New NEW Blog

Ok, sorry for the hassle but blogger is being a pain in the rump! I had to change my blog site because...well it's a long story and it was super annoying, but it's working now. Sorry for the confusion, but I promise I'm done creating new blogs and websites for you to remember.

http://www.koryandmandymereness.blogspot.com/ is the real deal and is where I'll be posting from now on.

Have a Happy Day! :)

New Blog!

The reason I've been absent from posting for so long is because I've been working on creating a new blog! Now, it's nowhere near as fancy or cool as my friend Katy's new blog, which you should all check out here, but it will work for my life. Photography and style and web design are not my talents...but I still love communicating with my far away friends and family via blogging so I will continue.

The new website is http://koryandmandy.blogspot.com/. A few notes about the new blog:

1) Right now I've only got wedding recaps on there because I want to remember my feelings and the little details and stories behind the pictures in the future, but I will also be posting non-wedding things for those of you who were at the wedding and are ready to move on from that :)

2) The pictures on it are being weird. They are really high quality, but when I put them on the blog, they don't really look that way. If I make them extra-large, they're too big and they take over the sidebar and don't fit right on the page. If I make them large, they look kind of grainy and low resolution. So...the best solution is to click on the picture to enlarge it and see it looking focused and great.

3) I don't plan to post on this blog anymore, so you can remove it from your blog lists and stop following it, etc.

Kory is gone all week with the high schoolers to camp, so hopefully this alone time will allow me to get quite a few more blog posts up.

Our New Home

Well we are officially moved in and settled at our new apartment and we love it here! I cleaned house for your tour this time, so it will look much nicer than the last time you saw where we lived. It's not a dream home, but that's the great part about being young newlyweds...low standards! :)

A few notes about our new place. 1) Since we're planning to be here short-term, the manager told us the best way to get our deposit back is to not hang anything on the walls. Apparently, he's really anal about holes in the wall, so we are allowed to hang one clock and one key holder, and nothing else. Therefore, the walls are bare and we don't have a lot of decorations. 2) We were able to use the church office building for storage, so we put a LOT of our stuff in storage to free up space around here. Therefore, we mostly have the basics out and not a lot else.

So...those are my disclaimers. My home will  never be featured in a magazine and I'm totally ok with that. We are really happy in this new apt and actually feel like we'd be happy staying here for a while. So here are the pictures:

Looking up at the apts from our parking lot, ours is up the stairs and to the left.

Welcome to our home!

Looking in from the front door to the kitchen with the living room on the right.

Not too surprisingly, the living room is the first room you come to when you walk into the apt.

Yes, that is a fake fireplace under the TV.  I have never lived anywhere that had one, but I'm kind of hoping we're still here when the weather gets cold enough to try it out.

Next to the living room is the kitchen, which is my very favorite room. It's so big! It's actually bigger than the kitchens in a lot of houses I've seen, so I'm quite excited our little apartment has such a large kitchen. 

Of course, since I haven't had a dishwasher for the past 2 years, I'm quite excited to have one now!

The dining room is really just a small part of the kitchen, but it works great for our little dining room table. 

We're also excited to have a balcony here, which is accessible through the door you see in the picture above. My picture-taking skills are definitely lacking, as you can tell in this next picture, but at least you get the idea. The door on the balcony is to a tiny storage closet, where we keep our bicycles.

The weekend of the 4th, we bought a grill for Kory and some flowers for me. 

My flourishing strawberry plant...which you will see in just a little bit is no more.

From back inside the kitchen,  you head down the hall to find the rest of the apt and one fat cat laying in the floor. That's Kabie...who is quite large these days.

The first door on the right is our little pantry. It's a tiny one, but since we didn't have one at all in our last apt, we're happy to have it!

Across the hall from the pantry is the water heater closet. Nothing exciting, but this is what you get on the Premium Tour :)

The full bath is the next door on your right down the hallway between the pantry and the washer/dryer.  The cats' litter box lives here in this bathroom also.  I REALLY hate litter boxes, but this one actually hides the smell pretty well as long as it's cleaned frequently.

I am not sure if it helps, but hopefully the pictures from all different angles help you get a better idea of what the room really looks like. 



Next to the full bathroom is the washer and dryer. I know I sound like a broken record...but since we had to use a community laundry room before, we're REALLY excited about this!

At the end of the hall is the guest room. Kory will primarily be using the room for this:

His PlayStation2 is in this room...and yes, it's totally necessary for it to have a separate TV from the Xbox 360, which is in the living room. 

