camping!

I'm so excited. I haven't been camping in a few years! Josh and I really need a vacation, I think. I feel like I haven't been on vacation in ages. The funny part is....we don't have a place to stay because the tent is occupied and my parents trailer is too small....so we're taking his parent's van, taking out the back seats and sleeping in there....should be a blast :) my parents have been camping with a church group for years....eventually we'll have to vacation without one of our sets of parents...but that's not this weekend. haha we'll grow up eventually! oh well.

camping is camping!

Happy holiday weekend!

monday morning

it's monday.....hooray. should be a decent day despite it being monday.

finished kite runner last night--what a tragic, beautiful book. i WILL be renting the movie.

church today-actually somewhat busy! thank goodness for the beginning of the month and things to do. i need to focus, though. forgot to do a few things last week. oops. focus, bethany.

currently listening to: hallelujah--Rufus Wainwright. no matter who sings it, i love that song.

have a great week everyone!

summer nights

There aren't too many things that are better than living in Holland during the summer. and I can't wait to live nearer to my favorite parts-downtown and the lakeshore! well, the macatawa lakeshore...haha but it's just as cool. as it is, josh and i ride downtown and to kollen park on a fairly regular basis. not as regularly as we should, though!

tonight we rode to kollen park in time for the sunset. we ride on the new boardwalk behind heinz (check it out if you haven't!) and then sit on the benches on the kollen park boardwalk and watch the sun set. fisherman every few feet. families finishing up summer afternoon picnics. not the best sunset i've ever seen, but a beautiful setting.

i also love downtown holland at night. it's quiet, people walking in the evening light and cooler breeze. walking by the stores with their subtle lights and colorful summer displays, past scraps from yesterdays farmers market in the square. couples strolling, holding hands. children racing past their parents on scooters, not having to worry about the cars because there aren't any.

this just might be where happiness comes from.

weekend!

it's finally the weekend! i can't wait. hopefully it will be dryer and more fun than last friday night. sounds like we're meeting josh's parents and their friends at the house to give yet another tour...haha but it's fun. then, my brother wants to go see the new Transformers movie so i'm sure we'll take him to that. tomorrow the water cleanup continues because my husband is convinved that the stairs are part of the musty smell in our house...so those will get a full wash-down. there are still some totes in the middle of my living room that need to be put upstairs....just the general clean up. hopefully my house will be back to normal! i'm still exhausted.

last night we had an open house for my aunt who has divorced my dead-beat uncle and moved into the cutest duplex EVER. seems like she had a blast. there were quite a few people there and she got tons of cute housewarming gifts. success! congratulations, aunt kim :)

construction is going well at the house. glenn got the new roof on the piano studio and the porch and it looks different already! can't wait to see more. love this stuff :)

have a great weekend!! (all 2, maybe 3 of you who read this)

The great flood of '09, building permits and kitchen faucets...the stuff of life.

This weekend we had a flood. I'm talking 3 feet of water in our basement...it was fun. josh's uncle said we should have gone swimming when we had the chance just to say we did it. Thankfully, none of our stuff in plastic totes downstairs (mostly college textbooks I don't know what to do with and Christmas decorations) was ruined, although it did look like a Christmas resale store on my front lawn all weekend as stuff dried. However, according to the heating/cooling guy the furnace and water heater are shot. bummer. this means no hot water and air-conditioning through this 90+ degree week. lovely. ah well. i have air at work and plenty of relatives with hot water they're willing to lend. attempting to count blessings. my sister is also house-sitting for people with a pool. maybe it's God's way to try to get me outside.

i feel terribly bad for our neighbors...although we had a lot of water, we really don't have too much damage. it's nice to have cement block walls and concrete floors that can handle getting wet. 3 of the houses on the other side of our street have dumpsters in their driveways. that's never a good sign. they also have had stuff spread out on their front lawns all weekend, including couches, boxes, carpet, padding and many other possessions. continuing to count my blessings that we didn't suffer much of a financial loss other than our washer/dryer and deep freezer (still not sure if any of those will work after drying out)

i also feel terribly bad for our contractor at the house this week! i guess he's used to the heat...but still! there was water in our new house's basement as well, but it was strange because we expected there to be water at the 14th st house and there was only an inch. we didn't expect water at the 33rd st house and there was 3 feet. go figure. anyway, the contractor should finally be able to get going on the house! it's been at a standstill for a bit because we've been waiting for the correct building permits from the city. strange because you should be able to walk in there, write a check, and receive your permit...but for some reason it took them a week to issue them. so now we have both the building permit (needed only for the piano room construction) and the roofing permit (would have been nice to have a roof during the storm) so Glenn should be able to get going on the house now! looking forward to some nice progress, and things going INTO the house instead of going OUT of the house. it's been an un-changing war-zone for a few weeks too many at this point.

josh and i are starting to pick out finishes for the house. fun stuff! we are big nerds and now enjoy spending friday nights at menards or lowes to pick out really awesome stuff like kitchen faucets and blinds :) paint colors are really challenging for me, though! any thoughts, please let me know.

question--one of our disagreements right now is that I would really love bronze finished light fixtures and faucets in the kitchen and we have black appliances. josh is thinking this won't look good. i'm thinking it'll look fine. any thoughts? hopefully someone reads this and has an opinion! :)

so really i just have houses on the brain. maybe eventually i'll be able to think about something else, but not right now! and that's just fine with me.

The start of something new

So I've decided to start blogging. Why? I was trying to convince myself that I need to journal my thoughts. it might be therapeutic, might have some value, and might be fun to look back and read once in a great while. who knows. why not give it a shot?

reasons for blogging? 1) facebook has become too populated with my aunts and parents and people i don't need seeing everything about my life...no offense aunts. 2) new things are great fun! 3) i used to enjoy it.

Reason's for not? 1) i might be terrible at keeping it up. lame reason. starting a blog wins!

I'm sure nobody will read this. what the heck? its for me, right?

so here goes nothing!