J's Big Birthday Bash

Happy Birthday to my Amazing Wonderful Delightful Supportive Entertaining Creative husband of 7 years, J. (going on 8 years in November, but we have technically been a couple for 13 years.)

I got a new job.  I work nights.  I am either asleep or at work.  As such I feel like I do not have time for extra curricular activities as I used to do such as Baking, Cooking, Cleaning, Civil War re-enacting, Sewing, Victorian era dancing, Aikido Martial Arts, Jogging, Exercise, Shutterfly, Blogging, Reading, Pinterest, and Facebook.  Yes, my beloved pinterest and facebook followers, my new night job is to blame for the reason that you no longer see my Civil War ball gowns, brownies, or daily Grumpy Cat re-posts.  I miss my daily Grumpy Cat so much.  

To plan for this I used my precious Saturdays to go shopping for utensils, decorations, and print off recipes.  I put all my dry ingredients in bags so baking time would be easier.  I made frosting a couple of days ahead of time.  I had my brother and sister lined up to come early to help decorate and despite his catastrophic sewage back-up flooding his apartment, my brother bravely came early to help me.  He is a very responsible young man.  I made the games and printed them weeks beforehand.  But even with all my pre-preparation, I still only got 4 hours of sleep in two days.  I am a stress monster.  But in the end I think it came together beautifully.  All we really needed was friends and family and cake and I can do cake.

My sister Chelsea decorated outside and made the Happy Birthday board.  She has way better handwriting then I do.

Happy Birthday Jody.

 My parents came over.  I made J's favorite foods:  Yellow Cake, Peanut Butter Bars with home-made peanut butter, Cake Pops, Applesauce Cupcakes, Meatballs, French Bread, and Pineapple.

 I had a soda float station with all our favorite Soda Pops.  We love Soda Pop and ice cream.  I went with Green because that is J's favorite color.  

 (I got the one bottle of lemonade because I have a lot of friends who do not drink Soda.)

 Cake is not as pretty as I wanted it to be, but at least he got a birthday cake.

 Happy Birthday to the most intelligent, humorous, artistic, kindest person I know and am lucky enough to be married to.  He also has an awesome beard to which many are in awe and envious of.  Respect the beard.  Respect it!

 Our friends and family.

 Tom and Kimberli.

 Scarlett, Colin, Ayla, and Angie.

 My Aunt Lonnie and Uncle Mark.

 Our Aikido Sensei Mike.

 Counting Candy.  I put J's favorite candy in jars and had our guests guess how many was in the jar and take it all away from him.  Jolly Ranchers 40, Lemon-head and friends 300, and Tootsie Rolls 40.

 The Birthday party went from 6 - 8pm.  Afterwards our Civil War boys came and had our monthly Civil War meeting.  Jamin, Caleb, and Mark.

 I love our Civil War re-enactment group.  I could not have asked for better friends.

 And this is what happens when Caleb gets my camera.  Rachel, Kimberli, and Amanda.

 Let's end this blog post with a baby.

 Caleb and Amanda's 3 month old baby boy Hunter.  He is adorable.

Here is one of the games I made for our guests to play.

The Many Near-Deaths of Jody Ehrmantrout

(True or False)

1.          At the tender age of four, a motorcycle fell on him trapping his neck between the handle bars and a dog house, asphyxiating him.  He was clinically dead for 15 minutes until revived at the E.R.

2.          At scout camp he was dumped head first into a rain barrel, and unable to right himself, he drowned (only dead for about 5 minutes this time).

3.          He was attacked by a stray dog and had to have a rabies vaccination.  You know, the old way, where they used a ten inch hypo in the abdomen for a series four extremely painful shots.

4.          In a case of drunken mistaken identity he was punched in the face (breaking his nose in ten places and the bone plate behind it in three) by a stranger at a run with a roll of quarters in his fist outside of a convenience store.

5.          He had his right ear torn almost completely off by a dog (in a second dog attack.).

6.          He was in a severe motorcycle accident (the bike flipped, landed on him and they slid down the road for about 60 feet) crushing his upper palate and imparting a road rash that exposed both of his patella (knee caps), and removed his right nipple.

7.          He got lost in a sudden blizzard during a snowmobile ride with friends and had to spend the night in -20 degree temperatures under a tree.

8.          He slipped on ice while going down the stairs to his basement apartment one night and suffered a severe concussion.

9.          While riding his motorcycle through the school parking lot a car backed into him, breaking three of his ribs.

10.      A bowling ball rolled off of a closet shelf and landed on the top of his head, resulting in yet another concussion.

11.      In a quad runner accident he flipped and crashed through a three inch in diameter tree. Had the tree   been any wider it would most likely have broken his back.

12.      While climbing into a treehouse he fell 15 feet when the ladder broke, landed flat on his back collapsing both lungs.

13.      He walked his bike home with a 2x4 nailed to the bottom of his foot.

14.      He had measles, mumps, chicken pox, and scarlet fever.  (Yes, he was immunized.)

15.      In the fourth grade he ran into a set of play bars on the playground, landed on his back, and collapsed a lung.

16.      He was bitten by a brown recluse spider; on two separate occasions.

They are all true.  I could go on, but I had to stop at one page.

Happy Birthday Jody.  August 22nd, 2014.

