Not much has gone on in the last week. We found out that the people at the farmers market where we buy our eggs and beef also has chicken that we can buy on special order. It’s amazing! They do all the processing at their own farm. We are going to special order some for next weekend. Especially since this weekend we will be going to California for Darrell’s Grammy’s 80th birthday.

That’s about all that’s been going on this week. Hope y’all are doing great!

We’ve been really busy these first couple weeks. Darrell has finished his first year at Milsoft, we got a little bit of tropical storm Alex, and all in all just relaxed inside and hung out together.

Hope everyone had a great holiday! Darrell made me an apron for the kitchen. We’ve had the stuff, just never the room to do it. We finally have the room, so Darrell is totally taking advantage of the sewing machine. I love it! We spent the fourth inside playing video games since it was storming almost all day. It stopped just in time for people to light fireworks. There were a ton in our neighborhood! We walked out the front door and saw like 6 different firework shows! It was awesome. The downside was that since we have had so much moisture, the mosquito’s are out in force, so we spent a lot of time getting bit. No matter how much bug spray we put on.

We have had a lot of bugs visiting. There are a ton of grasshoppers in the backyard, some butterflies and then there are tons of flies that get in the house. The flies all swarmed the windowsill for some reason, so Darrell vacuumed them up. It’s all great!

We are loving our house and are waiting for people to come visit. Are you going to be the next?

So June is upon us. We had a great anniversary. We stayed inside, relaxed, played video games & just enjoyed our new house.

We have been keeping very busy in the new house. We have finally finished unpacking all of our stuff, but we are still working on the little things. Like curtains, hardware for the bathrooms, and where some things are going to ultimately go.

The big thing we have been working on this month has been the backyard. Since we had basically neglected it for like two months, the weeds finally hit thigh high or higher, the sunflowers bloomed, and our backyard looked like a huge meadow. Since our ac unit is in the backyard, we have to keep the weeds trimmed around it, so we decided to just tackle it all. No weed whacker since we don’t have the funds and Darrell also wants to get one online since he can’t find one here to fit him. Nope.. I am cutting down all the weeds in the morning hours with garden shears. Ahh.. so much work!! Well.. I’m the one that wants it done. I am cutting around the sunflowers so that there is still something pretty to look at out there. I’m hoping that it will cut down on the crickets so that we can sleep with our bedroom windows open at night. Who knows!

We had a landscape company come by to see what we can do with the backyard. We kind of have an idea on what we would like to do, but no idea on if it would work in this area. They are going to draw up some plans and should let us know in the next month.

My little sister finally graduated from High School! Congrats Rachie! Now she just needs to figure out what she would like to do next. Darrell and I have offered to let her come out here and stay, but who knows.

I finally got tired of cutting the backyard with shears. The other day when Darrell was coming home for lunch, some kids were in the street stopping cars and passing out fliers for a lawn mowing service. We had about 1/3 of the backyard left to go, and it was all about 4 feet tall if not taller. So we called the kids up and had them come over and mow the backyard. I had them leave the two flowers (which I have now learned are black eyed susans.. not sunflowers) that are right outside the kitchen window.

That’s all that’s happened with us this month. I’m gonna try to now do an update once a week instead of once a month. We’ll see how that goes.

Hope y’all are doing good.

~The Ross’

So the months of April & May have just flown by! We spent a fabulous week in New Orleans. We had a lot of awesome food, heard some great (and not so great) music, did a lot of walking and saw the sites with some conference friends. There was a ton of amazing stuff that the conference put on and had available to both the attendees and the significant others. I will put pictures up at some point.

It was really nice to come home after the conference and be able to move into our house. We did a lot of little packing since we still had to keep things prepped for our upcoming trip to California. Then Darrell asked to borrow a truck, and not only did he end up with a truck, he ended up with a 16 foot trailer and 4 co-workers to help. So we just finished moving everything from the apartment. There was still cleaning supplies and little stuff at the apartment, but we were staying in our new house. At least for two days.

