Hello from Montana

Hi everyone,

I thought I would try to start a blog so you would know what's going on in our lives out here since we're so far from everyone. As you already probably know, we moved to Great Falls, MT in the very end of March after being at Vandenberg AFB in California since August of 2008. We closed on our first house on April 28 and we got a welcome present of 22 inches of snow. Welcome to Montana, I hope you like, um, snow? (crap is more like it).

The house is 2000 square feet between the first floor and basement. We have 5 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, a fenced in yard, single car garage and a two-car carport. The outside has a nice deck as well as a storage shed. Tootsee loves her big yard where she can roam free with no more leash. Now we get to experience her running full force in circles like an idiot. It's quite funny actually. I really need to get a video of it.

We've already tackled some home improvement projects. We tore down horrendous wallpaper only to find, guess what...more wallpaper! We primed and painted the room to a sage green and repainted all the trim white. We tore out the carpet and put down laminate floor and also got some grown-up furniture. We couldn't be happier with the result. We also did some painting 2 of the rooms in the basement. I have a sunny yellow scrapbook room and Ben has a light brown "man room" where he built himself a work bench (for future projects, of course) and put up peg board to hang up tools. We used to have a gross apple border in the kitchen, so we took that down and repainted the kitchen white. Now on to other projects as the time comes (such as removing the carpet in the bathroom and putting down tile). Seriously, carpet in a bathroom is disgusting.
This is the finished living room - new paint, new floors, new furniture, and the pup, Tootsee

Ben also built a firepit in the backyard for entertaining purposes...it's been getting a lot of use (well except for now because it's so freakin' hot outside).

Ben recently started going on alerts for his squadron. For those of you who don't know what that means, he goes to a missile facility anywhere from 2-3 hours away and goes 6 stories below ground to a capsule with his crew partner (who is also named Ben) and they watch the missile launch sites to make sure they are secure. He is there for 24 hour shifts, usually 2 per week depending on the schedule. So he's gone all in all around 30-36 hours for each alert. At least he is able to call me and I can call him so long as he's not doing anything important.

I started my new job the end of June for the Great Falls Clinic. I work in the pre/post surgical area where we get patients ready to go to surgery and then we recover them as soon as they are out of the OR. Most patients then go home, but those with bigger surgeries like joint replacements and bigger plastic surgery cases go over to the small inpatient unit connected to the surgery center. I love the job so far, especially since it's 10 hour (give or take) day shift with call every 6th weekend. We take call on holidays too but don't actually have to be there unless there is an emergency surgery (which those would usually go to our competing hospital in the area, Benefis). I really lucked out with this job because I somehow managed to avoid working a single night shift since becoming an RN.

Well I do believe I rambled on enough for now. I'll keep posting as more stuff comes up in our lives. Thanks for reading.