Once again...

I've redesigned the blog and it forced me to post something since it has been about 6 months since I've written anything. I have been busy but that shouldn't be an excuse. I'd like to look back one day and see all the fun things that Blake and I've done together. I keep saying that I'm going to do better but that doesn't happen. I don't even know if anyone really reads this anymore, but I read other people's blogs all the time so I'm going to press on with this one.

Well since I last wrote Emily and Jim got married, I finished another school year, Katie and I went to Texas for a week, got a new car, went to cheer camp, went to the beach (pictures still to come), Josh and Tina came to visit, Em and Jim moved to town, went to Texas again for my girls weekend (didn't take a single picture. Who am I?), bought a boat (What??) went to the lake with the family and made it through almost 5 weeks of school. It doesn't sound like I've been busy but I really have.

We didn't do any major renovations to the house this summer besides get a new roof. I guess it's safe to call yourself an adult when you get excited about your insurance company paying for a new roof. I sometimes wonder if it will be the last major thing we do to our house... It probably won't be though. We don't need to move or want to but we don't want to do too much to the house just in case we want to move some day. The house next door to us finally sold after being on the market for like 10 months. I just like looking at houses online. I'm sure it will get us into trouble one day. Oh well... that day isn't here yet.

This is the most random post. I'm still trying to decide if I will try to play catch-up with all the pictures I have. I probably will. I'm at school right now. We have Parent-Teacher conferences tonight and I have to stay until 8. I don't have any scheduled and I'm caught up on grading. So you will probably be inundated with lame picture posts tonight. Nothing terribly interesting or controversial... so don't get your hope up.

I'll leave you with a few pics from Em and Jim's beautiful wedding that was all the way back in April.

Where has the time gone?

Has it really been seven months since I've blogged. Yes. Yes, it has. Blake has blogged but I don't really count that. I've been busy. Really busy. Cheerleading kept me busier than I thought it would. Practice and 2 games twice a week makes for not much time at home. The cleanliness of our house suffered, Blake and I at out A LOT (My MyPanera card had a free goody on it practically every single time we went), I barely exercised, never cooked, bought my lunch every day, and was just generally tired.

Cheerleading is over (for the year) and BOY have things changed. The house has returned to its (mostly) clean glory days. We only eat out on the weekends. I cook Sunday-Thursday... Therefore I spend tons of money at Publix, which results in yummy leftovers for lunch everyday. I have no free items on my MyPanera card. I'm exercising every day during the week (sometimes at 5:15am). I'm getting at least 8 hours of sleep a night. Things are returning back to normal.

Spring Break seems like a million years ago. We were able to go on a cruise to Mexico with some of our good friends. We had a blast. I was semi-sick (drainage, sore throat, coughing) for the whole week so I didn't feel like eating myself into an oblivion like Blake did. It was a wonderful week of food, friends, sun and salty air. I came back ready to face the 10ish weeks until summer.

Blake's sister Emily is getting married next weekend (the 9th) so I'll have tons of pictures to share after the wedding. I'll leave you with a few pictures from the cruise. Yes... I'm trying to make you jealous.

2010 Highlight Reel

Blake here, and being the good journalist that I am - writing the first draft of history and all - I thought our blog readers should know what's going in the Farmer history books for 2010. I have trisected our lives into work, home and family. We start with our professional lives.

Mo gave Lipscomb about 15% more of her life when she said, "yes, I'll be a cheerleading coach."

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I cannot complain, but I will say I have sacrificed some home cooked meals so Lipscomb's basketball cheerleaders could have appropriate adult supervision. I expect there will be many more fast food nights, but they are totally worth it. I expect Moriah to come home from long hours at basketball games complaining about a 12 hour day. But more often than not she's in a great mood and laughing about something one of her girls has said/done. Teenagers are weird. Her girls love her, and she is definitely doing God's work.

I have not taken on any new responsibilities at WPLN, but my job continues to bring new challenges. Probably the most memorable week of my professional career so far was when it started raining the first weekend in May and didn't stop until more than 15 inches fell, turning Nashville into a muddy swimming pool.

I snapped this photo downtown, but that's not where the stories were. National media outlets - NPR included - made a big deal about the Opry House and Country Music Hall of Fame being underwater. And those were crazy sites, but it was the families who lost everything who really needed some media attention. Remember, most of these 10,000 homes didn't have flood insurance.