Then our trip to California. We left early on Saturday morning to drive to Dallas. We landed at SFO and then got the rental and spent the day hanging out with Ryca and Jon. It was a total blast. We had brunch on Sunday with Michelle & Ryca at a cool little place in Oakland. Don’t remember the name, but it was great! Then we traveled down to Santa Cruz to visit some friends down there. We got there a little early, so we hit up a couple places that are our normals when we end up in that area. We got to have dinner with Turtle, Michelle, Megan, Geoff, Abby, Henry, and Matthew. After chilling out for a bit, we drove through Sunnyvale to stop at Trader Joes and say hi to Min since she couldn’t come for the dinner. Then we spent about an hour getting lost in San Francisco (gee.. why does that always happen when you move away?) then finally made it to Boonville. We hung out in Boonville with Will, Peggy, Rod, & Janna on Monday. On Tuesday we drove up to Humboldt. We picked up Lorna on the way and then hung out with Kendra, Lee, Wiz, Loyn, & Ben. Ahh.. we were feeling the relaxation of hanging out with normal people! We spent a couple days in Humboldt seeing a whole bunch of people (Liam, Toshi, Sigrid, Kearney, Grace, Jes, Matt, & lots more). Then on Thursday we traveled back down to Ukiah to stay with Book & Janna to prep for the awesome weekend!

Boonville Beer Festival 2010!!! We got to see so many of our friends that it made us hope for the next five years to fly by! We hung out around the firepit, played our horns, grilled up a meat fest, got drunk (ps – sorry Jon but I would call operation Caye Caulker a slight bust.. It was great until most of it came up along the drive to SFO :/) Ahh.. we were slightly bummed the weekend was ending. Since we had to leave real early on Sunday, we didn’t get to say goodbye to a lot of people, so next year, I think we are going to set things up so we don’t leave until Monday. The trip just went to fast.

So we finally returned from all of our vacations and Lorna flew back out with us. We worked a lot on unpacking all of the stuff into the house and catching up at work. I finished up my school year, so summer here I come, but no paycheck…. Oh well.. Gives me time to relax. I also got my netflix wii disc, so now I have unlimited movies.. hahaha!! Darrell likes to call it my Wiiflix.

If any of y’all wanna come visit, our door is open! Just give us a call!

~The Ross’

Hey y’all

Boy oh Boy have we been keeping busy. Darrell is working hard at his job. He’s doing pretty much the same thing he has been doing since January. Just trying to keep up with all of the bugs. I’m also doing more of the same thing. Just driving buses and keeping busy. There are a lot of things going on in the District, so I have been putting in massive numbers of hours. I put in almost 70 hours in a week. That was the week before Spring break, so boy was I glad it was spring break.

So other than work, we have been pretty busy on our own time. Darrell found out that we were qualified to buy a house, so we began a kind of small looksie to see what we could find. Will, Darrell’s dad, came out and visited us early in the month. We wandered around through open houses and found a real estate agent to help us look at houses.

After looking for a couple days, we found a house we absolutely love! It’s a brand new 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage. We are excited and can’t wait to close on the house and be able to move into it and out of the apartment.

Then Steve came and visited us during his spring break which also happened to be my spring break. We had some fun and really enjoyed hanging out with him. We were sad to see him go, but it just meant that we were a week closer to our trips out of Texas.

Things have been going by really quickly. We are currently halfway through April and things are progressing nicely. We had to move our closing date up to this Friday, so we are getting set to close and then leaving for New Orleans on Sunday. I also got my wisdom teeth out last Thursday, so I am still adjusting to the surgery recovery. Slowly working on getting back up to solid foods.

Well, that’s about all that has been happening around here. Hope things are going great where you are!
~The Ross’

 Hey Y’all,

We have been keeping busy out here in lovely Texas. We have had three snowstorms since the last update. We got one on Christmas eve, one for New Years, and one for Valentines Day Weekend. We are actually getting set to have another one starting on Tuesday. This has been the coldest winter that Texas has experienced since the late 1970’s. They usually only get two snowstorms a year, and none of it sticks. Each snowstorm has dropped anywhere between 3-7”.We didn’t do much for the last couple of Holidays. We stayed home for Christmas and New years and just enjoyed spending time together. It was a little lonesome and we missed hanging out with friends and family, but it was nice not to have to worry about big money issues.

Just wanted to post an update for anyone who might still be checking here. I have been trying to post something, but I couldn’t login. But now that I can,  I will try to update here at least once a month. Here is what’s been going on:

We have been in Abilene for 6 months now. Time really flies when you have a countdown and keep busy. Our countdown is to the Boonville Beer Festival. It will probably be one of the few times we are in California. We have been keeping pretty busy though.

