wow...

it has been a long month.

-i tried to put pictures of our new house up, but it isnt cooperating.
-it has been flooding here for the past 5 days
-matt has to park a mile away from work and walk the rest of the way because a bridge washed out
-our neighbors keep putting their trash in our trashcan and then theres no room for our trash
-matt has to work nights for the next month, even on new years eve
-im looking for a job...not so successfully
- im thinking about taking 2 week classes they offer on base that allow you to take tests for college credits
-matt and i have been married for 10 months on tuesday :)
- people keep blocking us in our parking spot
-we finally got our cable installed
-my family will be here in less than 3 months!


well...i think thats it

Very Sad News

Oscar the beta has died.


Rest In Peace Oscar

Happy Veterans Day!

I dont have much to report, thats why i havent written in so long. I fell/slid down the stairs on saturday night and ended up in the ER on sunday morning. My foot is swollen and bruised. It isnt broken but i have to wear a boot and walk on crutches for atleast a week. We are going to have thanksgiving with some friends. Somehow Matt and i got roped into making a turkey and a ham. And various other side dishes. Honestly im not looking foward to it. The people we are doing it with want to do the sit down at the table/tablecloth and centerpeice thing. Ive never done that before in my life. My family is so big that people sit on the couch or the floor or wherever there is room. Its more relaxed that way. Sitting down at a table just seems so formal to me. I guess watching to football game during dinner is probably out of the question...

Prayers Please

We need to move! We are number 26 on the list but it just isnt going fast enough. Matt is exhausted! Between work and Pt and driving 30 minutes to get to and from work, he is almost never home. Its starting to catch up with him. He never gets a day off. Even on the days he doesnt work (including the weekend) he still has to do Pt. There is seriously not a day in the week where he gets the whole day off. I know moving wont fix it all, but it would atleast make it where he doesnt have to leave an hour early for work.

And im going bored out of my mind. I want to get a job, which i cant do until we move because right now matt has the car all the time. When we move, we will be close enough for me to take matt to work so i can finally get a job.

Also, they screwed up matts leave days. He should have 10 days but they messed up the paperwork and they have him negative days right now. People keep saying they will get it fixed but its just not happening. It would be nice if he could take a day off!

So please pray that they get all of this stuff fixed...and please pray for matt.

Busy...

Things have been BUSY around here. Matt is always working or doing PT. When he does finally make it home, we use that time to catch up on sleep. I was never one to wake up early (or even before noon) yet here it is, 6am and ive been up since 4:30.

Our friend Ron, who we know from highschool, is deploying to iraq today. We got to spend some time with him last night and say goodbye. Please keep him and the rest of his unit and their famalies in your prayers.

For those of you following the housing list, we are number 31. We havent moved on the list in the last 2 weeks and it is starting to get old! We have been on the list since May 1st. Im not looking foward to the actual moving part. We accumualte more stuff every day and for some reason the government isnt assisting us with our move (they move your stuff for you most of the time, but not this time! why? who knows...) So we have to deal with the issue of finding a vehicle big enough to move all of our stuff, which isnt easy because you have to be 21 to rent a UHAUL.

A new way to look at a deck of cards

It was quiet that day, the guns and the mortars, and land mines for some reason hadn't been heard.

The young soldier knew it was Sunday, the holiest day of the week.

As he was sitting there, he got out an old deck of cards and laid them out across his bunk

.Just then an army sergeant came in and said, 'Why aren't you w ith the rest of the platoon?'

The soldier replied, 'I thought I would stay behind and spend some time with the Lord.'

The sergeant said, 'Looks to me like you're going to play cards.'

The soldier said, 'No, sir.You see, since we are not allowed to have Bibles or other spiritual books in this country, I've decided to talk to the Lord by studying this deck of cards.'

The sergeant asked in disbelief, 'How will you do that?'

'You see the Ace, Sergeant? It reminds me that there is only one God.

