The 80s

I love 80s music. I love 80s movies. I love candy and toys that remind me of the 80s. After all I was a child in the 80s. But 80s fashion continues to befuddle me.

Last night I attended a 25th anniversary bash that honored Ron and Dana with an 80s theme to commemorate their marriage during the 80s. The party was a blast. The outfits and makeup were over the top. The music was awesome. 

But the thing that amazes me most is how easy it was to shop for this party and how 80s fashion seems to be making a comeback in current fashion. While shopping, I actually saw teenagers in the store with tight-rolled jeans and pony tails sticking off the side of their head... can this be for real? Is the awful fashion sense of the 80s REALLY making a comeback? The 80s and early 90s will always be bizarre to me: hammer pants, tight rolled jeans, over-sized shirts, weird use of colors. Heavy, bright make up. Big hair...

 

Enough about my thoughts on current fashion. The party was a lot of fun. I was even convinced to karaoke and to dance. I am a terrible dancer and I have a great fear of singing in front of people. But karaoke-ing with a group didn't turn out to be so bad.

 

 

Last Day of Corporate America

Today is a happy but also a somewhat sad day for me. Two weeks ago I gave notice to my current employer that I would be leaving to pursue a new career - one that is free of cubicles and bureaucracy (at least I hope it is).

Well today was bittersweet. I work with such good and talented people. They have been my close friends while we transitioned to Charlotte and now I am leaving them behind. This day is exciting because I am venturing into a brave new world but it is sad because I am doing it alone and I will miss my daily chats with my co-workers who are also my friends.

We celebrated my last day by going as a department to a museum in uptown Charlotte and having a fajita bar catered for us. My co-workers did a wonderful thing for me. They know that I have 2 passions and they gave me 2 wonderful gifts. One passion is reading and they provided me with a gift card to Barnes & Noble. My other passion is quotes and they gave me a journal in which each of them wrote their favorite quote and a note for me. This is by far one of the best gifts I have ever received.

This morning on the radio I heard a quote that sums up my overall feelings: It is better to try and fail than to never try and always wonder "What if?" So with that I move forward. I will be working as the creative director for a presentation coaching company based out of Nashville. While this company builds clients I will work for free. To supplement this I will also be building my freelance business. This is the best time for me to do this and I don't want to look back in 10 years and regret not trying because I was afraid of failing.

Outdoor Adventures | 2006 edition

I have journaled regularly since I was kid. 2006 was the year I shifted from writing about our adventures in a journal to writing on this blog. I still have stacks of journals that I may try to convert to a digital format some day. This little space is my personal effort to document life as we know it and the adventures we take.

We took two big trips in 2006. We also started mountain biking pretty regularly in the Charlotte area, but no blogs posts about those experiences. Renovating pretty much took all of our time

February
My first ski trip | Snow Shoe, WV

July 
Vacation in Oregon | Multnomah Falls, Mount Hood, South Sister, Bend, Crater Lake, Oregon Dunes Recreation Area, Haceeta Head

Top 10 from 2006

Another year has passed. We continue to be amazed at how quickly the time passes. While rereading last year’s newsletter we noticed that we ended our newsletter stating that our lives revolved around remodeling our house. This past year has been a year-long extension of that process.

We have had our share of what we would call growing pains. These are pains in life that seem truly unbearable but as soon as you achieve your goal you cease to remember the pain it took you to get there.

We have laughed and cried and argued and debated and compromised. Sometimes our house has been a battle of wills and other times it has been a source of great creativity and problem solving. We have learned so much about ourselves and each other through this process and we are so blessed to have had this experience, even with all of the aches and pains that came with it.
 
We look to the new year with great hope and expectations of what our lives will bring us. We have been blessed with 4 amazing years of marriage. We continue to grow every day and count our blessings. Even when life isn’t what we expect, we are blessed with each other and with wonderful families and friends that are supportive in so many ways.