I was doing interviews and filing stories nationally for All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace and The Takeaway. I would get up at 4 am, appear on a show from my home office, then go out the door with my recorder to talk to people dealing with the worst flood this city has seen in decades.

I was working out of my house because it wasn't safe to be at our studios in MetroCenter, which is essentially a floodplain protected by a levy, which was leaking. Crazy time.

Home

Did our house flood? No. We were actually laying the tile floor in our new kitchen when it started raining. The worst we got was about three inches of water in our crawl space, and while it wasn't fun to bellycrawl through that mess to hook up our new refrigerator's water line, I'm having a little trouble complaining.

On the home front, the kitchen renovations are the headline. We ripped everything out in mid-April.

Dad and I redid all the electrical work and installed recessed lighting. I laid the backerboard, and a buddy helped me put down tile (while Nashville was flooding). We let trained professionals do most of the rest of the work. While I was a little irritated at the total price tag, I'm glad we went all the way.

There was some sad news in the neighborhood. We lost our dear friends, the Lipscombs.

Justin and Katie did not die, but they did move. We were neighbors for nearly two years. And while I thought we would eventually get tired of having friends next door, we never did. The only advantage to having them gone is that we don't do as much slipping down the little hill between our houses any more. We wore out a path between 321 and 323 Binkley Drive - borrowing tools, ingredients and vacuum cleaners.

Fortunately, they have bought a house just 2.4 miles away, so we're handling the move pretty well.

Family

How about burying the lede? Ok. We became Aunt Moey and Uncle Blake.

Brady Lynn Williams was born February 2nd.

It's been so fun to watch Bevin (Moriah's sister) and John come into parenthood. They are charting a course for the rest of us to follow.

While we don't get to see her face in person as much as we'd like, Brady enjoys plenty of attention. You should see Moriah's dad. I think he's obsessed with his grand daughter, and I guess you can't say that's a bad thing.

In other Fort Worth family news, Les (Moriah's dad) kicked cancer where the sun don't shine.

We took our annual trip to Lake Ouachita, which was a highlight of the summer. Moriah's family came to Nashville and spent some time with us too. We realized our house is not built for a family of eight. That's good to learn.

Thanksgiving was spent with the Steward's - a first. In our 5.5 years of marriage, we've always done Christmas in Fort Worth. This year, it was a Nashville Christmas. It even snowed.

Moriah is the best gift receiver. Her reactions kill.

So how do you put a bow on 2010? Perhaps by talking about what's to come in 2011. We're going on our first cruise. We have a wedding in the family (Jimily). Whatever else happens will just be gravy.

We rarely stop to count our blessings. Perhaps that's because there are too many to number. Life is beyond good.

-Blake

P.S. Somehow Maverick didn't make it in this post. He's still the love of our lives. He's had a hard time adjusting to the loss of our neighbors too (Maybel), but he still gets to visit his girlfriend from time to time.

Weekend RE-port - guest post

It was a RE-laxing weekend around the Farmer house since we were paid a visit by Josh Pavlik. If you haven't kept up with Pav since college, his word of choice is "Re." This is "Re." That's "Re." The whole thing is RE-tarded unless you just give in and have fun with it too. But Pav can't seem to have enough RE time, hence the visit to West End's REBAR. Actually, there was no one there Saturday afternoon, so we just took a picture and went next door to watch college football. 

 

Pav is one of those guys who just won't let a friendship fizzle. He's one of my only friends who doesn't live in Nashville who still calls me on a regular basis just to check in. (The phone call typically originates in Houston, not Nashville. I'm just not a big phone person) Pav always asks how Moriah's doing and genuinely wants to know what's up. He's really quite thoughtful.

But these Nashville visits, which have become more regular, have ulterior motives - to get near VY. Pav is the craziest Vince Young fan I've ever met. Pav doesn't hold VY on a pedestal; he built a pedestal for the the Titans' on-again, off-again QB. I frequently get the random text message that looks like this: "VY till I DDDDIIIIIEEEEE!!!"

