we're moving!

WOW! It's been a long time since I last blogged. Alas, the very few of you who read this have doubtfully been holding your breath and waiting for my next posting.

Jason has been gone for 8.5 weeks and the adventures have continued in his absence. Sweet Chandler has been to training camp and is back there now as a temporary resident. Why? Because we're moving and it was in his best interest to get some fresh air for a while. No worries -- I'm not giving up my puppy dogs. Our new house has a fenced in yard for he and Coco to romp around in. My dear friend Renee and her husband volunteered to babysit Coco.

Moving. again. packing up all of our things. again.

The pack rat in me is extremely glad that I have kept boxes that items come in. The newlywed in me is now wondering why we registered for wedding gifts. I LOVE everything we received and my china cabinet is the perfect display case for our treasures. Packing everything back up is giving me anxiety.

I took the day off of work to TRY and get a handle of this household. I should be a professional at this by now. This is my 10th move since graduating from college and moving home (that move is not included in the tally) -- but I'm almost as bad at it as the first move! My goal for today is to get the china cabinet, pantry and "office/library" room packed away. It's been 2.5 hours and I've managed to pack half of the china cabinet. I wish I had a helpful blog to write. Maybe I'll post my culinary adventure tonight.

My new outlook on food is worthy of a blog (in my opinion) so that can be my excuse for procrastinating later tonight. See? Anything to keep from packing....

Bah. Back to the grind....

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I have survived two full weeks without Jason. Kind of. I'm learning new levels of frustration every day and learning just how long my fuse is before I explode.

These two weeks have not been without their highlights -- I saved my first dog, appropriately named Zoey, from animal control. Work has picked up and I am running on more cylinders than I thought I had, and I already have my taxes turned into my accountant. The dvd of our wedding and our picture cd finally arrived and I get the pleasure of reliving that day every evening. I also cry every single time. Man, I really loved our wedding and am thankful we were able to capture the experience on film.

I LOVE my couch. I love my couch so much that it seems silly. I wont ever mind being in the doghouse and "having to sleep on the couch", and neither will Jason. It's a Pottery Barn sofa that is big and plush and you can sink right into it and fall asleep in 5 minutes. Jason and I can both stretch out and watch a movie without being in the other person's way. It's a great entertaining couch because of it's L shape and how the coffee table fits into place. It's just a ridiculously awesome couch. Ask anyone that has sat on it.

My adventures in Dog World continue and today I was pushed to my limits. I left the dogs unattended for 5 minutes and when I heard them wrestling I came back to make sure the smallest dog was still alive. And instead of a dead or injured canine, I found my injured couch. My beloved (and expensive) couch had the linen slipcover shredded away on one side. Most people will say it's my fault or that I had no business with an expensive couch -- and to those people I say "shut up". We wanted nice things, quality pieces that we would enjoy sitting/laying/lounging/sleeping on. And we fell in love with this sofa. Slipcovers CAN be inexpensive but such is not our luck. It's nearly a 2 week paycheck to replace it. I saw shades of red that I didnt even know existed when I realized what the dogs had done. I learned a very important lesson -- do not leave dogs unsupervised. Not yet at least. Ours are too young and too new (to us) to be trusted alone.

The couch was the second injury this week -- the dogs also chewed up my Pottery Barn coffee table. Anyone know of a good wood repair person???

Jason's departure is allowing me to grow. To test my patience. To see just what I'm made of. So far everyone has survived but the furniture has not. I am getting wiser by the hour and the jaunt through Dog World just might be my greatest challenge to date.

another week has passed, already???

I should have blogged on Tuesday, but I was too tired to even form complete sentences by the time the night was over. And then I could have posted on Wednesday, but I was recovering from Tuesday. On Thursday life was busy as normal, Friday was dinner with my family, and that leads me to today.

I have no idea where time has gone, and I'm extremely serious. It seems like I was graduating from college not long ago (it's been almost 9 years). I began working at my company nearly 5 years ago. Holy cow. I met Jason nearly two years ago and THAT really feels like yesterday. He began his deployments overseas and time dragged on a little bit. Now he's about to embark on his third trip and I'm torn because it seems like he just came home -- 3 months ago. Today we have been married for 2 months -- the best two months ever!!!!

