Abbie’s Bridal Shower

Monday, August 31, 2020

We had a nice time at Abbie's Bridal shower on Saturday. Abbie was cute, like always. 





















Events of the Last 3 Months

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Ice Cream after biking the Sakatah Trail...the start of something new starts in about an hour.

Swirl, my faithful coworker through this pandemic

Memorial Weekend in New Ulm with the Dobies


Four Generations

My beautiful Day Lilies, I will miss these at the new house

WI Weekend, the new flowers for my Dad's grave

Brazilians arrived June 23rd. We took Anna to Minnehaha Falls. 
Fourth of July weekend we went kayaking and swimming...yes that is Blake "kayaking"

We found a race...a live race. It was hot and wasn't a great run but at least it was a real race!



We bought a new house!


Birthday Party for all the late July-early August birthdays

Happy Birthday!


My "Family Wall" at the new house...see gray everywhere!


Coronavirus Blues & New House!

Three months...three months since my last post! Looking back, it was such a positive one. I was still running. I went on daily walks during work.  I had optimism that life would get back to normal. Races will start happening again, Valleyfair would open up and life would be awesome. But here we are, three months later and nothing regarding the pandemic has changed...well except we have to wear masks all the time. Places are still closed or operating at reduce service. Wal-mart closes at 8:30pm!!! Really!!! We are both still working from home. Good news, we haven't killed each other...so that is a positive.  Working from home means no walking the skyways...I rarely hit 10,000 steps in a day...I'm lucky to get a quarter of that daily. I miss socializing with coworkers. I miss Ginelli's pizza! I miss Twins baseball. I miss Valleyfair. I lost that positive attitude I had in May. I'm just doom and gloom now. Life sucks! 

Other things have changed a lot...

I'm addicted to Mountain Dew (very bad)
I've basically quit running. :(  (bad) 
We moved to a new house (very good!)

Wait, What? New House?!?!
One of the few positives of this whole thing is we sold our townhouse and moved into a new abode. On May 14th we took the day off to bike the Sakatah trail. I still had a positive attitude on the 14th!  Anyways, my former neighbor (and realtor) asked me if I was ready to sell. I was shocked when I responded YES! We started looking at houses the next weekend. There were some good ones, some bad ones. One I really loved but we got priced out of that one. We were about to settle for a not great house when this one popped on the market. At first I ignored it. I was still hoping to get the one I loved. Getting rejected from that one was actually a blessing in disguise. They were tearing down the KC Hall in the back yard and building a 3 story condo. Whew! Dodged a bullet there! After the rejection, I decided to give this one a shot. I'm so glad we did. I love the layout, Kitchen, Dining room, Living room and bedrooms on one level. The only bad thing was the laundry was in the basement. After 16 years, I got spoiled with laundry room next to the bedroom. Oh darn. 

They accepted our offer which started our clock. We had to sell our house in 7 business days. Yikes!  We listed on Thursday and had 2 showings on Saturday. Neither one offered. I was starting to get worried, very worried. We also had an open house on Saturday and nobody came. What? This was the same weekend of the Riots in Minneapolis. Apparently that was the reason for the lack of turnout. Then the appointments started pouring in on Tuesday. We had 4 showings and 2 offers that were over asking price. One of the offers required a COVID test...really!  
     
After all the inspections and appraisals and fixes we just had to sit and wait, and wait, and wait. The sellers of our new house couldn't move out until July 23rd because they were moving into a new house. Ugh.  After like 50 days, it finally came. Because of COVID, we pre-signed our house on Monday, July 20th. 

We got kicked out at 8am on July 22nd. We were technically homeless for 26 hours. By the way, in the meantime, my Mom had to have emergency surgery in Shakopee and was in the hospital this whole week. Fun times!

We finally signed our new house on July 23rd. The sellers were still in the house when were signing. Our title guy held on to the funds until we got proof they were out. It wasn't the cleanest place but we are working on it.

My mom was also discharged from the hospital on this day and had to recuperate at my new house good thing everything is on one level. :)

The new house is mostly great. Great location, Great yard, Great layout...wet basement. :(. We didn't discover the wetness until a couple days after we moved it. Thankfully I caught it now. We've regraded our front yard and removed all the hostas...hopefully this solves the problem. We are ripping out all the carpet down there and replacing it with laminate.  

We are also ripping out the carpet upstairs too. I didn't realize how bad it was. And I was spoiled with the new floors in my old house so we decided to replace them all right now. We are still moving but put a lot things on hold since we don't want to unpack and turn around and pack in a couple weeks.  So we are literally living out of suitcases. 

Well since we are replacing all the floors, we might as well re-paint all the ugly gray and brown around the house. We don't have to worry about getting paint on the carpet. Yay!  Ade and Caio have been a huge help at painting. It has been a lot of work. but I like the colors.

Today we finally mowed the lawn. We bought an electric mower...it is awesome. Eric forgot to buy self-propelled so it is a work out!

That's it from here.