Given his unwavering devotion to a legendary Texas Longhorn, Pav was not impressed with the Titans game Sunday. Vince couldn't get much going. And when Kerry Collins took over, Pav had to leave our seats, at least for the offensive series. It really makes me laugh, but it's no joke to Pav. He had some choice words for head coach Jeff Fisher, though I'm pretty sure they feel on deaf ears. 

Pav is passionate. 

There will be more visits this year since Pav and I purchases season tix to the Titans, but something tells me we won't have the same frequency of face time if VY gets benched. 

-Blake

I L-O-V-E Better After!!

Thanks to my friend Jill H. I have a new obsession. Better After. Its a blog solely dedicated to the before and afters of furniture and room redos. There's not a lot of commentary, just great before and after pictures. Our house is 48 years old and needed some updates when we moved in. We weren't able to do a ton at first but have really been making up for lost time this past year. We remodeled the bathroom the summer of 2009 then the kitchen this summer. Some of the redos on the blog are really extravagant and some aren't. You can submit pictures of your Before and Afters and she decides whether or not she wants to feature you. I submitted pictures of both the bathroom and kitchen and she featured the bathroom yesterday. I was excited (even though it's silly). I just thought those of you who like design related stuff might like this. Its just a really great resource!

I'm in LOVE...

I've been shopping at Kroger (I kindly refer to it as Crappy Kroger) for over 5 years. It's really close to our house and they always have everything I need. The guy at the self-checkout line always speaks to me and is really friendly... Probably because I'm in there like every day. I'm not a once a week shopper, more like a "shop for every meal" kind of shopper.

Sunday after church and lunch I went up to my classroom to work. Blake volunteered to make dinner while I was gone. He (of course) had to go to the grocery in order to make dinner and he chose to go to Publix. (For those of you in TX, it's pronounced like "pub." Blake's likes to say it with a long "u" sound and it annoys me to no end!) He enjoyed his  shopping experience so much, he "authorized" me to grocery shop at Publix. Publix is a little more expensive than Kroger, but SOOO worth the few extra minutes in the car and a few extra dollars on the bill!

Publix is like the Chick-Fil-A of grocery stores. The store is super clean, the people are so nice, and the items on the shelves are always perfectly aligned. I mean, I can't help but love this store. The packaging of their Publix brand items is nice looking too! I would hardly every buy Kroger brand items because I hated their packaging (I'm a diva, I know!) but now I'm all about buying the store brand! How can you not love the solid color bands with a single polka dot??

All this "love" talk reminded me of something that Blake and I used to do when we were dating... At ACU it was super easy to send mail to anyone who lived on campus. (I think I spend my entire fall semester of Bible writing notes to people to put in the mail.) Later in our relationship, probably Junior and Senior year, Blake and I wrote a lot of notes to each other. Not because we never saw each other but because that's what everyone did. Somehow we got started on this saying, "I love you more than you love {insert something that the other person really loves}!" Yes, I know it sounds cheesy now, but it was really sweet.

All that to say... I love Publix more than Blake loves picking his nose. If you are friends with Blake on Facebook you know what this is referring to!

Happy Thursday!

I got a little bored...

I'm filling in for one of the administrative assistants at school this week while she's on vacation. Monday and Tuesday were pretty busy (not to mention I took a pretty long lunch on Monday) but today has been super slow. I've sat on Facebook waiting for people to update their status (I'm aware that is totally lame), I've looked at the weather countless time and I've looked at all the blogs I read (through Google Reader) to see if any of them had been redesigned. Then I looked at my own blog and just about barfed. It's the homepage on our home computer (probably the reason for so many hits). I hardly ever use that computer anymore so it had been a while since since I'd seen the actual blog. I used to redesign the blog all the time... that was before my job took up so much of my time. I'm grateful for my job and I like that it keeps me really busy... that just means that the poor ol' blog has suffered.

So, here it is... our (and by "Our" I mean "My") new blog. It's kind of like my new kitchen. Grey and white with little hints of green. If you read this blog through Google Reader, hop on over to the actual blog to see what I spent my morning doing. Is that begging for compliments, or what? I know I'm a brat, I get told that a lot.

I hate posting something without a picture... So here's one of me, my dad and Bevin at my cousin's wedding in San Antonio earlier this summer. I actually acted as the wedding photographer for my first ever (probably last, too)

Anyway, hope everyone's last few days of summer are stellar!