Life By Lindsey Rae

We went to our house today and saw the builder while we were there. He said that we will be able to close on our house this month after all. It will probably be either the 19th or the 21st. It's really soon! I can't believe we are going to be moving in 3 weeks!
This past week they put the cabinets and counters and some flooring in and were working on more of that; including pluming fixtures today.
We had also paid for extra outlets in our cabinets so we could install some under cabinet lighting ourselves later on, but as it turns out, they made a mistake on it. This is good news for us because and so now the builder is going to install and give us our lighting for free. (Normally it's not an option they offer.) So, that will save us a few dollars that we were going to spend on that. I don't know if it will be exactly what we would buy ourselves, but I'm all about getting the free stuff whenever possible.

Overall, it was a pretty uneventful holiday. We didn't really do any big dinner thing. We hadn't really planned anything and didn't get any invitations to anyone's house this year, which has been the case for me in all the years I have previously lived here. Although, we did go over to Reco's in the evening so Jerrod could help him set up some stereo stuff that he is selling to him and ate some of their leftovers.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, I did not realize that Americans took the holiday so seriously until I moved here. Of course we have Thanksgiving too, but in some ways I think that they made a bigger deal out of it than they do Christmas. At school, people would ask me if I was going home for Thanksgiving and when I would say no, that I was not planning on going all the way to Canada for a one day holiday, (which by the way happed more than a month ago in my country) they would be absolutely shocked.
Earlier in the day we went over to Providence and saw our house. Amazingly enough, it has been painted! Well, partially. The first layer. The trim has been put up and painted also. I think that next week the cabinets are supposed to be put in. Jerrod talked to the builder last week and he said they are still attempting to close in December.
It's so crazy to me, because every time I think about moving, I can't even imagine it. I feel like I have lived at this place forever and the idea of moving in less than a month is just really unfathomable. There is (almost literally) a million things to do before then. All the packing and organizing. I am hoping to downsize my stuff and go through and get rid of what I am not using, which will definitely be a project. Then there are all the art things and the daily music stuff, recording, etc., to keep up with. It's overwhelming to think of it. A person needs to pick and choose their battles, but it's hard to choose when they all seem necessary.


On Friday, I did get up and go do the Black Friday shopping thing. I didn't buy much of anything, but I got to the mall early enough to get a free $10 mall gift card. Actually, the stores were pretty dead, all things considering. Looked like a kind of normal day at first. However, I think the real evil is when you go to places like Best Buy and people are trying to snatch all those limited quantity big-ticket electronic items. Some of the other stores really don't do any better on their "biggest" sale than any other sale, in my opinion. I really wish everyone would just rebel against this whole early morning thing too. I mean, why can't they have a sale that starts at 10 am rather than 4 am? Wouldn't it just be better for us all?

Today we went on a drive down to Birmingham to pick up an eBay auction that Jerrod won last week. It's some high-end audio that was being sold on behalf of someone by SnappyAuctions and they had somewhat mislabeled it and were charging a huge shipping fee for it, so Jerrod ended up finding it and winning it for really cheap. He has some of the stuff already and is going to re-sell it. Since they wanted so much to ship it, we went to pick it up. It's about a 3 hour drive. We pretty much went there and then turned around and came home. We did stop in Franklin and did a little shopping and looking around in Cool Springs on the way home. Not that we can't do that anytime; it's only 30-40 minutes away, but we don't go over there a whole lot because it's normally out of the way for us. But, it wasn't coming back from Alabama.

Our house is coming along further. We now have drywall and siding too and a finished ceiling too.
We stopped by today to take a look at it and take a few pictures.
This was all supposed to be done last week, but apparently there was some kind of siding shortage/delay and then, they couldn't put any drywall up until the siding was on to prevent moisture from getting in. So they said that put them eight days behind. We may now be closing in January instead of the targeted December 19th. They said they will still try to push it through, but, we'll see. We'll just have to wait until we get closer to know for sure.