On Tuesday my inspired interest in helping shelter animals lead us on an adventure to Rome, Georgia. That's about 90 minutes from where we live. I had seen a posting of a huge fluffy puppy and I wanted to go meet him. Jason always had dogs, and he was eager to go and check out this little fella. After a busy and hectic day, I left a little bit early from work and away we went!! The puppy was cute. Really cute. And it was caged with an annoying other dog that bit the puppy in the face (poor little guy)! I couldn't bring myself to NOT look at the other dogs in the row of cages that lined the walls. At the end of one row I was drawn into a pair of sad amber eyes. A sweet face, curled up into himself, and those sweet and sad beautiful eyes...

The first image to run through my head was a flashback to the day I discovered Duchess -- huddled in the back of the cage, sad and piercing blue eyes, and was the only cat not to bring attention to herself. And I wanted her.

I now wanted the dog with the sad amber eyes. Jason and I debated and visited with both dogs, and while we wanted to take both of them we couldn't. Not yet at least. The amber eyed dog won out. The trip home was fun, my car smelled like a stinky dog (rightly so), a long visit to PetsMart, an hour long bath in our master bath that resulted in a clogged drain that still isn't clear, and one seriously worn out puppy dog. Midnight sneaked up on me and my alarm the next day was ringing all too soon.

Chandler is a laughable dog, sweet and affectionate, appreciative and understanding now of what love is. He and Coco are wonderful playmates and we are lucky to have found him. Coco is a handful and hyper and loves to be loved, and oh so sweet. Now I have Chandler to keep me company, along with Coco, and our menagerie of felines while Jason is away.

I have volunteered with Angels Among Us Pet Rescue and between pets, volunteering, work, and catching a nap now and then I think the time that Jason is away will pass quickly; it always does.

Tomorrow I'll post about my experience for my first rescue -- another dog that I felt a strong need to save but couldn't take her myself. It should be an interesting day and I can only hope that it' the first of many.

Puppy Power!!!!

Wow. Hadnt realized it had been so long since I blogged. That's such a strange word, by the way. Blogged. Anyway, I digress and it's only the first paragraph.

I love being married. Truely. I love that I was lucky/blessed/fortunate to find a man that encourages my love for animals. He may not always understand, but he never puts down my desire to want to save and help the pets out there that do not have warm homes, soft beds and affection showered upon them. Jason even is on the bandwagon now, too!

SO that brings us to 2012. A brand new year. Brand new opportunities and a clean slate in which to start off.

I'm a cat person. Always have been. Always will be. I've only had cats growing up and I love just about everything about them. Mine especially. Cats are very smart, they're quiet, they're self sufficient. Dogs are foreign to me.

I always tell Jason that when we win the lottery I want a home with a lot of land -- so that I can build a kennel house with individual spaces, heat and A/C, and a large fenced in pen for dogs that we foster. And I want a cat room that gets sunshine for them to bask in for those animals. No, not in the hoarder kind of way. I legitimately want to find forever homes for animals, not keep them all for myself.

The cats we had when I was young(er) were always purchased from breeders, and I didnt even know that animal rescues exisited. When I was 21 and I went to the county animal control and found Duchess it opened up a new world for me. All of my pets since her have all been adopted, and I've had an itch to do something more....

I'm a busy lady at work during the week and used to work just about every Saturday. I'm thankful for that, please do not misunderstand me. However, my work life and choice of living location have not been close together. I fought and fought against moving into the suburbs, only to find myself here anyway and loving it. I'm only a few miles from work and I just recently filled up the tank of my SUV with gas after 3 weeks. THATS AWESOME! The point of this is to say that my life has not been conducive to volunteering or having pets that required so much devotion of my time and attention. That all changed on Thursday night.

Meet Coco(nut). Our wedding officiant friended me on Facebook and the first thing I said to Jason was "her posts are going to be the end of me!". Deanna is a fellow animal lover and advocate for finding homes and fosters for animals in need. SHe posts on an hourly basis pictures and information for animals in urgent need of help. She, however, was not the end of me, but, the beginning of an internal desire to help.

Here was my chance. I'd wanted to help before but couldnt -- lived too far away, not home enough, etc. She posted a picture of an adorbale puppy. Yes, puppy. Not even a fully trained dog or older puppy. A brand spankin new puppy - one that has no clue what a command is, not house broken, an probably never been on a leash. Jason and I decided to dive right in.

He's in love already and wants to keep her. We'll see about that....

We've had her for one night. The cats are upset and hide under a bed but they did end up sleeping with me last night.

Haley isn't so sure and is watching throught the coffee table

Holt is the only brave cat, so far. He peeks through the spindles on the safety of the stairs and talks to Coco. He doesn't want her getting too close right now, but he's interested in having a playmate. Coco, on the other hand, is beside herself with wanting to play. She and Holt are the same size and she's just giddy with excitement, but disappointed since the kitten keeps his distance.

