Guess who’s back

Yikes. I’m sorry it’s been like a month…

Life really got in the way this time. And since I’m a list maker, here’s a list of what has happened in the past well, month.

1. WE CLOSED ON OUR HOUSE! What a relief it was to finally close on it. The actual “closing” was the easy part. Getting everything together for our mortgage approval and wrangling in the builders for 8 months was the difficult part.
   
2. We moved into the new house. We sort of did this over two weekends. After we closed on March 16, we spent the following Saturday and Sunday at the house. Our appliances (washer, dryer and fridge) got delivered, and so did our new mattress and box spring. The following weekend we had the “big” move, with the moving truck, lots of the hubbys friends and lots of pizza. I took a few days off of work after that to work on unpacking, organizing and getting the utilities hooked up.
3. We unpacked the last set of boxes just a few days ago – or rather, moved them into the basement where they will ultimately be stored. 😉 Thank goodness for basements, we’re not pack rats by any stretch but there are some things we just couldn’t get rid of. The scary part is my wedding dress plus tons of childhood stuff are still at my parents house…but we’ll deal with that later, once we get everything in the house under control.
4. The house is slowly coming together. We’ve made a ton of trips to Lowe’s, Home Depot and Bed, Bath and Beyond over the past month. Last weekend we purchased a bed frame & headboard and a secretaries desk to organize our bills and paperwork. Here’s an awkward photo of the secretaries desk at the store.  We love it, and the price was AWESOME.
   
   We still have a list of some other things we need to buy, but we’ll get there. One of the top things on this list is blinds… one downside to building your own house is that there’s no blinds left there from the previous owner. The duck-taped sheets that are covering our bedroom and bathroom windows are starting to get to me so hopefully we’ll get the blinds installed soon.Onto the non house related stuff…
5. I finally got to try the whole spaghetti-squash-as-pasta-thing. I’ve been wanting to try it forever. It was simple and was definitely a nice change from eating pasta. The recipe I used was from here but didn’t do the whole garlic and butter thing. Instead I just added some pasta sauce to it.
6. The Pittsburgh half is getting closer and closer. This weekend I hope to run 9 or 10 miles for my long run. Training is going well and I’m starting to get excited. I also realized that since the Pittsburgh half and the Clevland half are 2 weeks apart I’ll qualify for the lowest level of Half Fanatics once I complete them. SWEET.
7. I ran a 5k about 2 weeks ago. It wasn’t my best, wasn’t my worst. Nothing really to report about it. A friend did get a pretty cool photo of me running in it though. At least I’m smiling?
8. I met with my cardiologist to review the reports of the echo cardiogram I had done. I have a small hole in my heart that apparently 1/4th of the population has. One of the outer walls is also slightly thicker, and the cardiologist said he wasn’t exactly sure why, but he wasn’t concerned about it either. I’m going to go back in 6 months to see him again to check in, and in the meantime he asked me to check my blood pressure occasionally, sometimes after I exercise because it was slightly high (which I had been attributing to all of the house stress). Most importantly, he said I can exercise just like I have been, and he said running is no problem at all, in fact it’s encouraged. He said there’s nothing to worry about. The findings are more so just interesting factoids that are good for me to know, but shouldn’t effect my daily life. Hearing this was a gigantic relief!

So all in all, things are going well and my stress levels are lowering. The house is bought, we are moved and mostly unpacked, running is going well, and my heart is a-ok. Can’t ask for much more than that. I am truly thankful.