Closing Today!

Here is a more recent photo of our new house! (Well, it will be around 11:00 a.m. today :)
This is the backyard. The white room is a 3-seasons room.
Here is another angle of the back of the house. The living room is on the left and the bedrooms on the right. The bottom windows are part of the family room in the 1/2 basement.
The little blue building is a gardening shed.
This corner, which looks amazingly dead right here, will probably be the location for next year's garden.Unfortunately, this white fence is hanging over the neighbor's property...The backyard lawn does not look like this anymore... we had the electric line trenched and that ripped up the lawn diagonally all the way across the yard (as well as breaking almost every sprinkler line our yard had). We are very excited to start moving. God worked the timing out perfectly. We were not sure we could close today because the electrician was still working at 9 p.m. last night and our church friend was still working on the garage venting yesterday late afternoon but it looks like it is all done in time. I wish you could all help me move and set up home :)

First Snow...

Here are a few pictures from our first snow the other day (the day that this is dated)... We got snow earlier than I have ever seen in the Midwest. As it got darker, more snow fell but I didn't get photos because my camera doesn't take pictures well at night while it is malfunctioning.

This is the view from our kitchen. The snow is on our screen and our building dryer vent. Today, Sunday, we are supposed to get 3-6". YIKES.

New Look and New Experiences

I like "date nights" but it is a little hard to have a homemade date night in our little apartment because we spend so much time in this little space we often just want to get out of it, so, I did a little brainstorming. Our coffee table can be raised to almost a dining table height so I raised it and put a nice tablecloth over it. Then I found some chairs and lit some candles. Next I baked this special dinner. (I baked the orange slices right on top of the chicken to help keep it moist and add flavor) and steamed some fresh veggies from our local Farmer's Market. I decided to post about this because the dinner itself turned out looking so colorful.
Last week, I drove myself down to Chamberlain for a 5 day training seminar for my new place of employment. I was pretty nervous about being gone that long and not knowing anyone or the area but the training went fine and the area was pretty. There were low hills as you can see from above.

Lucy has taken up with a new friend. During my Mental Health First Aid training we received these little Koala animals and she has befriended it.
The day after I got back from training we were scheduled to go out to a fancy dinner thanks to a member of the church who gave us tickets. The tickets were to an awards banquet that honored women who had helped their communities in South Dakota. It was a fun (and free) chance to dress up. By the way, while in Chamberlain I got this new haircut.