The house

We put an offer on a house today. Here are some photos!
(As always, you can click a photo to see a larger view.)

The front
From left-to-right, the windows on the first floor are bedroom,
entry door, living room, dining room, and garage.
On the second floor we have windows to a bedroom, stairwell, and bedroom.

The front porch, complete with swing!

The entryway, looking toward the fireplace in the den.
The living room is to the right.
Two bedrooms and a bathroom are to the left.

Partial view of the living room and the dining room from the entry.
The doorway in the dining room leads to the kitchen.


Kitchen, with breakfast area and back door beyond, viewed from the dining room.
Just beyond the fridge, turn left to go into the den.


Breakfast area. The closed door is a 1/2 bath.
The back door is to the left of the bathroom.


Kitchen, seen from the breakfast area, looking toward the dining room.
The closed door just behind the microwave goes into the garage.

Part of the den.


Stairs from the den to the second floor.
The hallway to the right of the stairs leads to the front door,
with two bedrooms and a bathroom to the right.

Another view of the den, looking toward the breakfast area from the foot of the stairs.
The glass doors on the left go to the screened-in porch.

A view of the screened-in porch from the den.


Part of the backyard, just outside the back door.
The rest of the backyard is to the left.


More of the backyard, standing outside the screened-in porch.


A view of the back of the house.
The screened-in porch is on the left.
Our realtor is in the center. :)

The side/back of the house.

Goats!

Our apartment

Here are a few pictures of our new apartment. Yes, it's small (500 sq. ft.), but we both love it!

Kitchen, viewed from the front door.
(The door in the picture is the pantry.)

Kitchen again.

The rest of the apartment, as viewed from the front door.

Bedroom.

Looking from the bedroom toward the front door.

Back in business

We left Texas for Thailand on March 9th. On January 9th, we rolled back into town. It's good to be back.

Work (for me - Angela) will begin again on January 16th; between now and then, we'll be moving into a new apartment and settling in. I will also have to move my work materials into a new office building, since my department moved while I was overseas.

More updates later.

Redirect

For those of you not in-the-know, we have a new blog going while we're in Thailand: http://thailandt.blogspot.com. Come on over and have a look!

We bid a temporary farewell to Texas.

We left sunny, warm-ish Texas Sunday late afternoon and - after an overnight stop in Wichita, KS - arrived in the cloudy, frigid North late Monday evening. We'll be spending about a week with our families before we fly out of MSP next Monday morning.

All of our household belongings are in a 4x10 storage unit in Denton. Our house sale will close on March 25th. We're taking a total of 3 suitcases of stuff with us to Thailand, and one of those suitcases is full of books and materials for me to use in the classroom over there. Traveling light is the only way to travel.

It was strange driving away from Texas, and it was stranger still (and oddly comforting) to hear the southern "y'all"s gradually turn into the northern "you guys". :) However, though the Texan accent terrifies me, I like living in Texas and look forward to returning there next January.

Betrayal

Just when the flowers are blooming, the trees are budding, and the birds begin to nest, THIS is what Texas dumps on us. Traitor.

Snowy front yard

Snowy hammock

Snowy trees

Snowy bushes

These pictures were taken about 12 hours after the snow stopped falling, and some of the snow has melted already. I think we officially got 5" of snow yesterday. And actually, when this is (as the locals claim) a once-every-25-years event, it's kind of fun! I couldn't believe how many snowmen sprang into existence within 1 hour of when the snow began to fall!

It'll all be gone in a day or two, but for today, UNT is closed and I have vacation. As they say down here, yee-haw!

Time's a-wastin'

We have plane tickets and visas for Thailand, a condo there has been rented for us (by my boss' boss' boss), and we have a buyer for our house!

Packing is proceeding apace. Gus has been working hard to cull our belongings into a manageable pile. The Spring I term is now finished at work, so I (Angela) have some time to actually help get us ready to leave - and we leave balmy Texas on Sunday afternoon, March 9th. We'll spend about a week up in the frigid North before we fly to blazing hot Thailand.

Must go pack....

Briefest of Updates:

We've been given the green light for Thailand. It looks like we'll be leaving in about six weeks.

My Thai?

There's an 80% chance that I (Angela) will be sent to northern Thailand in March for at least 2 months to start, head up, and teach English at a new branch of our department. I would, of course, be taking Gus with me. :)

At this point, it looks like I would be the only teacher being sent this first term while we're getting the program going! If it works as planned, then other classes and teachers would most likely be added beginning with the summer term. I have the option (read: they would really like it if I would) to stay for up to a year. Gus and I both think it would be very fun.

The city we would be in is Chiang Mai. It's in northern Thailand and it's the second largest city, after Bangkok. However, Bangkok is 45x the size of Chiang Mai! :D Chiang Mai has about 200,000 people and is - according to a friend of ours who has family in Chiang Mai - a modern city with everything we might need, including broadband internet!

Chiang Mai is located at the base of a mountain range and has a river running through it. There are, of course, lots of local Buddhist temples, a number of large universities in the city (the largest one has 25,000+ students; the one I'd be at has around 10,000), and lots of shopping, including a very cool and very large night market!

Now we just need to learn Thai! :)

Favorite pictures

I recently decided to print out some of my digital pictures, since I'd love to have them in 8x10 format on our walls and not just in JPEG format on my computer. Just for kicks, here are a few of the pictures I'm printing! (All pictures were taken by me, Angela.)

The Shambles
York, England
March 2007

Skipton Castle
Skipton, England
March 2007

Groundskeeper's cottage and groundskeeper

Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire, England
March 2007

Mount Evans, Colorado
September 2005

Mount Evans, Colorado
September 2005

The Atlantic Ocean as viewed from our beach-front cottage
Vieques, Puerto Rico
February 2004

Floored

The cement has been poured, the French Drain has been completed, and now the sheetrock needs to be fixed! Here's a look at the progress:

Sunroom floor!


