture. Here's some shots of the garage, it's insanity in there:

It's been crazy, we've had to label each box either "rental" or "storage" and already I've found myself looking for things I could use...and then quickly *forehead slap* remembered that like a dum-dum I thought "oh hey, I won't need this object for the next 9 months" and had already packed it away. *sigh*. I guess it'll be quite the Zen living this year...pretty simple and without lots of fuss.

The good news is we found a rental this weekend! We're pretty excited, it's a fairly new complex in La Jolla and the owner is great, really low-key. The building itself is really cool - it has a sweet pool with cabanas, pool tables, cooking classes, a movie theater, a piano (woot! Mine is certainly going into storage, so that will fill the void), a gym, a yoga studio, etc, etc, etc. It'll be a challenge adjusting back to apartment living, but I'm sure it'll be fine for such a short time.

G's on the mend, too, hopefully getting his stitches out tomorrow. He's been such a little packing buddy, often going with me from room to room and supervising. Don't you dig the 80's style t-shirt? It's not pretty but at least it's keeping him from getting at his stitches...again.
Anyhoo, that's it for us for now, more later probably after our trip!

We come from France...

In what could NOT have been worse timing, our &*#$#%^! vet decided to remove some "old guy cysts" from Galileo when he was under anesthesia getting his teeth cleaned last week. What was purely cosmetic turned into a nightmare, and now we have a little "Frankenpuppy" with 10 different shaved and stiched spots....one of which tore open and required an emergency trip BACK to the Den of Horrors (AKA the Vet) with a hysterical dog Mama leading the way. Poor little buddy's world had already been rocked with all the packing and general mahem, and now he's been in pain and having to do his best Beldar the Conehead impression! It's been a week of Bichon suck-fest, but he's nearing the end, should get his stiches off Monday, just in time for Mama and Daddy to leave him and go on vacation. The guilt!!!

I took a moment off from packing to check email and clearly someone needed some snuggling (it heals all wounds, dontchaknow):
Poor little guy. And @!%@$! stupid vet. I think we've officially broken up with him for this.

The New House Deets

Who wants to check out the new pad? I aim to please, so here you go. Choosing our new house involved a fairly big leap of faith because our specific floor plan, Residence 6, is not actually modeled. We thought we wanted the plan 4, which IS modeled, but once we learned about the 6, we were hooked. We've taken a bunch of pictures of the plan 4, which is very similar (and actually modeled) so I figured we'd post the pics and explain the difference for those who want to be in the know.

Here's our floor plan, excuse the tiny photo, we scanned the handout:
The style of our house will be "Italian Farmhouse", which we're super stoked about! This is the Residence 5, but it's done in the same style so you get the idea:Here are the colors of our house, we're thrilled with the dark colors and stonework (ours are the stones on the left and our roof tile is the bottom left):

The big square is the main color of our house, the darker brown is the front door and garage door, and the dark slate color are the front shutters.


And now, on to the model of the plan 4. Our house will be really similar: the best feature is the outside, private courtyard with the fireplace. In the plan 4, the courtyard is in the front of the house, right off the front door and garage door. In ours, it'll be in the back of our house, and part of the big living space of dining room/great room/ outside courtyard. I LOVE that our courtyard is in the back because when you come home to the plan 4, you have to go through the garage door AND the door to your house to get inside, whereas with ours, you come from the garage right into the kitchen, or from the front door straight into the front of the house. I can imagine we'll use the outside courtyard a bunch, it's covered by the second story of our house, but other than the fireplace on one wall, is completely open. With having a corner lot, our courtyard will look out to our stone wall, and not into our neighbor's house, woot!

The view from the uncovered part of the courtyard looking into the fireplace/covered part. The main difference is our fireplace will be in the middle between two arches and not on the wall, if that makes sense.Our side and backyards will be a similar size to these shown in the plan 4. I love what they've done with it, we might have to copy some of their ideas (or sneak over in the middle of the night and steal plants...heh heh).

The other main difference of our plan 6 is that we don't have huge great room ceilings - all our ceilings are 9 feet and the plan 4 offers a huge open great room to the second floor. The funny thing about that is our neighbors who chose the plan 4 are doing the optional loft too, so their great rooms won't be open either.

The kitchen comes standard with granite and stainless steel appliances, and we're so relieved since we just spent a bunch of money upgrading our current kitchen, we'd hate to go backwards into white-tile-and-appliance-ville. The difference between this kitchen and ours is our sink and dishwasher will be in the middle island, not the stove.
And here's more shots of the model: we'll also have a spare bedroom downstairs, and 2 bedrooms upstairs in addition to the 2nd story master suite. We'll also have a loft, not shown in this model 4. Here's the 1st floor spare bedroom:
The upstairs master suite is...well...sweet! Much bigger than our current master bedrooms plus love the big bathroom and walk-in closet, such an upgrade to what we have now.