We would like to take this time to thank you for the contributions you have made to make our lives
richer and more purposeful. We hope that your lives have been touched by us as well.
 
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Cheree and Daniel
 
Our Top 10 lessons learned in 2006

10) In the unlikely event that 3 huge trees fall down in your yard and one lands across your roof, you have 2 options: Either call someone and pay a lot of money to have it removed, or just look at it as another opportunity to use your climbing gear and you don’t even have to drive to the cliffs.

9) If you drive a stick shift and the e-brake doesn’t work, always park it in gear. More specifically, 1st gear or reverse, as Cheree learned on 3 different occasions. Any other gear will just hold the car still long enough for you to go inside blissfully ignorant of what’s about to happen. First time the fence fell, second time the fence got pushed down the hill, and the third time the Pathfinder got in a fight with a tree at the end of the driveway, and the tree won.
 
8) Forget what the package says, self-leveling floor compound does not level itself. Not even close.
 
7) When you climb a mountain it is common knowledge that if you can’t see the summit because of bad weather, you stop climbing because it is too dangerous. What’s not as clearly defined is: what to do if you are on the summit and the snowstorm has moved in below you?

6) If you go to ski school, always fall at least once so they can teach you how to get back up.
 
5) If you are visiting a church you haven’t been to in a year or so, don’t volunteer to carry around your friend’s baby carrier unless you’re prepared to answer a lot of questions.

4) When remodeling, you need, as a minimum, 4 semi-finished-looking, semi-clean areas at all times. A bedroom for sleeping, a sitting area for relaxing in and forgetting about how much of a disaster the rest of the house is, a bathroom for, well, yeah, and a kitchen so you don’t have to eat out all the time. We had only three out of those four for over a year. Eating out is only fun for the first week.

3) If you remove full tile from a bathroom, don’t fill a 34 gallon trash can to the top with the old tile. If you’re weak you’ll never be able to lift the garbage can. If you’re strong, and ignorant, when you do try to dump it into the big can it’s so heavy it will take you with it.
 
2) Ferry rides from one island to another, although quaint and relaxing, are not exactly the most efficient method of travel. 27 miles at 9 miles per hour, you do the math. Suddenly a 6 hour drive home turns into a 12 hour tour.

1) Before you renovate a house, rent Money Pit (Tom Hanks). Every time they say “two weeks” in reference to how long it will be before something is finished, substitute in “two years” if you are doing it yourself.

If you are interested, here are our Top 10 List from Years Past
2003 | 2004 | 2005 

Adventures at Sams

Daniel and I are probably the only people on the planet that go to Sams and walk out empty handed 98% of the time. However the other 2% of the time lends itself to some crazy adventures.

Our first adventure at Sams happened almost 2 years ago. We decided to buy our mattresses at Sams. I wasn't sure at first, but I heard somewhere that you should lay on a mattress for at least 15 min before you buy it. So we went to Sams, found the one we wanted and layed it down in the aisle where we proceeded to lay on it for 15 minutes. We had plenty of comments from other shoppers, but in the end we were happy and the price was good and so we strapped it to the top of our Pathfinder and drove home praying it wouldn't start raining. This was our tamest Sams experience.

Our second adventure at Sams happened last year right before Christmas. We were in desperate need of a piece of furniture to accommodate people for sitting and sleeping. We found a futon that we loved - which was surprising b/c normally I don't love futons, but this one has a thick mattress and Daniel & I actually agreed on how it looked and functioned. We had looked at it over the course of several weeks, but put off purchasing b/c we weren't quite ready to put it in our house. Well, with the holidays upon us and my family planning on coming to visit right after Christmas we decided to go ahead and buy. So we went to the Sams closest to our house. Up until this point there had been an excessive amount of these futons in the stores. Well, we got there and they had just sold their last futon. So we called another Sams in the area and they had 2 left. So we drove across town and by the time we got there they had sold both futons. Starting to get frustrated, we called the last Sams in Charlotte and tried to convince them to let us buy over the phone. This is against Sams policy. So we drove across town again, fighting Christmas traffic the entire way and were relieved to get there and find they had one futon left in stock. So we breathed a sigh of relief, paid for the thing and sat in Christmas traffic some more.