This will be where our guests get to stay when they come visit us, but the rest of the time this bed will serve as a bouch. What, you've never heard that word? It's because we made it up. We've decided to try to make this into a bed/couch by putting a ton of pillows on it and using it as a place to play video games/read/chill. Here's what we've got so far:

It's still a work in progress, but here's the rest of the room.

Finally, here's the Master Bedroom.

My nightstand is clearly much shorter thank Kory's as it makes my normal-sized lamp look miniature!

And some other angles so you can see what the rest of the room looks like.

The doors you see are the bathroom (left) and closet (right).

Our bedroom has a walk-in closet that I adore. Most of our winter clothing is in storage, so we actually have some open space in here, which is nice. 

We have a 1/2 bath connected to our bedroom, and it's been really convenient so I can get ready in the mornings in the other bathroom without waking Kory up...since he gets to sleep in later than me. Lame.

And a couple pictures of our cats, just for fun:

Kabie was rolling around on the ground on the balcony.

Mr. Sir has taken to laying in my strawberry plant anytime he's out on the balcony. If he wasn't so stinking cute, he would get in trouble..but I'm a sucker for his purring and he gets away with most anything he wants.

So there ya have it, our new home :) We'd love for you to come visit and see it all in person very soon!

Two Things Tuesday

1. I get quite annoyed when I ask someone what type of work they've done and they tell me "everything. I've done it all". Really? Everything?? You've flown a spaceship and painted nails and stitched teddy bears and designed clothing and treated patients with malaria and pumped gas and been a dolphin trainer? No? Well then you haven't done everything, now have you? :)

2. Tonight I'll finish reading Mockingay, the 3rd book in the Hunger Games trilogy. I'm not completely finished with the book, so I suppose my mind could change in next 35 pages, but it's not likely. The 3rd book is by far my least favorite. It doesn't seem to fit with the other two and has been difficult for me to read at points. It hasn't kept my interested like the first book did. Anyone else feel the same?

One Month!

Today is one month of marriage for us...although our wedding feels like it was FOREVER ago. I think it's just because we've been packing/moving/adjusting to married life and we've packed a lot into this past month.

Kory texted me yesterday telling me not to make plans for tonight because we're going on a date! I was even more excited this morning when I found out we're going to

I've been craving chips and salsa from there lately so I can't wait to taste that yummy goodness!

I decided to make Kory one of his favorite desserts for tonight, so I attempted Key Lime Pie. Even though I added what seemed like a gallon of lime juice, it somehow wasn't enough and it doesn't really taste very limey. However, the combination of sweetened condensed milk, whipped cream and graham cracker crust still tastes delicious. I guess that just means I'll have to make another one soon so I can try again. No complaints here!

Not my pie...but it sure does make me hungry!

Wedding Day Feelings

The day of my wedding I was very calm. I did not feel nervous or anxious at all. I never felt like crying. I just felt like smiling A LOT!

Kory said when he was waiting to see me for the first time, Alisa told him if I was any calmer, I'd be in a coma. haha That cracks me up! I really was super chill that day though. Like significantly more than usual. This also meant I wasn't feeling rushed for time even though we were supposed to be starting pictures and I was still getting ready and everyone was waiting for me. I mean, I was the bride so no one rushed me, but it did through everything else off schedule. Oops!

Many things did not go as planned that day (another blog post to come) but none of it really upset me or stressed me out. Well, the only thing that slightly upset me was that everyone arrived at the wedding way early and as I walked back into the building to freshen up before the ceremony, I had to walk through all my guests and they were all seeing me and it was so anti-climactic, but I got over it quickly.

I think I smiled the entire ceremony. I remember just being SO happy and calm and present. I felt very present at that moment. Very aware of where I was and who was there and what was happening. I know a lot of brides have said they don't even know what the preacher said because they were too nervous or distracted or excited or something. I can tell you almost everything Ben said because I was listening intently and soaking it up.

I had planned for that day for so long and thought about it many many times. I've been in enough weddings to know the bride always says it goes by way too quickly (it does!) and it's easy to miss the whole day because it's gone in a flash. I was consciously taking it all in and I'm so happy because I really can relive it in my mind and remember so much of it.

The phrase that kept coming to my mind that day was "peace that passes understanding". I kept thinking, I don't know how or why I'm so calm. It must be God. Thank you, God!

I plan to blog in detail about our wedding weekend and cruise and all of those exciting events. It will probably take me a while but I should be able to include professional wedding pictures in those posts, so that will make the waiting worthwhile. Even if you've already seen them all. They're that good!

