Welcome to my home

In May of 2010 my husband and I bought our first house. Ever since we have talked about needing a blog to share this crazy ride with others, so here it is. Let me introduce the main characters of my future blog posts:

Neill and Melissa

Hi! My name is Melissa and I am currently a graduate student studying Industrial/ Organizational Psychology (work psychology). I work as a researcher at the Navy. I love working on our house and doing craft projects. Expect to see more of the latter on here.

Behind me there is my wonderful husband, Neill. We have been together since 2003 and married since 2008. He is an IT guy for the US Dist. Courts. He is super smart (I have actually given him an IQ test), but sometimes he does some of the silliest things. You will probably hear about his antics. Even though working on the house isn't one of his favorite things to do, he can learn how to do anything. Update: Sense the kitchen floors have been finished he is really on board with working on the house.

We are both from Louisiana, but moved to Tennessee for me to go to school. After living in our first apartment (in Louisiana, we rented a house from Neill's grandmother) for a year, we bought our first house. I'll have to post about that later (possibly multiple posts); that alone was an adventure.

Audi

Here is Audi, our first dog. He was left on the side of the road with his sister when they were only about 2 weeks old. A wonderful adoption group in Texas cared for them, and when he was 7 weeks old, we adopted him. With a lot of love he his has grown up, learned a number of tricks, and of course has some problems. We will save those for later.

Drizzt

When Audi was getting calmer and learning to behave, we started to look for a Boston Terrier to adopt and found Drizzt. Not exactly a Boston, but we fell in love. We knew if we didn't adopt him he would probably be euthanized, and he was so calm and quiet. We later found out that he freezes in unknown circumstances, and is a BALL of ENERGY when he is comfortable. His name was Rocco, but didn't respond to that, so I let Neill pick out a new name. He picked Drizzt based on a book where the character Drizzt was a part of a race that was hated and often evil, but Drizzt is a good guy, so it fit with him being an American Pit Bull Terrier. He really knew nothing, and we have taught him a lot, even "roll over" and "dead".

Our newest addition is our indentured servant.

That is my cousin, Allison, also from Louisiana. She was working at Lowes and getting very little art work done. So we offered to let her live in our guest room and work in our back porch area in exchange for a small amount of rent and her controlling our food budget. So she moved in at the beginning of the month and is basically a modern day indentured servant.

And last but not least is our current major project - our house.

Sorry for the dark and out of season picture but it was the only one I could find tonight, but don't worry you will see the good, bad, and ugly soon enough.

I hope you enjoy our journey and our past adventures.

Update: Here is one of the first pictures of our house when we were still looking at it.