A few weeks later, we decided we were ready to buy a real, grown up bed. Up until this point, our mattresses had been on a metal frame, not a real bed. During Thanksgiving we had found the bed we liked, you guessed it at Sams. We had been in Murfreesboro at the time visiting family and we found a leather sleigh bed that we loved. Well at New Years when we were back in Mboro we went to Sams to buy it. Well, just our luck, they had not only sold out, but they had discontinued the product! We went home disappointed, but Daniel did some calling around (actually he called ALL of the Sams within a 300 mile radius of Charlotte) and finally found the bed in Asheville, NC. So we rented a uhaul trailer and got up bright and early one Saturday morning and drove to Asheville in time for the store to open. Thankfully it was still in stock and we were able to buy our bed - granted we had to spend over 3 hours driving to buy it.

Now to our most recent adventure with Sams. A few weeks ago we found a leather sofa set that we really loved. We decided that we both really liked it and the price was right. The problem is that we do not have a place for it. The good news was that we are planning to finish our floors in time for Thanksgiving and ideally we could buy the furniture the weekend before Thanksgiving. Earlier this week, we decided to go take one last look and to our disappointment, Sams had already sold out of the love seat. We figured a worst case scenario would be that we buy one couch and 2 chairs (no love seat). Well we must be morons or just forgetful b/c Daniel started calling all of the Sams today to locate a love seat only to find out that all 3 local stores had also sold out of chairs and only had one or 2 couches left. We decided we better jump on it. So Daniel went and rented a uhaul and went and bought the couch. The good news is that we got it for $200+ less than the original price. The other good news is that he discovered they had a chair and a love seat at the Hickory store. So in true Cheree & Daniel fashion, we are driving to Hickory tomorrow to buy the rest of our furniture. We would have gone tonight, but we discovered that uhaul gave us a trailer without working tail lights...

Somehow we always manage to get the stuff we want, it just takes a little extra effort. The lesson we should have learned by now is that if we find something at Sams that we really want, we need to follow the American Way and BUY IT NOW!

What do you need a 30 pack of drill bits, wax toilet bowl rings & 25 gallons of screws for?

This is the question Daniel posed as a riddle to the helpful Home Depot guy. After the HD guy scratched his head and couldn't come up with an answer, Daniel gave the answer to the riddle (my dad knows the answer)...

The screws are for screwing down the subfloor in our living room to prevent current and future squeeks before we install the new floor.

The drill bits are to pre-drill the holes for the screws. The floor is 20+ years old and the wood is extra hard and prone to break the drill bits (thus the 30 pack of drill bits).

The wax toilet bowl rings (this is the brilliant part from my dad) is to put the tips of the screws into to help them enter the floor in a quicker, smoother manner.

After the explanation, the HD guy scratched his head again and said that he had heard of screwing down floors but never of using a wax ring to help with the process.

You have now learned something that you probably did not know before - unless you are my dad...

Most Recent Embarrassing Moment

I take step aerobics. I have been doing step for about 3 years now so I should be adept at the class. Step aerobics involve a 6-12 inch high, 3 foot long, 1 foot wide step that you do a pattern of steps on and around.

Well in all of my great ability and gracefulness, last night at step class we were doing a more complex pattern of steps that involved stepping over and across the step and then turning around. I cannot adequately describe what happened, but basically my feet missed a step or two and I found myself laying on the ground on my back.

The instructor stopped instructing to ask me if I was ok. I promptly jumped back on my feet, gave her a thumbs up and finished the class.

The whole thing would not have been quite so embarrassing if it were a class full of strangers. However in this case, there is a girl from work that takes the class with me. After class I broke the ice and asked her if she had seen me fall and I made a wise crack about my clumsiness. Thankfully I do not hurt, but that could be coming...