Donuts, Gas Monkey, Kenny Chesney & IKEA

After such a horrible week, a fun & relaxing weekend was what I needed and that's what I got! Saturday morning, we went to Krispy Kreme and got some donuts for our drive to Dallas. As always, they were delicious!!

Jacob has always wanted to go to Gas Monkey Bar & Grill so we met our friends Cassie and Bryce there for lunch. Cassie and I went to college together (we lived right next door to each other) and I only get to see her every now and then, so it's always a treat when we get together!

I had the brisket grilled cheese for lunch and it was pretty good, but I wasn't super impressed. I would definitely say the hype is more for the environment than the food. 

We finished lunch just in time to go check into our hotel, book our shuttle to the concert (which ended up being a party bus fully equipped with a stripper pole), and take a quick catnap before the Kenny Chesney/Jason Aldean concert.  I might have a slight obsession with Kenny...this was actually my fifth time to see him...

The concert started at 4:30 and ended around 11:00 so it was a long day! We got to see Old Dominion, Cole Swindel, Brantley Gilbert, Jason Aldean, and of course, Kenny. The good thing about AT&T Stadium is there really isn't a bad seat in the entire venue because of their massive screens! There are quite a few standing bars around the arena, so we actually ended up standing for about 3/4 of the concert. We made friends with a couple of Long Island transplants and we all had fun watching a few drunk cougars try to dance (they may have passed out a few times before the night was over). Oddly enough, the guy that we met is actually a recruiter for the Greenbay Packers--call me a skeptic, but I didn't believe him until I got home and verified it online! Small world!! 

To finish off our amazing weekend, we stopped by IKEA on our way home (by "stopped by" I mean, we spent 3 hours there) and enjoyed lunch at the food court. We found an amazing $10 cutting board that I can't wait to use! 

And for those of you wondering, I will post all about our meeting with the Design Center and what's next with the home building process soon!

Linking up here.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

I had every intention of writing something clever this week, but that was before my life turned into a series of unfortunate events.

It all started last Wednesday when I got a weather alert that there were tornadoes forming near my mom's house. I immediately text her to tell her to watch the weather and stay close to her safe room--of course she had no idea. She looks out the window to see this (as well as a news helicopter over her house):

Needless to say, I spent the rest of the afternoon worried about her and watching the weather to make sure it wasn't headed toward our house. Despite listening to the tornado sirens go off all night, we didn't get tornadoes near our house, just torrential rainfall and this pretty rainbow: 

On Thursday night, we were supposed to go to our first meeting with the design center to discuss our plans for the house we are building (did I forget to mention that we are building a house?), but when we were five minutes from the office, they called to say that they were going to cancel our meeting because of the chance of flash flooding that evening. Are you kidding me?! We have waited 5 weeks for this meeting and it gets cancelled the day of? To say I was angry is an understatement. When they looked at the schedule to see when they could "squeeze" us in, the first appointment was on May 26th. Seriously?! Three weeks away? After crying tears of anger the entire drive back home, they called my husband to tell him they decided to have a big group the following Thursday and we could come in then. I'm sure after calling the 3 other couples who were scheduled the same night as us, they realized how angry canceling appointments and trying to reschedule for a month later made people and decided they better make it right. 

On Sunday, we went to my mom's house for Mother's Day and went to install the glass/screen door we bought her only to realize that box didn't have all the parts we needed--we couldn't attach the door knob to the door! Really though?! Of course, nowhere in town had the part we needed so we had to literally barricade the door so the wind wouldn't blow it open (classy, I know). Luckily, my brother was able to find the part and will be able to fix the door soon.

Yesterday, my brain apparently missed the memo that it wasn't a Monday because I literally could not function. It was one of those days where nothing you do/say is right. I found myself asking questions I knew the answers to and overlooking the most obvious of things. Needless to say, I wish I hadn't gotten out of bed. 

