Bedroom Before

So it's been a long time since I have updated anything.  Marc and I are VERY and I mean VERY slowly unpacking and we have so much work to do on our house.  We are trying to do most of the work ourselves to save money.  It started with ripping out carpets.  There are hardwoods under all of the carpets in the house with the exception of the family room (previously a garage) and the "three season" porch.  Here are some before pictures . . .

As you can tell, the room (minus the paint samples) was pretty drab.  We have now ripped up the carpet, but still haven't decided on  a paint color!  It has been QUITE a process though, and definitely more than what we bargained for!  Under the carpet was not only carpet pad, but also this horrible linoleum-like layer with a felt-like layer that was GLUED to the hardwoods. 

Look at all these layers (and please excuse the ugly toes!)

After the carpet and carpet pad were removed, we had to remove the tack-board that was nailed into the hardwoods.

We had to then scrape the third layer off.  This was very laborious and took DAYS since I had to do it a bit at a time as my work schedule and integrity of my hands allowed.

This was after one afternoon of scraping.  It took another round of scraping to get the black stuff off, but just look at those beautiful hardwoods underneath! We have now removed all of the black backing that was glued to the hardwoods and now it is time to sand and refinish.  We are hoping that we can do it all ourselves and THIS weekend.  I am so eager to get settled!  Wish us luck.  Will update soon once we are finished!

Arrived in Minneapolis

Marc and I rolled into Minneapolis on Monday afternoon, just in time for a fun BBQ at one of my fellow intern's house.  It was fun to meet most of my fellow interns.  We have a great group and I am excited to start the year with them.

Marc and I are "living" at a hotel right now until our house closes.  It isn't ideal, but it is cheap, which is a benefit.  We stuffed our car with as much stuff (clothes and other necessities) as we possibly could and headed due north.  We tried to pack up as much of our stuff as we could prior to pulling out of town, but Marc (and his brother, Scott--thank you Scott) are going to finish up the rest, load and drive the biggest truck they can possibly drive to Minneapolis soon, and I am VERY eager to have our things, along with our wonderful 14 year-old cat, Max, who Marc and I are missing terribly!  We are glad that Emily is there to watch out for him though!

Here is how we left our house (and remember, we still need to SELL our house!)

More updates later as we get moved into our house!

House Hunting

Marc and I began our house hunting journey in The Twin Cities sometime in April.  It took us a bit to figure out when we could make the trip, but we eventually made one and have made 2 since--well at least I have made two additional trips!  It was definitely a learning experience.  We had to figure out what part of town we wanted to live in and to make the process longer we had to figure that out in 2 cities...Minneapolis and St. Paul!

We began our search in St. Paul.  This city seemed to have more of the older home characteristics that I wanted, but we just couldn't find the right house.  We loved character like this:

but this house was in foreclosure and was in very bad shape.

We ventured over the next day to Minneapolis and started looking around.  We finally figured out what part of town we wanted to be in, but that too came with other limiting factors.  We didn't want to live on a busy street or on a bus route, but wanted to be close to local amenities.

We finally found the perfect house, and by perfect house, I mean a house that will BECOME perfect.  We made an offer over Easter weekend, went back and forth a whole lot and then finally gave up. The guy just wouldn't budge on price.  We again became frustrated with the whole process.  We had some time to cool off, but were getting in a time crunch since I start on June 15th.  I made a quick trip to Minneapolis during my time off from school once some new listings popped up, again found a house that we loved, made an offer and again couldn't reach an agreement with the seller. This time, it wasn't the price but was over inspections.  They REFUSED for us to inspect the sewer and the chimneys...sounds fishy huh?  So after more back and forth, they still refused a sewer inspection, so we again, gave up.  

We went back to the original guy, he came down somewhat on his price and we reached an agreement.  Now we are in the inspection process and are keeping our fingers crossed.  I am just hopeful that I will have time to help Marc with the move, painting, updating, etc., and even more time to blog about it because home blogs are great to read.  I am sure it will be quite an adventure...as long as everything goes through!

More Hawaii

I know that I said that I would have more pictures of our Hawaiian trip posted, so please excuse the delay.  I haven't had a lot of time recently to blog (surgery rotation, looking for a new home, trying to get ours ready to sell, etc).  Perhaps, it is my wish/hope to go on another trip before June 15th (my "report" date), but I wanted to share some more pictures from our wonderful trip to Kauai.

This is obviously a lighthouse, but the water and the green color of the landscape were just to die for!

More of that same point

This was one of my favorites.  SHAVE ice.  It was incredible and below that big, colorful, tasty ice shavings is yummy ice cream!

Enjoying my shave ice in Hanelai.

Waimea Canyon

More of the canyon at a lookout point

We got out of our rental car to hike a little bit and this was some of our terrain!

We went to a beach called "Glass Beach" where (unfortunately) a lot of garbage, including glass was disposed into the ocean years ago, and much of the glass came back to land and due to nature's forces has now made this beautiful beach.

This was also on Glass Beach

One of the blowholes on the island.

A beautiful bird during our chocolate farm tour.

During our chocolate tour, we had a chocolate tasting, which was fun and interesting.  I discovered these tasty treats called cacoa nibs (covered in dark chocolate of course), that are now one of my favorite snacks and are also packed full of antioxidants!

