fuzzykitty

Oh the life of a well loved cat!

Actually, Kitty doesn’t know that she is a cat… she thinks that she is a ten year old baby.

Recently, she learned to tolerate her harness and leash so we could explore the backyard together. She loves to lay in the sun and nibble at the grass. I am glad that she is here with me because when Darrell is gone I feel very alone and Kitty keeps me company.

On Friday my very generous boss let me take a half day off from work. I was able to get all my errands done (gas, Sam’s Club, AC Moore, PetSmart & Encore Decor) so that I could head out to an herb festival at Maggie’s Herb Farm the following day. I guess I should confess, if I haven’t already, that I don’t enjoy driving. I love my little blue Scion tC but still do not love to drive. The herb farm was about 40 minutes south (on a little two lane road that winds the St. John’s river) of where I live so this was a big step for me to drive there on my own (oh my gosh, am I the biggest wimp or what?! Please do not answer that). I made it though and had a great time! I bought ten different plants; aloe, Cuban oregano, lemon grass, Aztec sweet plant, spinach, rosemary, basil, cilantro & bay leaf. I also had lunch and stayed for a yummy carrot cupcake! I guess it’s good that I went on my own, Darrell would have been bored out of his skull.

One of our Magnolia buds finally bloomed recently so I took this picture to show Darrell, I figured that I might as well post it here too. I think that this massive flower is beautiful. It also smells a little like oranges!

I should really stop trying to avoid unpacking.

Today I finally tried the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for “Almost No-Knead Bread” and am pretty happy with how my loaf turned out.  I would have liked for it to be taller but the chewy crust more than makes up for it.  This bread was a cinch to make and was also pretty cheap.  I am looking forward to making another soon!

I also got a pedicure and then enjoyed a tasty glass of lemonade while I donated to Lemonade 4 Life.

Oh my gosh! We have been busy settling in to our new home. We still have a ton of boxes to unpack.

This past weekend I went a plant sale at the Garden Club of Mandarin and bought two beautiful canna lilies with green and red foliage for the yard near the front door. The flower should be orange or red, the ladies who helped me were undecided. It seems like the plant sale is a good way to get word out about membership for the garden club. The ladies are all very proud of their groups and want you to join! I was happy to learn that you don’t have to be good at gardening to participate because they do a lot of work within the community like help out with meals on wheels and loads of other good things. I am thinking of joining but it seems like most of the meetings are during the day on Thursdays which gets in the way of my work schedule.

There is a natural food market here called Native Sun, they had an Earth Day celebration that included free fabric shopping bags, a huge spread of Heather friendly vegetarian food for lunch, green vendors, music, and free ice cream cones from Ben & Jerry’s! After getting my free bag and standing in line for free food I noticed that the people behind me were arguing about cutting in line or something then I started talking to the older guy ahead of me about his dog. He had a beautiful Australian Sheep Dog named Blue and I was afraid that I was crowding the dog too much. The man was nice and said “You can’t step on his tail!”, so I looked at the dog’s tail and noticed that he didn’t have one! After a few minutes of small talk I asked him what kind of service Blue provided and he told me that he had emotional problems and that Blue helps with that. The man then told me where I could go to buy fifty cent VHS tapes and where to float down the river and made sure he came by to say good bye.

When I came home I saw a hummingbird at our feeder in the backyard and then saw two deer the next day. It’s like we live in the forest!

I took a break from unpacking boxes on Sunday and made cupcakes! One of my favorite bloggers, Natalie of Bake and Destroy, posted the Magnolia Red Velvet recipe recently and it looked so good I just had to make them to break in my new kitchen. The recipe was interesting and the 24 cupcakes came out tasty. The only thing I changed was that I doubled the frosting recipe so I could pipe it on to my heart’s content and I also added one vanilla bean.

Natalie also sells these awesome Bake and Destroy t-shirts along with cupcake toppers, buttons, stickers and other items on her Etsy site.