This morning, I get an email from Capital One that there might have been fraudulent activity on my credit card. Why no, Capital One, I did not make 7 charges ranging between $1 and $12 at "Regis Hairstylists/Salons, Classified: Professional Services, and/or the Casablanca Hotel." I quickly called Capital One and told them they were in fact fraudulent so now my credit card is shut off. Thank goodness Capital One is on top of things and caught the issue before the identity thief got crunk on Amazon! 

Finally, I come home to discover that my crockpot barbeque pork tenderloin looked like this: 

Pinterest fail. 

If you need me, I'll be hiding under the covers of my bed...

P.S. Please send good vibes to us for our design meeting tomorrow--apparently, we need all the good luck we can get this week! 

Our Love Story, Part Three

via

You can read Part One here & Part Two here.

I could write so many posts on our relationship and our many visits to see each other, but I’m sure these posts are getting boring, so I will try to wrap this up in one final post!

After our first weekend together, Jacob and I both knew that we had an undeniable bond. During one of our late night phone calls, we started planning our next visit and since Jacob was out of vacation days (he spent all of his at the dunes), it was decided that I would fly out there again.  Luckily for us, I was at a good-paying job with commission bonuses so money wasn’t an issue; unluckily for me, that employer was the worst and would slowly suck the life out of me.  With that being said, I honestly don’t know how we could have made the relationship work if it weren’t for that job, so I do thank God for sending me down that path. We decided that it would work best for me to go visit him over Memorial Day weekend—he wanted to take me to Lake Havasu with some of his friends.

Lake Havasu

At that point, we still hadn’t used the terms “girlfriend/boyfriend” or really talked about being exclusive—we were still trying to sort out the whole long-distance thing, so the last thing we needed to worry about was labels.

Remember those butterflies that I talked about in the last post? Well, they made another appearance on my flight to Phoenix (and every trip after that). I will never forget the anxious/excited feeling that I felt every time I went to visit and every time he would come visit Oklahoma.

Shortly after that Memorial Day weekend at Lake Havasu, I finally asked Jacob if I was his girlfriend. His response was “You have been for awhile.” Well goodness, how’s a girl to know if you don’t say it? Haha. We never could pinpoint exactly when we became official, but since 29 is a significant number to us (both of our birthdays fall on the 29^th of our birth months), we decided we would claim May 29th, 2012 as the day we made it official.

Over the next year, we made more trips back and forth than I can even count. You always hear about trust issues and fights that long-distance couples have but that was never the case with us. There was one point where we started to wonder if we could make it work, but with lots of self-reflection, communication, and prayer, we made it through that tough stage. We did quickly discover that the conversation about who would move where caused a lot of tension, so we just refused to talk about it; call it denial, call it naïve, call it whatever you want but I had faith that if we were meant to be then that issue would work itself out and I was right.

In early 2013, Jacob randomly made a comment about selling his house and moving to Oklahoma. I just shrugged the comment off because that was always such a touchy subject for us. Little did I know, he was serious—within a few months, he had sold his house, moved in with one of his friends, sold his quad and toy hauler, and started looking for jobs in Oklahoma. By August, he was packing a U-Haul trailer and heading to Oklahoma! I was still in shock and very overwhelmed—I struggled with the idea that he would give up everything he knew and move across the country, I felt guilty that I didn’t have to give up anything, and I felt so much love for the man who was willing to that for me—for us.

On December 31^st, 2013, Jacob asked me to be his wife! He was so nervous that he could barely get the words out but it was absolutely perfect and I wouldn't change a thing about that night. 

When we were discussing my ring later that night, he said he was so afraid I would find it at his apartment (I’m notorious for ruining surprises) so he had it hidden in his coat pocket in the closet for the past FOUR MONTHS—he bought the ring before he even left Arizona! When I asked him why he bought it so early instead of waiting to make sure he wanted to be in Oklahoma and with me, he said “Do you think I would have moved to Oklahoma if I didn’t know I was going to spend forever with you?”