Not a great deal going on here this Independence Day. It is too hot to go outside (over 110, definitely too hot) and the city does nothing until after 6pm, at which time is a watermelon bust, and a demolition derby, neither of which is my thing.  So the kids and I stayed home (Hubster had to work) and I made a red white and blue dinner, bbq chicken, biscuits and blue rice. The kids thought it was great, I thought it was funny.

I also managed to assemble a shelving unit for the pantry, I was tired of half my food being scattered on the floor of the pantry and fighting my way to anything. And I unpacked 5 boxes, on top of picking up the house and working on cleaning things up, as my niece is coming to visit next week, the kids will have a blast.

I didn’t get a great deal done today… I unpacked like… 2 boxes. But one was a large uhaul box, full of clean laundry that had to be folded and put away.

I went over to the old house and did the last of my cleaning and loaded up the last of the stuff for me to load.

Spent the afternoon with my hubby, since it is his day off, and the kids.

Pulled everything out of my refrigerator and freezer, so that the delivery guys from Lowes could trade them out, the put everything back in it.

Made dinner for my family.

On the agenda for this evening? Kicking back and relaxing. I will either be watching TV with the Hubs, or reading, but either way I will be working on knitting the moebius cowl I have on the needles.

I got the water hooked up to my refrigerator  yesterday, it was making ice all night long, but I couldn’t get the water dispenser to work (bottom mount fridge, with a chilled water dispenser inside the left door.)  Thinking it was just  air in the system, Hubby and I stood there for several minutes holding the button down, trying to bleed the air out and get water. After a while Hubby decides I need to pull out the fridge, to make sure there is not a kink in the hose (why that would stop the water to the dispenser but not the ice maker, I have no clue) so I pull out the fridge, and we discover that there is water all over the bottom of the inside of the fridge. We pull out drawers, and start soaking up water, and I discover that there is a leak where the water reservoir is for the dispenser. Not something I can fix easily, not something I can even see well without taking things apart, and I am SO  not doing that to a refrigerator that is all of a week old.

So Hubby calls the store. They don’t have any more in stock won’t until Tuesday. In the mean time, turn off the water to the fridge, and they will come trade them out Wednesday.  Ok, we can do that…  Hubby continues with the day, starts to get ready for work… while he is in the shower, the salesman from Lowes calls him back. Apparently this model of refrigerator is on sale this week, for $500 less than we paid for it 10 days ago. He tells Hubby to come down, and buy a new one, on Wednesday, they will deliver the new one, and pick up this one. At that time Hubby will follow them back to the store, and return the malfunctioning refrigerator, for a full refund of the price we paid, because we have the receipt.  So Hubby makes the trek down to the store, does the transaction, ends up getting the extended warranty, not only for the fridge, but the stove we got 10 days ago as well, and still saved $200 over what we originally paid. (Sale price was only $450 less what we paid because Lowes offers a 10% military discount, that we had used.)

Over all, it is a bit of a hassle, and an inconvience, but, we got a much better deal, and we are satisfied. I am very happy with their customer service, providing we have no issue returning the malfunctioning refrigerator, I would have been satisfied if they had just replaced it, the advice on how to save the $ pushed me into very happy. I will continue to use, and recommend Lowes.

Hubby goes back to work tomorrow, thank goodness, now I can get down to major unpacking and getting things put where I want them, without his interfearance. He is much less likely to bitch about where something is, if it is already done, than if I am deciding to do it while he is home. Also, I am gonna tackle installing the reverse osmosis water system, and hooking up the ice maker on my fridge, totally doable. I am hoping to get lots done, this digging and hunting for one specific item in all those boxes is getting on my nerves.

We managed to get the last of the furniture moved into the new place today. Deep sigh of relief. Even after I managed to fall backwards out of the U-Haul. No major injury, I scrapped up the back of on heal, and bruised my ass and ego. Life, and loading the truck, goes on.

We still have some things to move, but nothing that won’t fit in the back of my Yukon. Plus, I need to clean the old place so that we can get our deposit back. And not to forget, withdrawing the girls from one school and enrolling them in the new one. Still a busy week ahead.

We closed on the house 3 days ago, deep sigh of relief. I had been majorly stressed, it was a VA loan, and we had been within days of closing once before when the underwriters decided they didn’t like the appraisal and refused the loan, so the closer we got to closing without a ready to close from the bank had me getting more and more stressed. Anyway, we closed and all is good.

We have spent the last 3 days getting the house ready to move in, having a little bit of work done. It  had gas hot water heater and stove, and we want an all electric house, so we had an electrician come in and rewire the two, and a plumber come in and install the electric water heater, as well as a water softener and filter system (water here is BAD but this will make it drinkable.)  We had the A/C people come out and work on the system, clean it out and charge the system. We set off bug bombs and cleaned the house, it has been vacant for over a year, so it had an inch of sand (no landscaping, lots of dirt) in the tracks of all the windows that had to be vacuumed out so that the windows would open… Then the usual, clean out cabinets, wipe off counters, vacuum and mop the floors… but we are finially ready.  We pick up the truck and move the furnature tomorrow… Wish me luck, I am not sure I will survive…

The Big Read reckons that “the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

• Look at the list and bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Underline the books you LOVE.
• Reprint this list in your own blog  so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnet
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

It looks like we may be able to move  up our closeing date, hopefully to the 15th, which means we would be moving in just over 2 weeks!! I need to get my butt busy packing!! I have been doing a lot of cleaning out and getting rid of things, but now the packing will become priority #1. I am excited. Our own place. I can paint the walls, hang what ever I want. Dig or plant in the yard with no prior approval.

I heard a song on the radio this afternoon that brought tears to my eyes, so I hunted down the video, Here it is..

I love it, it is really great. I really can’t think of much else to say about it… now, to give you some context, it has been a while since a song brought tears to my eyes… the last song that did so is a couple of years old, and this is not a great copy of the song but it is the best one I could find online…

Have you noticed a theme here? I could post a few more of my favorites, but I really don’t feel like hunting them up just to find inferior quality videos… so I will just list a few titles.

• Letters from Home ~ John Michael Montgomery
• I Just Came Back from a War ~ Darryl Worley
• Riding With Private Malone ~ David Ball
• Anymore ~ Travis Tritt (especially the video)
• American Soldier ~ Toby Keith
• Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue ~ Toby Keith

yeah, I have a major thing for Soldier songs.

We had a great one!! Because we are in the process of house buying we don’t have the extra cash for the usual in gifts, but the kids made me cards that were very sweet. And we were planning on going out to dinner, but we decided that I could buy a whole prime rib and smoke it myself for cheaper than Hubby and I could eat it in a restaurant, and then it would feed us for days.  Before you even consider feeding 3 kids in a restaurant… So I picked up a rib roast and got it on the smoker for dinner, really super yummy, 5 mins prep. Can’t get much easier.

Things on the house buying front are moving along, slowly but surely, we had our inspection done last week, a laundry list of minor problems, but nothing really major, especially considering that the house is a foreclosure. And most of the list can be taken care of in an hour or two, even I could do most of it. So we are working on securing the loan, VA, that is never fast. And I am working on cleaning and packing up the house. I haven’t done a great deal of packing, but I am working on cleaning, sorting through things and getting rid of a lot of junk, broken toys, etc.  So that when I do start packing, half the battle is fought.