The Two represents the two parts of the Bible, Old and New Testaments

The Three represents the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The Four stands for the Four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Five is for the five virgins there were ten but only five of them were glorified.

The Six is for the six days it took God to create the Heavens and Earth.

The Seven is for the day God rested after making His Creation.

The Eight is for the family of Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives -- the eight people God spared from the flood that destroyed the Earth.

The Nine is for the lepers that Jesus cle ansed of leprosy He cleansed ten, but nine never thanked Him.

The Ten represents the Ten Commandments that God handed down to Moses on tablets made of stone.

The Jack is a reminder of Satan, one of God's first angels, but he got kicked out of heaven for his sly and wicked ways and is now the joker of eternal hell.

The Queen stands for the Virgin Mary.

The King stands for Jesus, for he is the King of all kings.

When I count the dots on all the cards, I come up with 365 total, one for every day of the year.

There are a total of 52 cards in a deck; each is a week - 52 weeks in a year.

The four suits represent the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

Each suit has thirteen cards -- there are exactly thirteen weeks in a quarter.

So when I want to talk to God and thank Him, I just pull out this old deck of cards and they remind me of all that I have to be thankful for.'

The sergeant just stood there.After a minute, with tears in his eyes and pain in his heart, he said, 'Soldier, can I borrow that deck of cards?'

please stop for a moment and say a prayer for our servicemen and women all around the world. Of all the gifts you could give a Soldier, prayer is the very best one.

PT sucks

Matt failed his PT test, which means he has to do PT twice a day now. Which wouldnt be such a big deal if he could do it on the base we live on, but he has to drive 45 minutes there and 45 minutes back 2 times a day and he does PT for 2 hours each time. So this takes almost 6 hours out of his day. And on days he works he has to go to work almost 4 hours early to do
PT. That means he is gone for 16-17 hours on the days he works and 6 hours on the days he doesnt work. It also puts him driving almost 600 miles a week. Yeah i know, thats alot of math.

We are number 32 on the housing list and i am praying that the list moves along pretty fast. Especially since Matt will be using 2 tanks of gas a week to get back and forth to work and PT. A bunch of people deploy in a few weeks and we are hoping some houses open then up then because alot of those wives will move back home when their husbands deploy.

And congratualtions to my friend Valerie who just found out she is pregnant with her second child!

Not much going on...

Things are pretty boring around here. Matts work schedule is crazy. On the days he doesnt have to work, he has training or PT. We have been spending alot of time with out friends Ron and Providence (we went to highschool with them, and now they are here). Ron deploys to Iraq in 2 weeks so we are trying to spend as much time with his as possible before he leaves. We got a fish, his name is oscar. I was cleaning out his tank yesterday and i accidentally dropped him on the kitchen counter. He started flopping, I started screaming and Matt was laughing too hard to help me pick him up. Oscar survived the ordeal, in case you were wondering.

Missions and Windows

Matt got to ride in a helicopter yesterday. They had to do some kind of mission which involved spending most of the day circling the island in a black hawk. Of course i spent the whole day worried that he would crash. However, he came home safe, looking like a kid in a candy store. He had a blast. He also informed me that he got "blown up" by a fake bomb, which is why he came home covered in baby powder. He was supposed to have to work from 9pm to 9am after spending all day on his mission, but his supervisor was nice enough to let him take the night off.

I have also come to the conclusion that my house is not safe, which is why i lock myself in my room when matt leaves for work and only come out to go to the bathroom (since he works 12 hour shifts, my inability to go downstars alone leaves me starving by the time he gets home in the morning).

Why is my house unsafe, you ask. Many of you may not know, but most houses in Hawaii do not have central air conditiong. Since the trade winds blow pretty strong most of the time, some genius (and i use that term loosly) decided to put windows made out of slats of glass in the houses so they can be twisted open and air flows through the house. I guess in theory it was a good idea...except the slats come out. Yes, you can stand outside and literally take my windows apart.