This is my office.  It’s kinda messy because we just moved in and because I spend eight hours a day here.  The rug kept coming up so I had to put that fan box and file box on it to weight it down.  I bought the Logic computer desk from Sam’s Club a few months ago and Darrell quickly put it together for me last weekend so I could start my work-week right.

The color on the walls of my office is a custom dark slate blue mix from Sherwin Williams.  I have uploaded several other colors we have used including utterly beige, soulmate, and aleutian blue here.  I am very happy that we decided to have the walls painted before we moved in and love living with the color on the walls!  If you live in Jacksonville I highly recommend calling William (Jimmy) Sutton from Colonial Custom Painting.   They do excellent work and are great trustworthy people.

Today I am going to a design seminar  called “The Top Ten Decorating Mistakes” and hope to learn some important information!

I bought this sparkly blue chandelier from a local consignment shop called Encore Decor the day we closed on our house and Darrell promptly hung it in our dining room.  I love it!  Now all I need is a dining room table.

We have moved in to our new house and are working to unpack all of the boxes.   The move went well but we had some crazy plumbing issues and could not spend the night in our new home on Saturday.  I guess someone flushed paper towels or something that should not have been flushed before we moved in which caused a severe backflow of poop into our showers.   It was super gross!  EW! Thankfully the plumber finally arrived late that night and resolved the issue.

Soon after we moved in the painters finished up their work.  It’s nice to have all of the walls finished.  They are very colorful in shades of blue, beige, and purple!  Once I find my camera cord I will upload some pictures.

After a grueling two day closing process the house is finally ours!  The above photo is of Darrell so happy to have received our house keys that he is showing off his “Metal Face”.  We celebrated by purchasing a beautiful blue chandelier that I had fallen in love with last week from Encore Decor and then going to a nice place near our new house for dinner.

Our experience with  DR Horton’s sales, design, and builder team was amazing!  Much better than I had ever expected.  They were all great at letting us know what was going on and did everything they could to help us in every aspect of the home planning and building process.

On the other hand, the mortgage process was a complete nightmare.  When DR Horton’s mortgage company denied us late last year we were referred to another company to work with.  I do not recommend working with Rick and Angela from EQ Financial for your mortgage needs.  It could be that the business is tough for them right now or something else but it felt to me like they simply did not know what they were doing, they also were not very good at communicating with us to let us know what was going on or exactly what they needed.  Well, Angela did frequently email demands to us like a curt robot.  She was also rude to my Insurance agent which upsets me.

We are so happy to be through with this and to move in soon!

I am not yet a happy home-owner, in fact I think DR Horton did something tricky to me last night (end of quarter) when they made me come in and sign all the paperwork for the house at 8PM (our closing was originally scheduled for 11AM) but failed to tell me that they would not be handing over the house keys. We are going back to their evil lair to do battle this afternoon and will arm ourselves with our whits and a big fat check. I can not wait for this to be over.

This is week 10 and  we have grass and faux wood blinds!  We picked final paint colors last week and hope to have the interior painted after closing next week so we can move in quickly after that.

Our house comes with all appliances except for a refrigerator.  I have been eying the stainless french door freezer on the bottom refrigerators for awhile now but the price has been crazy high.   I settled on a GE brand because I had been told that it was tougher to get the LG brand repaired if.  Yesterday Lowe’s website had the fridge that I really wanted for $500 less than I had ever seen it so I just had to go into the store to see if they would indeed honor the price.  It turns out that their appliances are 10% off, through today!  We ordered the fridge and browsed the fans, lights and lawn mowers and left.

I can not wait for everything to come together and for us to actually be living in the house!

For Easter dinner we made tuna steak, green beans, cream biscuits and chocolate pudding.  It was a very low key day.   I also made some hummus.  The hummus and cream biscuits are from my latest cookbook find “The Art of Simple Food” by Alice Waters which I picked up at Costco for $21.49.