Upstairs laundry is a plus too.


And finally, the 2 other bedrooms upstairs. Ours won't have a jack/jill bathroom in between, the bathroom will be between bedroom #2 and the loft.
Isn't it so pretty? I'm so excited!!! Is it December yet?

Our new house!!!

Rob and I are BEYOND thrilled to announce our big news, we got our dream house! As most of you know, we found a new development about a month ago - we happened upon it completely by chance but fell quickly head over heels with the place. It's been such an amazing month, literally every little detail has gone so smoothly, it's such a miracle and we feel so blessed.

We had several scary hurdles we had to get through over the last month including selling our home since we were contingent buyers. We placed it on the market last Tuesday and within 3, count 'em 3 hours, we got the perfect offer! We accepted right away and are now going through the escrow process. That part was truly remarkable because our big fear was we'd get our new place and in this economy and housing market, not sell our old home and end up losing the new house. We are so grateful for our buyer!

The second major hurdle was to get the new place, we had placed our current house on the market in a leap of faith praying we were going to get the new house, which was on a first come, first serve basis and there were only 8 homes available (but really, only 3 that were in our price range that we wanted). The week leading up to the opening sales day was nerve-wracking. Neither of us slept very well and forget about appetites, we were both so nervous and could think of nothing else! We called every day at the suggestion of the Shea Home staff to check if anyone was lining up, and Thursday afternoon (mind you, TWO whole days before sales day!) there was somebody in line.

Rob was amazing, he dropped everything and hauled butt over there, he works only about 15 minutes away but by the time he got there he was already #3 in line! Quickly we were reassured, however, when we learned #1 and #2 wanted different homes than ours: it finally hit us, we got our house!!!! And now, we've got to camp out like the Beverly Hillbillies for 2 days in a super nice neighborhood. Wah wah wah.

It actually turned out to be such a fun process - we totally bonded with our new neighbors and we're thrilled to be living next to some great people...we really like them already and can't wait to get to know them during this whole process - how unique to get to know people even before you move in! And, in the smooth-process fashion that has been this whole experience, we were completely saved Thursday night. The Shea VP came and rescued our butts by allowing us to go home - they could not, in good conscience, allow us all to camp out in the cold for 2 days and they asked a Shea employee to come hold everyone's spots in line and be the "keeper" of the sign-up list.We were thrilled! Although, secretly, I think Rob and the other dudes were bummed - they'd all geared up to camp out and I think were actually really enjoying doing their "dude duty" for their wives....but several hours of camping out was plenty for this girl (not to mention I still had to work Friday, so I probably wouldn't have made it long Thursday night and would have had to bail and go home eventually).

The Shea VP, Vanessa, was so sweet - she even brought us champagne to celebrate! Here's us with Vanessa (on the far right) and our new neighbors camped out outside of the sales office.

When we left, Rob and I drove over to our actual plot and walked around and took pictures. We love our patch o' dirt, it's OUR dirt!!!
We returned on Saturday morning when the houses went on sale, and it was such a fun and exciting process. Of course we'd already met and bonded with our 2 neighbors, and had met yet another one just as we were leaving Thursday night. Saturday we got to meet everybody else and it was really cool - and we're off and signing paperwork and giving away all our money! :)

And it's only just beginning! We're new homeowners and how fun we get to watch our beautiful house get built from the ground up!Here's the first 5 homeowners together:


Our friends Karen and Alex came over right away to walk through the model and go see our new land...it's so special to be able to share this with people and I'd imagine we're not going to be talking about much else this entire year.



The coolest thing about all of this? We got our house Valentine's weekend which is our 14 anniversary (first date, first smooch!) AND also the same weekend we moved into THIS house 8 years ago! Clearly that's a great weekend for us, such a special significance. And as Rob pointed out, home is anywhere where we are together.

The new house is due to be done anywhere between October and December this year, so in the meantime we've got lots to do. We've already turned into packing maniacs and have to find movers and a rental in the next 2 weeks. No pressure.

But once we're in a cute little rental, we'll have nothing but time to visit our land and watch our dream house get built from the ground up! Stay tuned for frequently progress and updates. I think Rob's shirt says it all:

Out with the old...

So stay tuned for our big news (how's THAT for a cliffhanger?) about our new house, but as far as our current house goes...we're in escrow! I thought it'd be fun to capture our listing for memory sake - we sure do love our little place and are going to miss it a bunch (until we move into our new fat pad, that is), ha! We've had so many wonderful memories in this place and it will stay with us in our hearts forever. Enjoy!

http://www.real-estate-video-tours.com/video/1001-12322springwaterpoint.php