Our first visitor!

We had our first visitor last week. An old co-worker of mine from Family Video came and stayed with us for 5 days. It was a relaxing yet busy week. Some things we did were played mini golf, rode go carts, went on a picnic, saw some of Nashville consisting of downtown, Opry Mills Mall and Gaylord Opryland Convention Center and hung around home and visited with one another.
To end the all day Nashville (downtown, Opry Mills, Gaylord Opryland) trip we visited Dave & Buster's, where Dan and Kim met up with us. Dave & Buster's is basically an adult Chuck-E-Cheese. It is was very fun! Here Matt, for the first time, experienced drinking and driving while on a motorcycle.

Another fun, memorable moment was eating BBQ chicken from the grill on our patio. It was so messy and we made fun of each other will all the BBQ sauce all over our faces. Yet another Kodak moment missed.
We would like to that everyone is welcome to come visit us at anytime. You will have your own bedroom and bathroom so you don't have to worry about paying for an expensive hotel room.
-A

Ichi-Ni-San Sushi!

One of our favorite meals to eat/make, Tiger's too. Just wanted to share the pictures since ya'll couldn't be here to eat it with us.
-M

Wild Garlic?!?

Matt and I were sitting out on the patio painting a project of ours and I smelled something peculiar. SO... my first reaction was "MATT, you stink!" He of course denied everything and we forgot about it, for the time being. I continued to paint and Matt continued to sand. A few moments later the smell came back and I commented that it smelled like chives. And it hit us, we have wild garlic growing in our yard. We thought it was green onions at first but did research and found out it was garlic. We don't complain because we have used it as green onions in some of our food. It seems like most people hate it and think of it as a weed, but we welcome it.
-A

Happy Birthday To Me!

Wednesday the 7th was, as you may well know, my birthday, yea! For dinner, we ate shrimp fettucini alfredo, garlic toast, and peas, all accompanied by a "fine" chardonnay. Ashley made a German chocolate cake for me, her first ever.
It was boring, but perfect. She got me a really nice pair of gore-tex hiking shoes, which I use every Sunday. Moron that later.
Friday the 9th, Dan(Ashley's brother) and Kim(his fiancee), took Ashley and I out for the night in Nashville, unfortunately we forgot the camera. We experienced the Frist art museum, featuring Mexican lithography and paintings from Picasso's blue period and several from Matisse, fantastic! Afterword we went to a Moroccan themed restaurant called Layl'a rul, they are well known in Nashville for their martinis and fine cuisine. We, the table, ordered nearly everything from their tapas menu, excluding only 2 or 3 items. Dinner was fantastic and I was overly stuffed. However, after dinner, Dan and Kim took us out for dessert and drinks. We went to The Melting Pot, a great fondue restaurant/bar, which has stoves built into the tables. We had a caramel fondue and a chocolate fondue brought to the table with two huge platters of strawberries, bananas, pineapples, cheesecake, fried marshmallows, and brownie pieces. Oh my stomach hurts just thinking about it again. Thank you Dan and Kim for the most extravagant birthday celebration I've ever experienced.
-M

Move in Special

Our townhome came with washer and dryer hookups and we were planning on purchasing some a few days after we moved in. Dan and Kim knew of our upcoming shopping and found a flyer "FREE washer and dryer. Must be out by Monday." So we called and it was true. They lived in the same complex as Dan and Kim so we had to rent another moving truck to go pick them up. Of course it's not as simple as that. We scheduled to go pick them up for 8 AM. We got up early, rented the truck and left Murfreesboro at 7:30 and hit the interstate to head to Brentwood, a suburb just outside of Nashville, we thought we were fine. Wrong, we hit the tail end of rush hour and an accident blocking 2 of the 4 lanes. It took 2 hours to travel 8 miles. That was an experience. But we eventually made it to our destination. The washer and dryer are old decorated in brown and tan. The dryer is missing a knob and requires vice grips, but they work great.

-A

We have arrived!!!

Well, goodbye snow, ice storms, cold weather, and corn. Hello, rolling foot-hills, warm weather, big city, and miles and miles of hiking trails. Oh yeah, hIll-billies, southern hospitality, and lots and lots of pick-up trucks too. After a restless night's sleep, Ashley and I awoke to more blowing wind, and ice and snow. We decided we had better leave anyway, assuming if it got bad enough we could get a hotel for a night.
Nonsense! 2 hours into the 11 hour ordeal, the wind stopped and the weather warmed up a bit. Things were looking up. We arrived in Murfreesboro around 9 PM and decided to drop the truck off at our new townhouse, even though we didn't yet have a key. We drove around to about 5 different hotels looking for a reasonable rate for a room...nothing, horse show in town that weekend. Instead we drove into Nashville to stay with Dan, Ashley's brother. Dan and Kim were also good enough to help us get unloaded the next morning. which took about 1 hour to unload, gas-up, and return the truck. Pretty good compared to 5 hours of packing it. Of course we didn't count on having the task of unpacking the boxes being a 4 day job!
-M

The moving adventure Part II

The day finally came when we were to pick up the moving truck and pack it up. Due to the crippling Iowa winter storm my father, who's a lineman for Alliant Energy, wasn't able to help us. So we called some friends the night before and convinced them, with food, to help us pack up the truck. As we started to pack the truck our neighbor, who we had said hi to a few times in passing came and helped. He said he had nothing better to do, which was probably true since he had moved out of his apartment a few days earlier and he would have been sitting in his empty apartment waiting on the carpet cleaners. What a nice guy! All in all it took over 5 hours to pack the truck. Most of that time was trying to figure out how everything was going to fit inside. Matt's motorcycle was the first item in and it took up A LOT of room, we were sure everything wasn't going to fit. We started figuring out what we could live without and Matt was sure we needed to return the 16 foot truck and upgrade to the 24 foot, but I refused. Surprisingly, as we put more and more stuff inside, the truck seemed to get bigger. We didn't have to throw anything out!
-A