More sunroom floor! (Note: The door is once again in place.)
The floor actually is level - I just wasn't holding the camera straight.


The exterior, with its new gravel-topped French drain. We tested out the French drain by running water on it for about 10 minutes (from the garden hose). None of the water pooled on top of the gravel, and a few minutes after we started, water was pouring out the far end of the drain, which empties onto the street in front of the house. It works!

Here's what the French drain looked like before the gravel was added.

Sunroom update

Here's what they did today:

Dirt and rebar

Rebar and dirt

High-tech external support system

Yes, folks, it's an update!

Well, it's certainly been a while since the last update! Here's what's going on down here in the land of huge belt buckles, cowboy hats, and people spouting out "y'all"s with wild abandon:

The August trip up north was good. Probably anyone reading this was a part of our time up there, so there's no need for details. Right? :)

Our spider (see two posts below this one) has passed on. We realized that her substantial girth was due to her impending motherhood. After she spun and filled TWO egg sacs (sacs bigger than her), she met an untimely, Gus-induced death. Her evil, cute little spawn will not carry on her legacy, either. RIP spider(s).

On October 17th Gus and I celebrated our 9th (!) wedding anniversary! The years have flown by, in a good, very happy way!

Halloween was great. We carved jack-o-lanterns! We bought a metric ton of candy! And then, on Halloween evening, we turned out all the lights, locked the door, watched a movie, and ate the candy ourselves. :D

Angela's pumpkin

Angela's pumpkin, lit from within!

Gus' pumpkin. Spooooky, eh?

In other news, we are having our sunroom worked on. The foundation was cracked. Actually, "cracked" is too mild a word. Perhaps "torn asunder" would be more accurate. The house had originally had a small (maybe 4' x 8') patio off the back. The previous owners built the sunroom (12' x 20'?) up around it, but neglected to do proper foundation work. They basically just poured concrete up to and around the original patio slab, not tying the two pieces together in any way, trusting - naiively - in the two concretes to meld. Over the years, with the odd Texas tradition of houses shifting with the seasons, the two slabs pulled away from each other, with the newer one more or less drifting away from the house.

Since this made the sunroom pretty much useless, we hired a foundation repair company to come in and fix things. So far they have done this:

Obviously, a vast improvement. :P To reach this stage, they first removed all the sun-blocking bushes that were growing along the outside of the sunroom. Then they dug eight deep holes (10' deep, I believe) at intervals along the sunroom walls. Then they filled these holes with concrete and gave it a week to cure. Meanwhile, they jack-hammered the foundation and removed (almost) all traces of it. Today they came in, placed support pipes in each of the holes, and jacked up the sunroom to lift it off the remaining foundation.

Exhibit A: A pipe in a concrete-filled hole, holding up the sunroom wall

Next, they plan to remove the rest of the concrete, dig some big ditch along the outer edge of the wall, and pour an all-new concrete foundation.

At this point, the sunroom door to the outside won't fully close:

Exhibit B: Sunroom door sitting at a jaunty angle

But that's just fine. Soon it will all be fixed, the room will be as good as new (better than it's ever been, actually), and it will be habitable once more. We just need to figure out if we're going to carpet the new floor, tile it, stain it...so many choices!

For Mom: Header/footer dilemma in Microsoft Word

To create separate headers in document sections:

When you create a header or footer in a Microsoft Word document, and then create a section break, the first section's header/footer settings will be duplicated in the subsequent sections.

(click image to enlarge)

As you can see in the picture above, there is a button called "Same as Previous" in the Header and Footer toolbar (the button with two pages side-by-side, with a little arrow connecting the two). It is automatically engaged when you create a new section. When it is engaged, the words "Same as Previous" appear directly above the footer's borders, on the right.

In order to work on the headers/footers in one section independently of the headers/footers in the previous section, you need to remove this link between them. To do so, in the second (or following) section - the section in which you want a different header/footer - you need to click that "Same as Previous" button to disengage it. When you do, the words "Same as Previous" disappear [see below]; you can now work on the subsequent headers/footers with no impact to the previous headers/footers.

(click image to enlarge)

Just remember: Each time you create a new section break, you will have to disengage that "Same as Previous" button, if you want that new section's headers/footers to function independently.

Hope that helps!

To find the "Same as Previous" button:

On your Header and Footer toolbar, at the far, upper right, is a small down-arrow that allows you to change your toolbar options.

(click image to enlarge)

If you click that aroow, it will expand to display the words, "Add or Remove Buttons."

(click image to enlarge)

As you hover over that text, it will expand further to the right, displaying "Header and Footer," and then - finally - a complete list of buttons available to this toolbar, including today's favorite, "Link to Previous."

(click image to enlarge)

Click the buttons you'd like to have available to you on this toolbar.

There you go! Easy-peasy. :)

Our new guard dog

We just got back from a long trip (more on that in the next post) and upon our return, what did we find living in a huge web alongside our house? This:

(click for a bigger picture)

According to an entomology site I found, this is a yellow garden spider. The site says they "can reach a length of one inch or more".... Yeah. This one's body is at least 2.5 inches long. No kidding. She's HUGE. And now that I know she can't kill me, I like her. :)

Name that plant

We have a number of flowering plants around our yard, all planted by previous owners. I don't know what any of them are, so here are some pictures. If you know what they are, feel free to enlighten me!

Mystery Plant #1:


Mystery Plant #2:



Mystery Plant #3:

(this flower smells like heaven!)

Any ideas?