I decided to remedy this problem by closing the windows...which didnt work because the slats still come out when the window is closed. Now, i dont really think someone is going to go through the trouble of taking out 20 slats of glass so they can climb though my window, but these slats of glass are also on the back door. Remove one slat of glass and you can reach through and unlock the door.

I realize i am being paranoid (im on an army base, how much safer can you get?)...but my windows come apart!!

Today we organize

Matt and I decided to clean today. We have spent the last 4 hours organizing and scrubbing and all that good stuff. I can think of other things i would like to do today instead, but its nice to have a clean house. We are taking a break and watching Speed Racer and then we are going to tackle the car. Hope everyone is having a great day!

Pictures?

At the end of august Matt and I were lucky enough to get to spend the weekend at Turtle Bay Resort for a marriage retreat. We spent alot of time in seminars learning how to communicate (they even gave us a magnet that looks like a floor, and when youre holding the magnet during a discussion you have "the floor" so youre the only one who can talk), we did the 5 love languages and heard testimony from couples who had been married for 14+ years. They taught us how to deal with deployments and explained how some things that apply in normal relationships have to be altered to fit military relationships. The overall message was good and i think matt and i both got alot out of it. We also got alot of free time to spend together on the beach and in this gorgeous hotel. The parrots were just sitting on rings in the lobby! It was the time of the month when the jellyfish come to shore so we didnt spend any time in the ocean but we did take advantage of the hotels pools and hot tubs. It was nice to get to know some of the people Matt works with and their wives. The army does this every few months so hopefully we will get the chance to do it again.

Its official! My mom, Greg, Katha, Kevin, Nick, Nicks parents and my moms best friend will all be here in March! I dont know where we are going to put them all but i am just glad they have the oppurtunity to come. Hopefully Aunt Tina and Granny will be able to come later in the year.

Starting on the 19th Matt will be working only at night. His schedule is 3 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off. It going to be a little confusing at first. Supposedly he will work all nights for a month and then all days for a month but we'll see.

We are slowly moving down on the housing list. When we got put on the list to move to the other base on May 1st we were number 156 on the list, 4 months later we are number 44 on the list. I just hope we get moved by christmas.

Hard night!

We didnt quite get our schedules switched back over to days in time. I can already tell that matt working half days and half nights isnt going to be easy. He had to be at work at 6am which meant he had to leave the house by 5:15. Poor matt didnt fall asleep until almost 2:30 because we have been on a night schedule, and someone with a wrong number called at 4 and he didnt go back to sleep. Which means that he is working a 12 hour day on and hour and a half of sleep. I got up and made him breakfast before he left in hopes of giving him enough energy to atleast make it to work without falling asleep while he was driving (he did).

Ive been doing everything possible to keep myself awake so that we will both sleep tonight. The house is clean, the laundry is done, my myspace is updated, the dvds are alphabetized and now i have run out of things to do.

I guess i can go make cookies :)

Lazy Weekend

We havent done much this weekend, we are trying to get back on a nomal schedule (we have been sleeping all day since matt worked nights). He has to work during the day on monday so we have to get back to sleeping at night.

Matt cleaned out the lanai this weekend after we found that a stray cat had kittens in there. We called the hawaii cat foundation and they came and got the kittens, they will bottle feed them until they are old enough for someone to adopt them. The mama cat is a little sad that her kittens are gone, but i didnt want to leave them out there to become strays.

First nights alone...

So i have never spent the night alone in a house...EVER. Well last week matt found out that he has to work night 2 out of every 8 nights. I, needless to say, was not happy. But what can you do? Last night was my first night alone, it was rather uneventful. I worked on my real estate classes and watched tv and tonight looks like its going to be more of the same.

So maybe staying alone wont be so bad. But i still havent gotten the guts to go downstairs :) im locked up in our room!