The Life and Times of Alann

Since the last time that I blogged we have done some work on Claire's room. We finally have all the insulation put up and glued in place and we have all the drywall up and ready to be taped. We were able to save 2 pieces of insulation and one piece of drywall so we could return them. Which is good because we forgot to buy a couple things last time we were at Lowe's, so now we have money to buy the rest of what we need. This project has been the fastest and easiest one that we have done so far and if things continue to go the way they are we will be painting sometime this or next Saturday night. I have been testing the room to see how well it retains heat now that we have done the major part of the construction and while it does not get overly warmer than the rest of the house it now is the same temperature as the rest of the house instead of being a good 8 degrees colder. We ended yesterday's project work by going to papa Murphy's and getting some pizza and watching an 80's movie called Ice Pirates.

Then i took a hot bath to try and relax a shoulder muscle that had been bothering me all day and Becca played the wii she borrowed from work (i think she's addicted to it), then we went to bed. All in all it was a very productive and pleasant day. I'm thinking that tonight I will try to get some of the mudding done in the room so we can be a little ahead for when Saturday comes, because we usually have lots of errands to do and I don't think this Saturday will be any different. So maybe if I can get a little more work done tonight we can get things done this weekend and not have anymore projects waiting to get done.

So it has been like 5 weeks since i posted which is due to my being lazy, finals and the Christmas holiday season. Does this mean that i have a ton of stuff that i can update people on, yes Does it mean that i will do it, no. It all depends on how fast i can type on my lunch break. Luckily though non of the stories i will tell are like the stories from our thanks giving outing to AZ. We had no major break downs or mishaps the worst thing that happened was that on Christmas day we had a winter storm that turn off the power for 2 hours and left almost 2 feet of snow in the front yard. But the power shortage was in the middle of the day and the snow will melt on its own so those two events weren't really that bad after all.

I got my grades for school today and and got 3 A's, 1 A- and 1 B+ which brings my school career GPA to 3.853, not too bad if i say so my self. Now i have one semester left to graduate and will be taking 13 credit hours. 6 hours are semi blow off classes 4 are for a group CAP class that depending on the class members could be time consuming or not and the last 3 are a traditional in the room learning class. So hopefully things will be fairly easy next semester.

Becca and i have decided to call our baby Claire Abigail Severinsen (so far) and she is due on Feb 11 09. We have gone to see the hospital and what kinds of rooms they have there and were all the important rooms are. Becca signed us up for a birthing class that starts next week and goes past when Claire is due so we may not finish the class, but we will be more ready than if we didn't take the class at all.We have started to work on Claire's room and are about 1/3 of the way done with it. We need to install the rest of the insulation and then put up the dry wall, mud, sand, and then paint. We are trying something different for the paint in Claire's room this time, we are going to paint it in a way that I have suggested. Which means instead of doing one full bodied color like the rest of the house we are going to do a full bodied color on the bottom half of the room and then a lighter whitish color on the top of the room. The hope is that this time the full bodied color wont overwhelm the room like the green piant does in the bedroom.

For Christmas i got a lot of tool stuff, a camcorder, a self sufficiency book and some PS2 stuff and we are still waiting to receive our gifts from Becca's family, but so far it was an enjoyable Christmas haul. My parents stayed for about a week and visited with me and my brother, it was fun having them here to visit and mom got to see the new bathroom we just finished. I gained the traditional Christmas 5 lbs and have started going to the gym to lose the weight and stay in better shape. It is especially important for me to keep going because i no longer have the workout classes and my job at WSA is nothing but sitting at a computer. So weight gain is an easy thing to do, I would say almost as easy as when i worked at nothing but noodles ans drank soda all day. So with my high blood pressure it is important that i try and lose some weight and do strenuous exercises to keep in shape.

The goal for this month is to prepare for Becca's soon lose of work hours by finding her another job or new position at her current employers. We are going to try and refinance the house to a lower rate to lwer our monthly payment, but need it to appraise for 165,000 which means we need to finish up the home improvements soon. We also are talking about how many hours i need to maintain and if we can get rid of some of our life style ways in exchange for others, like giving up Becca's cell phone or a home line and Internet access so she can work from home and other such things. We are also playing with the idea of rearranging the whole house and changing the purpose of rooms from one to another to see if it works better functionally. It will also give us a chance to do some deep cleaning and sorting of stuff.

Work is going good and i enjoy being here. I don't think that i will work here full time next semester, but if they want to hire me after i get my masters there is a chance i would accept it. We still hope to move back to the Midwest some where. So far the main candidates are Columbia Mo, because of our past experience with it. Kansas City Mo, because WSA has an office there that i could transfer to. Or to one of the towns located around the greater St Louis area, because there are jobs there and the land type we want and Dan is there. If no in Mo I am pushing for IL, upper AR, lower IA, or western TN. I don't really want to go too far north or into the plains and if you go too far to the east with out getting to the coast you run into the backhills people, which i would like to avoid.

Well thats all i can think of right now so hopefully that is enough updating for everyone and hopefully i'll get back into blogging more often