Can you spot the clues that contractors have been here?

We found a lot more trash today, including an old hubcap.

To give you an idea, yesterday we’d gotten just about a foot past the leaning wooden beams.

Since the dump isn’t open on Sundays we just left everything we pulled up in piles. Ideally I’ll come back tomorrow with Dad’s truck and take everything to the dump. We’ll see how time works out though.

Definitely the most exciting discovery was the pecan tree. Yesterday I though the leaves looked like pecan but today we found bunches of rotten pecans as we cleared under the tree. Jackpot. You can see Chris cleared the ivy to about shoulder height but he didn’t have the right tools to take out the trunk. Who knew ivy could get that thick? He stripped some of the bark in an attempt to kill it, and we’ll have to come back with a hatchet or axe.

We got permission to go out this weekend and do some cleaning/clearing of the back yard even though we don’t close until Monday.

You see there’s quite a lot to do.

Our friend the tree snake.

The view from the back of the yard looking at the house.

Trash we collected.

This is what we were left with at the end of the day. Not bad for a few hours, but there’s still a lot to do.

The car full of yard waste.

It made for the quite the uncomfortable ride.

Well last Tuesday marked our 1 monthiversary and it simultaneous felt super short and as if we’d actually been married forever. We’re still working on ironing out the rhythm of day to day life and the challenges that working and living together for the first time pose.

The only real challenge is how much time is left at the end of the day. Chris can more or less set his own hours so he just bases them on my schedule. I have to be at work at 7 which means that I leave the house at 6 which means we wake up at 5. I then work 10 hours minimum, leave at 5:30, and get home around 6:30 at the absolute earliest. At first we would throw together a pre-planned dinner, eat, and find that it was time to sleep. Before 2 weeks had passed we decided to ditch the whole making dinner thing and use only crock pot meals. This has been working really well but a lot of times there is a lot of chopping of vegetables involved in the recipes and it becomes a lot in the mornings.

So Mom sent me a link to the blog of a woman who only cooks once a month. She does 1 big cooking day and makes meals that can be frozen and then defrosted as necessary. I can’t even imagine how intense that one day is. Anyway, she recently experimented with making meals that could be frozen and then tossed in the crock pot. She included 3 recipes and I tried 2 of them out this afternoon. I completely forgot that I could have done all the chopping in the food processor so I spent an hour or so watching TV and chopping veggies and then tossed them in zip lock baggies with spices, meat, and sauces. It was super easy, didn’t involve any actual cooking, and now I have 4 meals. (2 for this week, 2 for 2 weeks from now.) Our goal is to have 4 prepared meals a week, at least one of which must be a non-cooked salad, and the we eat leftovers for lunches, Friday, and any weekend meals that we’re around. This week we’ll have chicken salad sandwiches (I also made chicken salad today), BBQ chicken, curry chicken, and a pesto salad. The ideal plan if I can find enough recipes would be to cook every other week. So for 4 weeks we would have repeating meals every other week. At first it means I’ll need to cook 2 weekends in a row, this and next, but it could end up saving a ton of time without sacrificing a home cooked meal! I’m very pleased.
Each meal is enough for the 2 of us to eat for dinner and lunch the next day and I also made chicken broth from the chicken I used for the chicken salad and vegetable bits and pieces I’ve been saving. (When I cut off the head of a carrot or pepper I toss it in a zip lock bag in the freezer so I always have veggies on hand for stuff like that.) The problem with the chicken broth is I wanted to separate it into 2 cups per bag but all I had were 2 gallon bags so they look rather pathetic.

I’ve also heard that a full freezer saves energy, so this is basically a win-win-win situation! Hopefully everything turns out to be good!

So the first thing that created us when we got to our new apartment was a gigantic mess. A combination of things from my Blacksburg apartment that hadn’t been put away yet and all of our wedding presents and we could barely walk through the place. Just a week later though we’ve turned it into this:You can see that we’ve started a gallery wall and the plan is to do black frames mixed with unframed canvas. The fingerprint tree from our wedding is up and we absolutely love how it turned out.

You can still tell that it’s a work in progress. We’re hoping to get a couch at some point, although it’s not top priority right now, and we’ve affectionately named our collection of beach chairs “our couch” in the meantime.

In this picture we’ve got the table set for our very first dinner guest and you can tell that we were using our china and silver for tacos.
We love the apartment and it really feels like our home already. Small touches like the gallery wall and our collection of travel magnets (every time we go somewhere we bring a magnet back for the other, we also pick one up whenever we travel together) really bring everything together. We feel so blessed to have been so spoiled by all our wedding gifts! Especially in the kitchen it’s just night and day from cooking in college with all of our mismatched, beat-up, falling-apart kitchen tools.

Things are still coming together, things like finding out in the middle of a recipe that we don’t have a can opener or discovering that Chris thinks one clove of garlic is the whole cluster (we’re still making our way through those left overs!), but all-in-all we’re thrilled with our new apartment and hope that everyone will come visit us very soon!

Well lots of people of people have been asking about the honeymoon and how everything else in our lives is going. We’ve mostly been too busy to give good detailed answers so we thought we’d do it here, as well as keep things generally up-to-date on our happenings.

The plan is to eventually move this blog over to the jessicaandchristopher.net site, but for the time being this is what we have.

So after our perfect-in-every-way-wedding we took the short drive to Christiansburg to stay at a B&B.

We had a private cottage on the premise and it was really nice. There was a a cute little koi pond outside and we had a private hot tub. We spent Sunday lounging around, had a nice dinner in town, and went to see Green Lantern.

Monday morning we headed to Roanoke where we checked into our hotel before heading to Lexington for our hot air balloon ride, which was unfortunately cancelled due to weather. We walked around their 4th of July fair for awhile eating cotton candy and lemonade before heading back to Roanoke in time for fireworks.

Tuesday we spent the morning doing chores (I know!) such as going to the bank, picking up essentials, etc. In the afternoon we visited the VA transportation museum (which was a huge hit with Chris) and in the evening we had dinner at the Hotel Roanoke’s restaurant. It was a special meal of VA food and wines and we both really enjoyed it.

Wednesday we packed up and headed to The Homestead via the Blue Ridge Parkway which was beautiful but very very windy. We stopped at the folk art museum in Clifton Forge and got to the Homestead right on time for me to chop all my hair off. The Homestead was amazing and we had the most wonderful time there. We went to the spa, ate at the fancy restaurants, went for a hike, ordered room service, and all-in-all had a very relaxing time.

So that’s the Reader’s Digest version of our honeymoon. More posts to come about our new apartment and new jobs!