Marc had very mature descriptions of his chocolate "palate."  He never ceases to entertain me!

We loved being able to use our iPhones in paradise.  Little did we know that just one month later, we'd be able to call the Twins our hometown team!

Beautiful view from our hotel grounds in Princeville.

We took very few pictures of ourselves....

We definitely stopped at the one Wal-Mart on the island MULTIPLE times.  Most of our meals consisted of mac and cheese and PB&J, so we made trips to Wal-Mart to get meal supplies.  We thought it was funny that they had a free shuttle!

BEAUTIFUL waterfall on one of our driving tours.

Toward the end of our stay, Marc and I decided to take a tour of the vacant Coco Palm.  This was "the hot spot" in Kauai before one of the hurricanes destroyed it in the 1990s.  Elvis stayed here a lot and actually filmed the movie "Blue Hawaii" here, so we of course had to stop in!

Outside of Elvis's bungalow.

The Coconut Grove

A destroyed piano in the storage area.  I like to think that Elvis tickled these ivory (although not real ivory) keys!

View from our room's balcony.  Not bad for using hotel points and getting 25% off of those points! I love that Marc still has great perks left from his old job.  Too bad he doesn't get them now!

Our trusty rental car which we named "Merlin" because it was a Dodge Caliber (close to Excalibur). 

There were roosters EVERYWHERE!

One our way home...open air airport! 

It was a great trip and one we'd definitely LOVE to repeat.  Who knows, maybe (cross my fingers) another fun trip will be in store before I start residency!

Stay tuned for house hunting stories!

Our life for the next four years

On Thursday, I walked on stage in front of all of my classmates and their families and friends and opened my envelope, which read "Congratulations, you have matched to The University of Minnesota in internal medicine/pediatrics."  Well not exactly like that, it was more of a list, but you get the point.


I was so thrilled and I think Marc was even more excited!  I will be so sad to leave so many good friends, but now they will have a real winter to visit along with some awesome shopping!  The city itself is beautiful (above-picture taken from http://classic.cnbc.com/id/29350033?slide=2) and filled with so much to do in all seasons. Now begins the crazy rush to find a place to live and pack, move (including moving our nearly 14 year old cat Max), and unpack and get settled and actually practice medicine as a doctor....lots of responsibility is headed our way!

Minneapolis/St. Paul has a population (including the suburban area) that is larger than the entire state of Arkansas, so we will be in for quite a change, but Marc and I both have been wanting to get back to a bigger city.  His former home was Chicago and in college I lived within 20 minutes of Charlotte and we both really missed all the opportunities and activities that those larger cities offered, but we will shortly be back in the hustle and bustle of a large city.

With my rock, Meredith, throughout med school.  She made my life during medical school so much fun and really got me through school and the rest of my life during med school too!

Opening my envelope on stage!

I am sure we will have many updates as we progress through this move, but we are excited and I can't wait to get back to Minneapolis for a visit knowing that is where we will make our home for the next four years!

Matched

Just a quick update to say that I "matched."  We found out yesterday IF we matched and find out Thursday WHERE we match.  This will be a crazy and potentially life-altering (meaning a BIG move is possible) week!  Stay tuned to find out where I will be for the next 4+ years....

If you want to read a bit about the process here's a link:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/match-day-medical-students-learn-their-fate/

Hopefully I will have good news to share Thursday (or soon after, come on celebration is in order!)

Trip to Kauai

Since I had the month of February off, Marc and I decided that a trip just for fun (not for interviewing!) was badly needed.  With all of the miles I racked up going on 17 interviews I had crossed the threshold for a free ticket to Hawaii, and Marc, with his many, many miles from his travel in his old job, also had enough (just on Delta, he was mainly a United and American flyer).  Because of our MULTIPLE unfortunate experiences on Delta (aka Doesn't Ever Leave the Airport, courtesy of someone else's facebook status), we decided to dump all of our miles and go to Hawaii to get rid of them. Last minute we found 2 "low mileage" (50,000 miles each) tickets and also were able to use points along with a discount for the points to get a hotel in Kauai.  We had a crazy route to get there, but we made it and wow was it beautiful!  I had been too Kauai, although just for the day, back in 1996 during a trip to Honolulu and Maui, but it was a different experience this time and I have to say, we actually ran out of time to do all the things we wanted to do on the small island, which really surprised me.

We spent one night in Honolulu solely because we came in late and couldn't get a flight to Lihue in Kauai. We spent much of the first day just driving around, going to Pearl Harbor and finding the bail bonds office for Dog The Bounty Hunter--surprisingly one of my favorite shows!

American flag flying high over the USS Arizona Memorial

The list of people who were killed on the USS Arizona on December 7th.

Part of the ship

The USS Arizona leaks oil daily and it can still be seen on the water's surface since the day it sunk.  It makes me wonder how long oil will be in the Gulf of Mexico...

A high view of the Memorial

People exiting the memorial.

...and on a much lighter note, the offices of Dog The Bounty Hunter!  They weren't there since it was Sunday, but maybe on our next trip we can find them!

Stay tuned for more about our trip...