No news yet...

Well, we haven't heard anything new yet about the house...but we did stop and look at it, no drywall yet. I did however fight with blogger until it allowed me to post photos so here are a few from other cameras from the wedding and some from our honeymoon that we took.

The two photos with the green background were taken on the Martha Brae River in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. The one on the boat with our cute mask lines was taken off the coast of Montego Bay after a snorkeling adventure! The others are obviously from the wedding and reception. You can look at some of the photos the photographer took by going to http://candidphoenix.easyphotoview.com/photos clicking "weddings" then scrolling down to "Shelby and Ryan" and the password is 060206. Not all of them are there, which is the reason for the lunch meeting to see the rest of them in the albums. Have fun!

Good news on the house!

Well after much fretting over what to do about the house we have a solution! While we weren't sure whether the builder would come down in price we had several people looking into our options for us, but before we had heard any of their ideas the builder called and gave us their new selling price! The new price we got from them is $2,000 over market value and we still have to add on our options but it is still a great deal. We're getting a 2,235 square foot house on a 10,500 square foot lot (1/4 acre) for $235,000...where in December we were going to get the same house on the same lot for $297,000. Not bad eh?! We are very excited about the house and being able to keep it, but after talking to our mortgage lady we are even more excited! With the price reduction from the builder they are also giving us $6,210 towards closing costs which she says will cover the closing costs completely. We have the choice to either use our earnest deposit of $2,500 to buy down the interest rate or take a cash rebate and get it all back to help cover moving costs (or we're thinking we will use it to buy our bed that we want). So...lot's of good news!!

I thought I would try to throw in some pictures of the house and a few of the wedding. The photographers pictures turned out pretty good but it will be about another month before we get the albums...I would love to show everyone the albums so we will all have to get together, maybe for lunch sometime!!

(Hmm...I'm still not getting the window to allow me to add images, I don't know what's wrong, I have the setting adjusted to allow pop-up's but it still won't let me....oh well.)

Married Life...

It's not so bad! It's actually not all that different; since we've been back from our honeymoon Ryan has been working a lot more so we hardly ever see each other. I've decided to run an in-home daycare center for the summer so that I can stay home and keep up with my "wife duties" while making a little bit of money at the same time. Ryan has been training to become a "Floor" which is a manager in a poker room. He seems to be very excited, but he sure has been working A LOT!!

The wedding was great despite all of the little things that didn't go perfectly. We had a gorgeous cermony with a breeze that made us all forget that it was 110 degrees that day. Our minister was a bit strange but he got his job done...we're married. We had hired our favorite local musician to play reggae music during our ceremony and while I heard he was great, I of course only got to hear about half of a song. Since we were so late getting started we didn't have the time to have the cocktail hour that we had planned, but that's okay because Ryan and I like to drink wine!! We took all of our leftover alcohol home and have been slowly but surely taking care of it! The picture taking though...that was awful! The breeze stopped and the full 110 degrees was rearing its ugly head as we were standing out in the humid grass trying to look happy while flesh eating flies were attacking us! We didn't get to take all the pictures we had wanted to, but we did get a lot of good ones back!

The reception is a blur... All I remember is being hungry and thirsty the whole time. People were coming up to the head table to take photographs (which I would like copies of if anyone is reading this!!) and instead of chowing down on our food, we were smiling and kissing with all of those little bells ringing! We had to completely change the order of events for the evening to accomodate the late start and the guests that were trickling out before we even finished dinner. We were forced to cut the cake first, then do our first dance while the caterers cut the cake and served it (and they didn't do that well at all as about half of the guests including Ryan and I didn't even get a piece) and then the father-daughter dances, the dollar dance, I don't even remember what all happened. Then the photographer wanted to leave so we had to leave the reception for a while to go take pictures in and around the limo. We weren't too impressed with the photographer, he just wasn't very accomodating to our schedule changes and our needs, but oh well. We left the reception at 11pm and took a nice leisurely ride in our limo around town and stopped at Rula Bula to see Walt (the singer) then we landed at the hotel (The Scottsdale Plaza) at about 1:30am. Phew......IT'S OVER!!!!!

Then there was the pre-honeymoon, the weekend at the hotel was lovely. We got spa treatments and relaxed by the pool! The honeymoon though, that is another story altogether! We went to Jamaica (again) and it wasn't quite the same. The service was sub-par from our first trip and the weather was a little rough but that's not the worst of it....I was sick the whole time! I had the worst urinary tract infection in the world and of course was determined not to go to a doctor. I had just enough Uristat to get me through the worst of the pain, but then the pain shifted to my back. Thinking it was going into my kidney, I was getting very nervous and had no Advil to help with that. After a fiasco at the front desk trying to get something for the pain at 3:30am I was needless to say very frustrated!! The second half of the trip was better, the weather had turned and we spent most of our time laying in the sun on the beach reading our books. We got a nice Jamaica tan, went rafting down the Martha Brae river and took a pontoon boat to Margaritaville and snorkled along the way!! Overall the trip was good, but our first trip definetly takes the cake!

Our house is a whole other issue entirely...we're not sure if we will actually be moving in our not. We are scheduled to close 30-60 days from now but unless they are willing to come down in price we are going to walk away. The reason......well, they are asking us to pay $286,000 for a home that you could walk in and buy for $204,000. As an investment opportunity in the first place, this is NOT a good deal. So, I'll keep you all updated on the progress of that, but for now...it's kind of up in the air!

I'm exhausted from drudging up the past month for over an hour now so I'm going to call it a day (or night in this case) and blog later...when I have happier news!!