It seems that the fall is always the craziest time of the year for us...not that the year really slows down much at all anyway. Since July, we have done:
I went to Barnabas for a week, and I got to help Courtney again!!!! It was great to see her again but not so much with everything else. Barnabas has changed a bit and it was kinda disappointing, but I won't dwell on it.
Orchestra started up again....wow! We had a lot more new people this year. Thirty new guitars! We're now overrun with guitars!! :0) The new choir, Bel Canto, is off to a good start this year, and of course we have the other choirs too. Miss Krista, the choir director, asked me to try out because she needed one more alto to fill out the Bel Canto and Concert choirs. I'd told her I'd do it if she needed me but I was kinda of looking forward to not having any classes this year. But it's OK, I'm having fun!
Josh moved up to second chair in the viola section, and Hannah got first chair in the first violin section...oh yeah! I'm going to brag on my little sister a bit. The choir she's in, the Mezzo Singers, perform tomorrow night at a hymns concert with a community and the Springfield Symphony! My little sister gets to sing with the Springfield Symphony backing her up!!! Now is that cool or what?
The goats are fine, Halley, Sirius, Scottie, and Copper are fine...but we added two more puppies to our menagerie. Hannah bought Logan, a full-blooded Golden Retriever, when I was at Barnabas. That's twice now it's happened to me...they got Copper while Josh and I were at Worldview and now Hannah got Logan while I was at Barnabas! But that was OK, he's cute. Right now, he's in this long lanky stage and he keeps tripping over everything. We call him "Moose" cause he's so big. Then I got Bronwen, who is a sweet German Shepherd/Labrador mix. That may sound kinda funny, but she looks a lot like a shepherd except for one ear that droops like a lab's. She's my baby, even though she has this little problem of puddling when she gets excited...yeah, I'm hoping she grows out of it!
We got the house painted! It was great! I didn't like the color Mom and Dad picked out at first, Taos tan, but it looks really cool with green doors and our green roof, though the dream of red doors really died hard for me. :0) The S's came over one day to help us, and we got pretty much one coat all the way around. Then Rachel C came over the next day and she helped us get one coat on the few spots we missed while Dad and Josh got the entire back of the house, which required scaffolding, completely done. Then another day (after waiting forever and again because of the all the rain we had) the M's came over and helped us finish it out. Ummm, imagine Wyatt and Joe and me with paint...bad idea. Bad, BAD idea. I'll leave it to your imaginations to fill in what happened.
We got landscaping, and it looks so nice o have grass growing around the house! Granted there are a few bald spots, but it looks a lot better than just dirt.
The inside of the house is pretty much done too. Mom wants to repaint the downstairs bathroom (after all that work we went to texturizing the paint and everything!) and we have the stairs to carpet and the rec room to paint. Other than that, we are done!!!! Yay!
Now, we need furniture. Mostly Great Room furniture, though it would be nice sometime in the near future to find bedframes for us kids. But yeah, we're all so glad that we're done with the house!
We got a barn put up too, it's really nice because the goats are away from the house and we have a place to store the tractor, the hay, the Suburban "Mater" since we never use it anymore. Very nice.
In a couple of weeks, our small group is coming out to help us clean up round the house, like getting those enormous trees chopped up. Hopefully I'll remember to get some pictures of that (since I forgot to take pics of painting the house) and hopefully I'll remember to post that blog sometime soon after it happened. Hopefully it won't turn out like that non-existent moving blog...*sheepish grin*.
OK, one more piece of news and I think I'm done for tonight...I got The Second Crown sent in! Yay! I think everyone who reads this knows, but for those that don't...I've bee working on the first half, The Quest, of my completed duology, The Second Crown, to get it into the Operation First Novel contest that I could enter since I've been taking my writer's course. I thought I had to get it sent by Oct 1 so it'd be postmarked by then, but about the beginning of September I looked at the rules and found out it had to be IN by then. So Mom and I (with help from Monica T and Josiah H) got it edited in time for me to send it in by September 22nd. I feel so much more relaxed now that it's in and I can take a break from it for five months (I promised Mom no more editing until the results of the contest in February). I'm definitely enjoying the freedom of doing purely the creative side of the writing process right now.
That said, you now understand my title for this post...and I'm going to bed! If you're shocked at the early time I'm going o bed rest assured I probably will not actually fall asleep until 11:30 or later. For you morning people who are reading this...you will never understand. :0)
