June Update

So as usual our personal blog gets neglected as we update facebook and the photography site. But it's high time for this to be updated too, so here goes:

1) We're settled into our new living space now. Good location, neighbors, noise, and bug levels. The dogs like the backyard, which is super important. It's about the same distance to both of our offices, so the bike ride is still doable. Jemma is not happy that it's not full of color like the last place, but there's enough art and photography on the walls that it's ok. for now. But I'm sure she'll talk me into painting if we stay here any longer. It's just her way. Must. Have. Colors. Everywhere.

2) The trusty Volvo died, so we had to get a new car. We shopped some used cars, but the depreciation on them didn't match with the lost value of things like reduced warranty etc, so we ended up buying our first new car! It's a VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI, and we love it! It's been raining here, so no official pictures yet, but a photo shoot is forthcoming of course! Room for the dogs, racks for the bikes, 6spd manual, 30/41MPG make it a very good fit for us right now. And it is a pretty good ride for schlepping around the state for this photography thing we've got going on....

3) Which leads me to the photography business. It's been going really well. Totally redone website, tweaking the branding, honing our skills; all progressing ahead at a break-neck pace. We've booked more weddings in the first 6 months of year than I figured we'd do all of the year. Plus maternity/graduation/couple portrait sessions have been really fun too. We went to a photography workshop earlier in the year in Oregon, which rocked and taught us some things we'd been missing. We also recently got to assist/second shoot with a great Tallahassee wedding photographer, which was really encouraging and fun! Like I said before, gainesville wedding photographer site gets updated more often than this, so please check it out!

4) Now that the weather is a bit warmer we've been both riding bikes more. Commuting by bike to work together is really fun and a cool way to spend time together. Nothing brings you together like dodging cars while the drivers text away on their trip to work. Luckily we pay attention, plan for the worst, and hope for the best. But it's fun. I recently rode in an Alley Cat race, which is basically a bike scavenger hunt. I got 14th out of 60ish people, which is better than I expected to do, as I was shooting for winning the costume contest. Riding 20+ miles in a full UPS uniform, polyester pants and all, to win with the theme of the 1997 Kevin Costner Movie, "The Postman". Though I was devastated when I got 2nd place to a girl who had nothing postal on at all, it was a fun day. :sigh:

5) We are really excited to have off some time around the holidays this year for the first time since we've been married. We're looking forward to spending time with family and friends! Details forthcoming...

6) We're both on Twitter, updated at least daily. If you're on, look us up so we can follow you!

I'm sure there are things that I'm forgetting, but it's getting late, so this will have to do for now.

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!!!

house pics

ok family & friends, i've finally had the chance to get our photos of the house online for you to see! so check it out.

For a description - check our old post here. I put a link to the gallery within this post as well.

Love Jemma

p.s. now come visit!

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...