Moving... again (puh)

Now that we've pretty much settled on the place, I figure I should go ahead and post that we are moving. How do we feel about that? Well, it's half "this sucks" and half "well, I guess we can save money, so that's good."

Estimating our Gainesville residency expectancy at about one year, we have chosen a lower priced home for our next place. The bonus is that though it is smaller and certainly less awesome than our current place, we aren't going to have to miss out on everything we gained. We will still have a yard, a laundry room, a paved driveway, central heat & air, and will have a good location (only a mile or so from this place). We will miss our garage, dishwasher, extra bedroom, extra living room, grassy yard, screened back porch, fun paint colors, and really nice neighbors.

We'll be moving at the end of the month. In the meantime, David is ordering a new engine for the pink car and Stink is coming up for a couple weekends to help put it in. Our goal is to have it up and running before we move so that no towing is involved.

My job is going to be trying to figure out what stuff we should ditch and what stuff we should keep. It's hard to say what you really neeeeed... we have gathered so much stuff and it isn't stuff you don't really need, but it might be stuff we don't really need right now. I'm so not looking forward to that!

Meanwhile, we are both still working full time, we have a few people thinking about hiring us for weddings, and we're trying to ride our bikes to work a fair amount of the time. Also, David's sister just got engaged and is expecting to get married May 2010. This is great motivation for me to ride my bike more to try to get in shape! I am trying to be helpful without being annoying to Kasey, though it is hard to tell from so far away and email communication. Oh well, sisters are meant to annoy each other, right?

;-)

Oh yeah, GO GATORS!!!

What's new?

I feel the need to blog, but I haven't got much exciting news to blog about. We're in the process of figuring out the holiday plans. One thing we know for sure is that we're going to our roomie Jessica's wedding in Deerfield Beach on the 27th of December, which means we're headed to the good ole' fort for Christmas.

I just finished up editing a massive quantity of photos including some for Dan & Sereen, whose wedding was in August. I always tend to beat myself up about not having finished things soon enough, and then when I'm done I realize, hey, it's only been two months, which is faster than I expected, so not bad...

David and I are still plugging away at our jobs, nothing too exciting there save some office drama for me and David doing way more work than one person should as usual. I guess something of interest is that David recently crashed his bike, his wonderful beautiful, long-awaited bike. So he's riding along, crossing three lanes of highway and going as fast as possible while shifting his bad mamma jamma shifters that are meant for racing and just such a purpose and whoopsie, his chain fell off. So David ended up head over bike over head over ... slam and sliiiide on the asphalt and ouch!

So I took off work that morning and we went to the ER, where the nurse did an excellent job cleaning David up. Unfortunately her bedside approach was to describe every thing she was doing, "Ok, so now I'm going scrub your deep abrasion with burning liquid on a spongey..." I did my best wife move, and told David to tell me about our prospects against LSU (it was THAT weekend! we missed out on the game - too many elbows close by to bonk David's) and that got him to a better place... ahhh football land. ;-)

He's healing up just fine, after a few weeks of soreness and changing dressings then graduating to band-aids and now just scabs! Since David was smart enough to insure his bicycle, we filed a claim and he's going to be able to get a new bike - so that's a bonus! Speaking of new bikes, I just got one myself and will be selling my old one. The new one works so much nicer and fits me! When we got it last weekend, I put it together myself, with a little help from David & Gary at Spin Cycle. I have ridden it a few times so far. I rode it home from work today in the freezing 50-something degree weather (and I want to move to Colorado?)and Northern winds and it didn't even bother me much because the gearing is so much mo' bettah!

David and I were very ambitious about doing weekly self-portraits a month or two ago, and so far we have done it three times. Oh well, at least we're still trying :-) It's been fun. Something we can do together that gets us to be silly, fun, and creative. Just what the Jemma ordered! ;-) Here are some from our latest "shoot".













Until the next urge hits me, adios amigos!

Lately :-)

So things have been busy in the Coleman household. We've finally gotten things mostly settled in our new place - it's nice that I don't look at each weekend or day off as time to tackle some other house project. At our new place, we've got three bedrooms; the brodie blue one is ours with a connecting bathroom in bright sherbet. Jessica, our awesome roomie lives in the room at the end of the hall. The last bedroom is an interesting shade of tan/brown and houses all of my crafty stuff! The other bathroom is turquoise and has an awesome shower curtain that David picked out. We've got sort of two living rooms, a big big kitchen, and a nice dining room. The cherries on top are the awesome back porch & yard plus a 2 car garage! We really love it here. Here are some pics!