I have always really enjoyed learning about history, ever since I was little and if I'm going to read something, I like to choose historical type writing. I recently discovered a very good author who writes historical non-fiction that reads like a novel. She is a British author named Alison Weir and she writes on English history. Her writing is so good because it is historically accurate and detailed as non-fiction should be, yet as entertaining as fiction is.
I actually like to listen to audio books a lot, when I am driving further distances across town or when I am working on my scrapbooking or art. So, I am very excited that I finally found someone who writes exactly the kind of stuff I like to learn about.
So, yesterday, I was looking at her website to see the list of books she had out and on one page, saw that she said that she had written that she really appreciated hearing from people who would take the trouble to write to her. So, I thought, since she appreciates it and I appreciate her writing good history books, I will write her a note to tell her so. I have never done something like that before, but I thought it would be nice. So, I sent her an email to tell her I thought her books were great. She promptly replied back to me today and said,

Dear Lindsey,

Thank you so much for your email and your very kind words about my books - it`s always really encouraging to get such great feedback. I am touched that you have taken the trouble to write to me.

Warmest good wishes,

Alison Weir.

So, that was really neat! I felt good that she replied back so quickly to my email...or replied back at all, and that she appreciated it. I always appreciate people who are appreciative.

In my appartment complex, I had 4 people there used to talk to around here and it seems they are all disappearing.
First there was Mari; who was my good friend. She is Japanese and lived here until May before she moved back to Japan. We used to hang out quite often and she made me lunch and I liked that a lot because she was a good cook. I really miss having not having a Japanese friend near me.
The other three people I just talked to. One I don't even know her name, but I know she had a pug dog named Coach...I guess mostly I just liked to see Coach. But now Coach moved away.
The other was a girl who lived next door to me and has now moved also. I liked her because she liked my art and always came over to me when I was working on projects to tell me she was jealous of my creativity and that I inspired her to make a scrapbook, so that was nice. And finally, I talk to George, who is an elderly guy who seems to not be in good health. He has a motorized wheelchair and he zooms and I mean zooms around on that thing; driving up and down the street several times a day. For exercise he says. (I find that so funny because, obviously, it's the chair, not him, that's doing the moving.) He carries an oxygen tank with him as he zooms around. Funny thing was that I always saw him so often. Even when I was going over Vanderbilt, on the other side of town. As it turned out, we had the same physical therapist. Anyway, tonight a firetruck and ambulance came and took George away. So, I hope he will be ok. They weren't moving too fast though, so I was a little worried that maybe he had passed away after they got there. But, we saw they hook an IV up through the ambulance window and Jerrod said that was a good sign. So, hopefully he will come back and I will see him zooming around again. I'm a little worried about him now.

Until I moved to the U.S., I don't think I realized that Remembrance Day isn't celebrated here. I know they have Veteran's Day on November 11th, but it's not really as big of a deal as you would think it would be; they being so patriotic and all. They don't even get the day off. I guess I was just surprised when I realized this, because it is a more important holiday in Canada and we are not as military oriented as they. I mentioned something about a poppy last night and Jerrod had never heard of such a thing. So I started explaining about how we wear the little plastic flowers and saying the In Flanders Field poem (which of course, every Canadian hears yearly, from the time they are in elementary school) and he had never even hear of it.
Speaking of Remembrance Day and thinking of war veterans, one thing that I often wish is that my Grandpa Suddaby would record his life history. He spent 5 years fighting in the war and I'm sure there are lots of things that he could tell about, but I know that he doesn't like the talk about those things, because they are bad memories for him. However, I also think it would be a shame if those things about his life were lost when he died. No one will know about them and all that history will be gone. There has been a few times in the past where he has said a couple of things when I asked him, but never too much and I think think these things need to be written down or recorded to be preserved. Maybe I can get him a little recorder for Christmas. I wonder if he'd use it. I will have to check out eBay and see how much I can get one for.

I am very diligent when it comes to taking care of my jewelry. I get my rings checked every 3-4 months because I love them and I am paranoid about having any loose stones.
In church last week Jerrod took my ring off me to look at it and noticed that the center stone on my 3-stone Tiffany ring was moving.
I am a little bothered by this...and Jerrod is more bothered by this, because I just had both my engagement ring and band checked two months ago when I was in Denver. And so, he is asking me how I possibly can have a loose diamond already when it was fine 2 months ago. I guess I must have hit my hand on something.
Both of my rings are very nice and have high clarity diamonds in platinum. I take good care of my them. I don't think I do anything with my hands that would cause a lot more damage than the average person, so why do I always seem to have loose diamonds? Or is that I just check them more often so I find them more often than the average person?
Anyway, since I had to get my ring checked I had an excuse to go to Tiffany & Co. Luckily there is a store in Nashville now. However, they don't do any repairs in store, so they still have to send the ring to New York to get worked on. So, now, I am at least a week without my rings. I'm hoping it won't cost too much, if anything. If they just need to tighten it, they may not charge, but if they have to re-tip prongs, it could get expensive. I guess they will let me know for sure what it will be sometime next week. I guess, even if they do need to re-tip it, that would still be better than loosing a diamond in the future.

