Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home...

With all of our great adventures over the past few months (almost a year), it's so nice to finally have a house that is actually starting to look and feel like our home. After performing some of the minor home repairs such as leaky drains, clogged gutters, and old thermostats, it was time to tackle our first full room renovation. Most of your know our home is nearly 100 years old, and there was about that many years worth of wallpaper on it. Luckily we only needed to go through the top two layers, but there were a few places that needed a little additional work. Fortunately we had a professional working on things.

So everything turned out looking pretty good.

We found a few of our pictures from our trans-continental Christmas trip, as well as a few shots from the great Turkey Feast 2008.

Mary acting like she knows exactly how to handle a one month old.

The Hubele Kids. Some are just a little older than the others.
And we don't want to forget about our California peeps.

Mary has been quite the busy bee with work, still trying to manage up and out or at least from the other side of the country. I finished doing about as much as a could for my Philadelphia office so I'm currently in the pursuit of new employment. Alls well that ends well though, it's giving me plenty of time to keep making checks off that "honey do" list. I'm glad to be done with the cross-country commute at least.

Mary and I got the basement somewhat organized over the weekend, I mean it is a basement after all. Similar to our house in Ardmore, we've made the main floor look respectable, just don't venture up or down the stairs. We had our first none related house guests over the weekend as well. Heidi and Jason were down from Seattle with Trevor and little Toby. I think Felix's affection for 2 year olds has reached a melting point.

That's all for now. And remember, our doors are always open.

Starting off 2009

Well it's been so long since I wrote anything here I figured I'd better say SOMETHING before people think we fell off the face of the earth. So I found a picture Deanna took at Gracie's birthday party the weekend after Christmas. These are Hello Kitty stickers the two of us are decked out in. They combine two of Gracie's favorite things... Cats and PINK!!! Gracie was very generous and Uncle Dennis and Aunt Mary just could NOT have enough stickers on their outfits to make them fashionable.

Then I found this one Deanna took, too, of the bunch who was able to come to the Independence B&B for Thanksgiving. I must say it was really nice not to be the ones who'd traveled the farthest (furthest???) to get there.

This one shows the middle 4 Hubele nieces and nephews... Brenden, Noah, Mikayla, and Micah. They are SO creative! They wrote, directed, and produced a full length stage production of "The Turkey who Escaped" or something like that. Nikki posted the same sort of photo on their blog but I thought it was so cute I had to copy it. Not to give it away, but the turkey escapes the pilgrims in their boat.

This is Gracie and her best friend for the day, Uncle Dennis. The mischievious grins are no doubt the result of some thrilling and dangerous acrobatic feat that had Gracie flying to the rafters or something. All's well that ends well.

We had a lot of fun over Christmas, too. I'll have to find some pictures from that week and comment on them in our next post. We spent the week in Philadelphia and Downingtown with Dennis' family, which was a lot of fun. More to come on that. We got to meet our new little niece, Shaye. Of course I got a cold for Christmas. That wasn't fun to fly back to Portland with, but we survived.

None of our pipes froze that week, and it turns out it was a fantastic week to not be in Portland. There was a ton of snow and had I not left when I did, I likely would have spent Christmas by myself in our new house trying to unpack all the boxes, since their airport was closed for a few days before Christmas. We've made serious progress unpacking over the last several weeks, but there is so much to do! But we love our house and our neighborhood and are starting the year off knowing that we are truly blessed to have all kinds of wonderful family and friends, a warm (now that we got a space heater in our bedroom) bed to rest our heads each night, and a significant other that is kind, funny, smart, and tall. We have so much in common! :-)