On the job front, I just got a new job in Gainesville which means that I don't have to commute 50 miles each way to work! My new commute is 8.5 miles and it still takes me about an hour including changing clothes and freshening up, but it's all worth it since I am riding my bike to work!! WOohoooOOoooO! I'm very excited about this exercise opportunity! I rode in today for supervision this morning and then rode all the way back home. There were times when I had to psyche myself back into the riding on some of the longer hills, but I made it and I'm very proud of myself. :-P David does this every single day, so I have a lot to live up to!

I'm so pumped about the bike-riding that I often forget to talk about the new job. I guess part of the reason is that it isn't too much of a change. Same agency, different location, slightly different role. Instead of counseling children and going into the schools during the year and doing summer camp when school's out, I will be doing intakes half the week and the other half will be for seeing a small caseload of clients. Intake is the first appointment you go to with a therapist and at Meridian it isn't always with the therapist you will continue on with, but it is an important role as you are often the person who will represent Meridian to them on the front lines, so to speak. I'm looking forward to working with adults again & working on my skills with kids some more as well.

You probably figured out from of my photography posts that one of my best friends, Jocelyn is getting married to the wonderful Jeremy in September. It will be in Lyons, CO which is one of the best places to visit. I am going to be a bridesmaid, singing a little, and doing some photography with the best helper ever, the David. The wedding is going to rock and so will the party afterward! We're pretty excited as this will be our third wedding. I am also shooting one in August for the beautiful Sereen & talented Dan here in Gainesville. We just did our first wedding with Clinton & Felicia in May. They are the brave souls who gave me my first paid portrait session and now the first wedding. We just presented their photos to them last weekend and next is creating and designing their photo album! Exciting!

So, the photography business is trickling along, which is kind of perfect for us right now. My dream is to be able to get my license for counseling and have developed a decent part-time stint in photography by May 2010. It's so crazy to think about that being a year. Will I say "twenty-ten" or "two thousand ten"? It would also be sweet if I had time to get a hair-cutting and coloring permit by then too. I have this idea that I could be a stay-at-home-mom-slash-photographer-slash-therapist-slash-hair-didder and get the best of all worlds, plus cheap haircuts for the fam. Wouldn't that be sweet? We'll see what God says.

Speaking of God, we have been trying out a new church this summer. We've been going the The Family Church (TFC) in Gainesville and so far so good. We just finished up a Love & Respect class which focused on our marriage relationship. It was pretty enlightening and all that jazz. We learned some good stuff to practice. Next on our agenda is finding a family group to attend. We've been really blessed this summer with fellowship with our roommate and a few other friends like Jackie & Elijah, Renee, and Matt & Rebecca, so it has been easy to stay in that comfort zone.

I think that about sums up most of our life besides our trip to Colorado in May which I still need to edit photos for... David is going to post about that later I think. Thanks for checking in with us. Until next time...

Biking to work

So I've been biking to work the last couple of months, and it's been awesome. It's about 7.25 miles, mostly flatish both ways, good bike lanes or back neighborhood roads. It's generally a 26-28 minute ride in the morning, depending on what lights I catch and how hard I push. Since driving is about 15 minutes with all the school zones (which only teaches kids that they are special and the world will wait for them...lies), it's a 1o minute difference, except I get in my cardio for the day an all that.

I rode to campus throughout my undergrad, but biking to work is viewed differently. Some people think I'm crazy (I surely give them enough other reasons), but here's how I look at it:

• Gas is expensive. I save around 2-2.50 each day I ride in gas.
• Insurance is expensive. Since I'm driving the car less than the ~7000/year that I had been averaging, I get a break on the premium with a restricted use rating. That saves a few hundred a year.
  
• Free exercise that fits into my schedule nicely. If I were to go to the gym and work out for an hour, it'd take me a half an hour to get down there and back, and all that junk. This way, it just means I get up 10 minutes earlier and get home 10 minutes later.
  
• Gas funds terrorism, or something. Gas companies must be terrorists with the interest rates on those gas cards at any rate.
• One less trip probably saves the earth. At least it might keep Al Gore from telling another Inconvenient Lie or something.
  

So yeah, I'm definitely a proponent of commuting by bike. It's really good for me, it wasn't too hard to get started, and it's good for the environment and junk. Maybe I could take some pics of my commute each morning (the sunrise is pretty), or my bike (it's teal, which is sassy), or my helmet (it's orange and blue). There's a link on the right for a blog that has alot of information about commuting to work. Check it out, it's pretty cool.

-David