I finally got a job in late September. I am a school bus driver for Wylie ISD in south Abilene. Their Mascot is the Bulldogs, and their colors are purple and gold. I am only a substitute bus driver, so I am just filling in when a driver is out. But I get to ride the buses everyday. The pay isn’t the best, but it is a job. I get some field trips since this is a very sports centered state. The High School football team is currently in State Championships right now. The last game is on Saturday, so we’ll see how things go. It’s been keeping me busy, but I really don’t like the mornings. To early..

Darrell has been busy at his job as well. He keeps being moved between different departments and the different departments are fighting over where he is suppose to go. They all want him with them. His boss has guaranteed him another raise in January, so things are definitely looking good for him.

Darrell’s evening’s are still pretty full, but so are mine. We played softball with his company team, and we won only 1 of the 7 games we played (we missed the 8th game since we were in Belize). That was fun and kept us occupied. Still trying to find some other type of exercise since there aren’t many sidewalks, and it’s not really a safe area to ride the bike around in. We’ll find something.

Yes I did mention that we were in Belize. Darrell and I headed to Belize on October 31 till November 7. We went to the little island of Caye Caulker. It was a total blast to hang out with friends and chill on an island. One of our friends got married there, so that was the main reason to go, but we tied it into a long vacation as well. The whole time there was fun, and not even Tropical Storm Ida ruined it. She made it so we didn’t do a lot of things that we would have liked to have done, but it was still a blast. (Lot’s of time spent in bars).

We also headed to Idaho for Thanksgiving. We spent the time with Darrell’s family in Sandpoint. It was so much fun. It was on the cold side, but we went prepared for snow, and there was only like 1/4” of snow on one day. (If even that much). We had fun with everyone. We spent the flight back realizing that we only spent about 14 days of November in Texas.

The funny part about getting back to Texas, was that the day after we arrived back from Idaho, we got about 2” of snow here in Abilene. It wasn’t icy, just a fluffy snow and it stuck everywhere but roadways. It made for a very cold day. It hasn’t really warmed up since we got back. The weather has been consistantly under 40 degrees. Just the other day, our high temperature happened at midnight, and our low was at 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s been really icy lately, so we are being very careful when we go out. Our stairs for our apartment froze over, so we were having to really watch our step and ice-skate down the stairs. Fun, fun!!!!

The apartment complex is working on renovations, so a lot of things have been redone. They replaced a lot of the wood, the back patio railing is fixed (now that it is to cold to really spend time out there.), the front stairs are fixed, and the patio is repaved. It was funny since I fell asleep one day, and woke up to go to work that afternoon, and they had just finished paving the front patio, so I had to call into work and let them know that I wasn’t going to make it to work. What a “dog ate my homework” kind of story. .

Well, it’s getting closer to the Christmas holidays, and it is very prevalent here. A good chunk of people had their Christmas decorations up around here a week before Thanksgiving. And boy are there a lot of decorations. Some are kind of overdone in my opinion. But to each their own. We have our small amount of stuff up. Just enough to make it feel like the holidays.

Darrell’s company has a huge Christmas party every year, so we are going to be going that next Friday. It is a big formal event, so I think it will be fun. It will be our first big party together here. Darrell went to a friends Halloween party on the friday before we left for Belize, but I had to work and drive the High school band to the football game in Graham. So I was gone until really early the next morning. We really miss having the dinner parties we use to and play games, chat, and hang out with glasses of wine and drinks. Ahhh. the good ol’ days!!!

Hope that everyone is doing great.

Happy Holidays!

~Darrell & Sharyn Ross

These are the photo’s from: Jennifer Radke, Turtle Kalus, Peggy Miniclier, Grandma Radke, Laurie Radke, Joni Werdeman, and Vanessa Thomas.

As I was going through the pictures, I noticed that there were a lot of pictures of funny faces, so I am going to make an album of them next chance I get. Just wanted to get these posted.

Enjoy!

~Sharyn

Darrell and I have been working on getting settled here in Texas. Darrell has been at his job now for two weeks, and I am still looking. Therefore, I have more time to get wedding pictures up online. I will be working on getting them up in the next couple of days. Here is the first big batch of pictures. These are the pics from John the photographer. Hope you enjoy and check back for more updates soon!

~Sharyn