So, this morning, we had (what was to me) a very early morning with an 8:30am meeting with our builder. It was a pre drywall meeting where basically you do a walk through of the house before they do the drywall to make sure they have everything right in your house.
So, as I was trying to figure out what I was going to wear today, the thought crossed my mind that I maybe should be more casual than usual and wear my running shoes in case we were outside of the house at all. It's still kind of hard to walk around there because there are a lot of big rocks and dirt piles and this sort of thing.
But then I almost wore heals anyway. I have probably 50-60 pairs of shoes and only about 4 or 5 of them are flat shoes. I don't like flat shoes. I don't care that I am almost 6 feet tall...and definitely am over 6 feet when I put my shoes on. I also don't care that my husband is at least 2 to 4 inches shorter than me at any given time. (Although he does). I just think my high-healed shoes are cuter. I saw a few minutes of that Victoria Beckham "Coming to America" show a few weeks back and in it, she mentions that she is also anti flat shoes. There was one scene where she is out practicing driving before going for her driving test and she gets pulled over by a cop in the process. Afterwards, when talking about the incident she says, “I was completely shocked and devastated because I was wearing flat shoes." I thought that was the funniest quote, because I've often tried to explain to Jerrod that this is how I feel when I don't wear heals, except, I never could explain it quite so dramatically.

Anyway, I finally did decide to go with my running shoes. The thought crossed my mind: "There will be another person there. If I am crawling around a construction site and injure myself because I a wearing high-heals I will look really stupid." So I wore the flat shoes.
Jerrod bought me running shoes when we were at Disneyworld. He thought I was going to get blisters if I walked around for so long without proper shoes for this sort of thing. He forced me.
But, I guess they come in handy for times when you have to crawl around construction sites, right? Not so true actually.

It was all fine until after the meeting when we were done, Jerrod wanted to walk across the street to the neighbors house to see how far along they were. When we came out and walked out the driveway, there was a pile of gravel they had poured in the driveway and I slipped on the gravel, with my flat running shoes and fell completely backwards. I hit the edge of the curb, smack down right on my tail-bone.
It really hurt. I cried. I thought maybe it was broken. Maybe it's ok, but I am sore. I have fallen on concrete before (in a choir concert, in front of all the people) and on ice, but none hurt so much as falling on the edge of a curb, actually.

So, the point of my story is that I am completely shocked and devastated that I was wearing flat shoes and after all the times I walked around there in skirts and heals, it was the time I was wearing jeans and running shoes and purposely tried to prevent falling that I actually fell!

The last couple of months my allergies have been surprisingly not so bad. Still there, but not so bad. The headaches have become less severe too. I have them maybe only 3-4 times a week as opposed to all 7. I think maybe it was a combination of getting my allergy shots 1-2 times weekly for the last 10 months and also the migraine medication.
However, the seasons are changing now and as it gets more fall like out there, I feel them coming back more. Not so intense as before, but bothering me more than they did a month ago. I'm allergic to a lot of molds, so I wonder if maybe it's not because with more vegetation dying, that brings more mold around. We don't get much wind, so I think that most of the time things doing get moved around and away. They just sit there and mold.
Anyway, although I find that my allergies are not really seasonal at all, I think I do remember last year when the weather was colder, I did have more pain in my sinuses.
I hate winter.
Not just for that reason. I just hate winter all together. It's cold. It makes me depressed. I hate fall because it means winter is coming.
At least the cold season is short here. Except for last year....last year was cold for so much longer than usual! (And so now I can't believe in global warming!)

Yesterday I learned some very good news. As I have mentioned before, Jerrod and I LOVE the show Meerkat Manor. It's basically a narrated documentary type show on the daily lives of these families of Meerkats living in the Kalahari Desert. Unless you have seen it, it's difficult to really explain why it is so good, but....it's good. It's really just good.
Anyway, what I learned is that there is going to be a full length Meerkat movie coming to theaters in 2008! It is made by the makers of Meerkat Manor and is going to mostly revolve around the life of one of the main characters and most popular meerkats who died this past season from a snake bite. (I know, sad).
This is so exciting for us since we love them so much. I can hardly wait to see it.
Here are a few good meerkat videos. They're advertisements, but they are funny.