Moving Drama and Landed Gentry

Behold the dream. To have a house of our own.  To be landed gentry. To no longer be poor white trailer trash, but poor white landowners. To sign away 30 years of our lives to a faceless, heartless corporate entity, a financial institution, a mortgage company. For is that not the American dream.  But, like so many heroes of legend and lore that have gone before us, we had to enter the Heart of Darkness before we could emerge into the brightness of the sun.  Despair, heartache and many challenges lay ahead of us before the dream was to be ours.

Behold the Board of Woe.  Let me explain. Nay! The complexities, tedium and minutia are too great  Let me instead sum up.  See you here a timeline of major events as they occurred.

April 1st, 2014 - We put the trailer (our home of almost 13 years) up for sale.

April 12th - A potential buyer makes an offer.
April 14th - The offer is accepted and a deal is struck.
April 17th - A manic day of house hunting ensues, a suitable abode is found  and an offer is made.
April 18 - 19th -A Bidding War breaks out, offer, counter offer and our eventual victory (Key dramatic music please).  (J met a bank teller who was a friend of the couple we engaged in the bidding war with when he went to deposit the money from the sale of the trailer. Oh, great are my feelings of despair that your friends lost the bidding war, I am so sorry.... no I'm not because they lost to us and we wanted, nay, needed the house more.)
April 21st - Our buyer pays us in cash for the trailer.
April 22nd - The House Inspector, mortgage appraiser and umpteen visits to bring yet more paperwork, initial signing, mid signing and final  signing of Loan papers through Axiom Financial (great people to work with)
April 23 - 27th -Exercises in logistics (i.e. packing)



The sum total of our existence (all our worldly goods) in storage units.

April 27th - We move in my parent's basement bedroom while we wait to close  and move into our house. 

I love my parents, I love my parents, I love my parents, I am so grateful for my parents and all they have done for me and helped me with.

April 29th - I am laid off from my job of 9 years. Bolt from the blue.  No warning.  Hello Kim we need you in a 3:00 pm meeting. How are things going for you today?  We have decided to eliminate your position, please turn in your key card and leave the building immediately.  You may return tomorrow morning to get the rest of your belongings. Pip pip cheerio.  I was needless to say stunned, laid low, gobsmacked.

April 30th - Go back to Axiom Financial and appraise them of the situation and redo the loan on just J's salary, since I no longer have an income to contribute to the mortgage.

May 5th - Pop-Can goes the way of all flesh and shuffles of its mortal coil.  My beloved 2003 Kia Rio's timing belt broke whilst driving down the road (we were driving to J's work from a bank run) this resulted in bent valves turning  my darling car into a rather large brick (with comfy seats). This malady occurred at the corner of homeless and panhandler's. An area that contains not one, not two, but three homeless shelters within a three block radius.  One sees the same panhandlers in this section of town every day.  And here I was.  Within one week I had become homeless, jobless, and car-less. Was this then to be my fate also?  I have never felt so very worthless in my life.

Alas, goodbye sweet Pop-Can, we knew ye well.  You were ever my most valiant steed.

She was sold for a pittance $220 (apparently the going rate fore a large brick with comfy seats).  Twas all I   could get.  So deep was my dispair that I am not ashamed to say that tears were shed.

But we got it worked out with Axiom Financial (they worked so hard for us).  They set us up with a different loan.  We had a higher monthly payment, but we could refinance to the original loan once I got a job.  Everything worked out in the end.  My parents generously allowed me to borrow one of their cars so I could get around and we continued the process of buying our new house.

May 17th, 2014.  Everything was approved, we got the house key and we were able to move into the small fortified building that we now call home.

Throw wide the gates of Atherton Storage unit 666 and let slip the beasts of burden, and let the carrying of heavy boxes begin.

 This is what we had dreamed of.  This is what we had worked for.  A house of our own.

 The Grand  Kitchen. 

 The Living room.

 Upstairs bedroom #1.

 Upstairs bathroom.

 Upstairs bedroom #2.

 The stairs.  Oh My Gosh!  We have stairs.  We have stairs in our house.

 The room of doors in the basement.

Basement Bedroom #1.  We turned this into the master bedroom because it had the large walk in closet, is 20 degrees cooler because it is in the basement, and is the darkest room in the house because J is a vampire.

 Basement Bedroom #2.

 The Walk in Closet.  Oh My Gosh!  I have a walk in closet.  I have a walk in closet in my house.

 Basement bathroom.

 Basement shower.

 The "L" room.  A basement room that is oddly shaped and has no closet and hence cannot be considered a bedroom.  So we shall turn it into a toy/painting/sewing room.

 The understairs  storage room.

 The Laundry room.  Oh My Gosh!  I have a laundry room.  I have a laundry room in my house.

 The brand new furnace which was one of our requirements after the inspection,as it was discovered that the original furnace was outdated and in need of repair.

 The water heater.  It also needs replacing, but we agreed to handle that if the furnace was replaced     (because it costs more and we can replace the water heater later.)

 The moving.

It took three truck loads.  Fortunately my brother-in-law's Father had a small U-Haul for his business that he allowed us to borrow for free on Saturday May 17th.  The Day of the Move.  The Day it did not rain, because Utah is a scrub desert and it hardly ever rains.

My sisters and their husbands helped move us in.  They sealed off one of the upstairs bedroom for the kids to play in while we all hauled boxes. 

As Boxmaster General I coordinated the placement of boxes.

In one day we were able to clean out our entire storage unit.

Twas a good feeling.

I could not have done it without the wonderful support of my loving husband (quite the handsome chap if I do say so myself, nudge, nudge, wink, wink).