I anticipate this experience to be interesting and hopefully too much fur doesn't fly in the process of loving and learning.

An American girl at Omaha

I think I was in the 5th grade when my Grandaddy finally spoke about his experiences in WWII. I had a school project and he sat down with me and a tape recorder to tell me his stories. I was young and unappreciative. And I was most definitely not worthy of hearing the stories he had to tell.

Today Jason and I visited Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc and the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. To bear witness to the conditions of the "beach", have memories return from conversations with my grandfather about when he stormed the beaches for D Day and view the ultimate sacrifices of thousands of boys and men who never returned home was humbling.

I do not cry much. I told Jason that this day trip was more for him bc I did not have the appreciation.

I was wrong. I cried. I said a silent prayer and took in all that the museum and thousands of white crosses laid out before me had to offer. 9,000 crosses, actually.


My grandfather survived the invasion of Normandy and the reoccupation of France in 1944. Now I understand why he drank constantly upon his return to the united states. I cannot fathom what a sober life would be like if I watched my friends and comrades die in battle. Actual battle. Not the kind we have today where it is distances and machines. I mean the kind where you see a mans face as you pierce him with a bayonet or shoot him with a gun in your hand.

The nightmares and images that would haunt your sleep would be enough to drive anyone to a bottle to numb and block it out. I'm not saying it was right, but now I can better understand. A family and daughters to raise would be something to block the memories, but the images would always be there in your head as constant reminders.......



I am glad we went.

A married American girl in Paris

Jason is out smoking a cigar and selecting a bottle of red wine as I write this. I love that about him - he's in an element and state of mind that relaxes him. He can be anywhere, at anytime and take in all that his surroundings have to offer. We have spent our days and evenings talking, sharing and hanging out. I love this honeymoon cocoon we are in. I sleep better than I have in months. I have no stress. He has no stress. We can just be as we are, and be together. No deadlines. No errands to run. No where we have to be.

I am still living the high from our wedding - an event that I would do a millions times over again and again. Despite my own self induced stress I had no worries and I had a damn good time. If anyone that attended did not have fun, then that is their fault. The months of planning and decisions and meetings resulted in a wedding that was EXACTLY what I wanted. If anyone is in need of referrals then just ask me.











So the spectacular event in which I became Mrs Jason Burt then brought us to Paris. I love the memories we are making, the fun we are having, the ring on his finger that I make sure to touch and play with every time he holds my hand. Jason and I have fun everywhere we go and we are in love, and it shows. I notice the people around us watch us when we are sitting at a table in a cafe or restaurant. We laugh. We smile. I stare at him when he isn't watching.

I've been told that this will wear off. Life will return to normal. We will fight. He will get on my nerves. Life will get in the way.

I hope that life will hold off for a bit. I am enjoying this phase immensely. Paris has been good to us and we will be sad to leave. We have toured and walked, enjoyed a dinner cruise along the Seine, strolls through a Christmas market with an illuminated Eiffel Tower 100 meters away, holding hands and hot cinnamon wine, window shopping, scarves and cold wind. I wouldn't trade our cold and rainy days in Paris for the warmest and most sunny days on a beach for anything.













I love being a married American girl in Paris.

An American girl in Paris

This is tough to do on an iPad, but I'm trying.

Being an American girl in Paris is easy. I like it. People have been friendly and accommodating. People all speak English. Paris is clean, the people do not smell bad and they are not all chain smokers. All of the notions I had in my head of what the city would be were false. I was warned not to look and act like an American, not to wear jeans and tennis shoes.

I look "American" and there isn't really much I can do about it. Blondes do not really exist here. However, I have blended in bc I have refused to look like a tourist. I do no have a backpack - I have an oversized designer handbag that I tote my camera and iPad around in. I "speak" as much as a I can and remember my manners. Hello, good morning, good evening, please, thank you -- all important phrases to know. My attempts to speak French have been appreciated and everyone I have come across has smiled and immediately returned my arttempts with English. If I butcher a word then I take the opportunity to learn the correct pronunciation.

Being an American girl in Paris has been wonderful. Jason has already promised me that we will come back.


There is so much to see here that it is not possible to see it all in one trip. Seriously. Even a week long trip where we have walked through the city for 12 hours a day. This is the part where I wish I had my tennis shoes...you cannot imagine how badly my feet hurt.

When we were in Italy last spring I walked through the streets and imagined myself living there. I had not been able to imagine the same thing about Paris until yesterday. I could definitely be an American girl in Paris :)