Married

Well here we are at week 3 of being married now. Life is really good! :)

We should be spending our evenings packing our apartment so we can move next week. However, we've been doing more fun things instead. Monday night we got groceries and cooked a really yummy dinner that took a while. Last night we went to see Super 8, which was really really good. I had popcorn, hot tamales and a Coke for dinner. Delicious and ridiculous.

Tonight, I hope we can ride our bikes. I have so much fun on our new bikes, but these stinking Oregon hills are going to kill me.

We're living out of suitcases and boxes right now so that's always interesting. We thought we were moving sooner so a lot of our clothes are already packed away. I wonder if people at my work are noticing I'm wearing the same outfits over and over?

Our plan as of right now is to move to Roseburg to these apartments and start looking into buying a house. Sadly these apartments don't allow pets so we have to figure out what to do with them for a little while. Hopefully some families from church will adopt them short-term. I'll definitely miss playing with them though, so we'll have to visit them often. The great thing about these apartments is that they do month-by-month rent so we don't have to sign a lease.

I would like to think we'll clean the apt and pack tonight, but realistically I know we'll play on the iPad. We're obsessed with crossword puzzles lately. Yes, we are 80 years old.

Around the House

One of my best friends, Rynn, asked me to take pictures and show her where we live. I kept thinking we were about to move, so I wanted to wait until we got a new place to show off. Well, I still think we'll move before too long, but this is where I live now, so I decided to go ahead and show you all our 1st home together...just be prepared for a mess :)

We've got all of Kory's stuff in boxes except some clothes, and then there are wedding gifts and other random items in the middle of packing all over the apartment. However, it's still home, so here is your tour, Rynn and the rest of blogland.

I'll start with a few things that really excite me! Mainly this strawberry plant :)

I have never planted any fruits or vegetables so that is why I'm particularly excited by this! A co-worker gave me the plant but it was in pretty sad shape when I got it in dirt, so I was afraid it might not live very long. It was all still green when I left for the wedding but I came back to some RED strawberries! I have been waiting to pick them until I could take this picture for you, but now I hope to start eating them regularly.

This bird feeder was a wedding gift and it was going to be perfect because we have SO many birds flying around outside our apartments.

However, no birds would ever eat from the feeder. We had no idea why but weeks went on with no birds in sight. Finally, Kory was home one day and saw some birds fly near the feeder and immediately THIS happened...

And we realized why no birds are at our feeder. The cats are on the attack up in the window as soon as one gets near, so we do not get to feed any birds. Hopefully we can find a better place to hang it wherever we live next.

I contemplated cleaning the apt before taking these pictures, but I'm all about being honest and real, so here is what it looks like when "lived in".

We thought we would move before the wedding so we took almost everything off the walls and have almost no decorations left. We also moved in Kory's couch and recliner and entertainment center from his apt, so that's why so much furniture is squeezed into the living room. And yes, that entertainment center is now functioning as a coffee table for now.

The cats pretty much have their own bathroom downstairs. Their food, water and litter box are in these bottom cabinets.

Our kitchen does not have a dishwasher which is the #1 thing I dislike about the apt. Our next place will definitely have that! We also don't have near enough cabinet space, which is why food is on top of the cabinets and even spills over into the dining room.

We really need a better system for our recycling. For now, it's all piled up here against this wall. We don't actually use our table very much these days either, because it's usually covered in stuff and we don't want to clean it off. So instead we eat on the couch in front of the TV usually.

These stairs have almost killed me multiple times. The carpet comes away from the stair block and I've tripped and fallen down these stairs quite a few times. The stairs are also very narrow and it's easy to miss a step, so I'll be grateful to leave these behind.

This bathroom was perfect for me when I lived here alone but now trying to share the same space is a little bit more of a challenge.

I guess that's just true of everywhere in my apt to be honest. I had it totally filled with just my stuff so adding another person and their stuff means we have to get rid of a LOT. And we have given away SO much...but I think we need to keep going.

This spare bedroom has become the dumping grounds for everything we have packed and ready to move. At least with all of this boxed up already, it should make packing a little bit easier next time.

Our bedroom (MY bedroom for 2 years is suddenly OURS...weird) is a wreck from coming home from the cruise and trying to pack some stuff and not having room for Kory's stuff in the closet yet. Our new bedding is not what either of us remember registering for, but we like it and it has really brightened up the room. Kory hated the red curtains I had hanging up so he took them down and we have none for now.

It's our home. It's nothing fancy but it's OURS and it's HOME so that makes me happy :)