new friends

Danny had his grad student orientation today. I decided to go with him since he thought it'd be for an hour and then afterwards I could meet his graduate professor. His graduate professor Neil is super nice! Not at all what I expected, but hes really nice and invited us over to his house for dinner sometime in the next few weeks :) His wife is even going to give us cichlids for our new fish tank that we just set up in our dining room :) I can't wait to actually put fish in there! :)
After his last orientation all of the grad students went out to a local pub and invited us to come along. I'm really glad that we went with them :) It gave us a chance to get to know all of the other grad students, and gave me a chance to get to know them since I had never met any of them before. They all seem really nice, and the girls even invited me over for a girls night since the boys were having a 'bro night' this weekend. Silly, but I'm really happy that they decided to include me, I was worried that it would be hard for me to make friends here since I wouldn't be at the school with Danny and would only be interacting with the girls at work and not really anything else outside of work. So I'm really glad that I got along well with the girls here :)
Also I must say, I. Love. Webcams!! Tonight we webcamed with all of our friends back at Morningside plus had some other friends that weren't at morningside webcaming with them at the same time and had the laptops pointed at each other. Twas fantastic :) I miss our friends and family back home so much!!! I can't wait to be back for break so we can be back with everyone again! Despite how fun its been being here in Texas just Danny and I, I really get homesick every now and then for my family. Its going to take some getting used to, but having webcams to see everyone helps :)

skyping with friends = love :)

Anyway, I must get to bed so I'm not too tired for work tomorrow :) Hopefully I'll have more exciting stories from the veterinary hospital!!

<3
Mrs. Goodding

into the routine

I've been so bad at updating this. I fail! Aside from the A/C breaking down there hasn't been anything much exciting than that going on here to update about. Unfortunately Danny and I still haven't been able to explore town very much aside from driving past businesses on our runs to wal-mart. There's a park a few blocks away...but who wants to go on a bike ride when its 115 degrees outside?! Not us!! So for now our bikes and fishing poles will continue to gather dust..we've been told that this 110 degree weather will finally break in November..god I hope not! Maybe if I just keep telling myself that it will be nice and warm here when its -20 back in Iowa this winter it won't seem as bad?

I was offered the job at the veterinary clinic! Although its only part time right now which is kinda sucky, I LOVE it!! It's a lot of bitch work, cleaning cages, restocking supplies, ect, but I do also get to play with the cute puppies when I take them outside during the day. I also got to stand in on a surgery last week too! Probably one of the coolest but more gross surgeries I've seen (I don't really like doing stuff with eyes..) but it was so cool to be in there and observe. I've just got to work my butt off and try to absorb all I can from what the doctors are willing to teach. The vet techs say that they worked for about a year in my position before the vet moved them up to tech, so I'm hoping that by working super hard that I'll get there in under a year. I do have a degree after all...either way its great experience for my resume!

Danny had his first grad school orientation today. He's pretty nervous about it all, but excited too. He's going to be such a great teaching assistant :) He starts classes on the 26th so he'll find out today what his schedule will look like and what days he'll be at the university. I'm hoping maybe our schedules will line up so he has days off when I have days off too. It's kinda lonely being here by myself instead of having breakfast together and watching tv or playing video games together. Married life has been simply wonderful <3 I love waking up next to him, going to sleep next to him, making dinner together (and he even does the dishes! what more could you want?! hehe) it's been better than I ever would have thought :) The only down side...I'm still sick :( Been sick for over 2 weeks now...its getting old...and frustrating. *sigh* and we still have no health insurance. Not until September anyway. I sound like I'm coughing up everything inside of me..ugh! 2 weeks is long enough! I want to be better now darn it!!!

I suppose I better go and be productive..there's one last box of picture frames that I have left to unpack. Maybe I should do that today :) We are still waiting to order prints from the wedding to put in the picture frames we got from the wedding..so we just have a bunch of empty picture frames sitting around. LAME! I'll just have to use some of the ones packed away that have old pictures in them already until then :)

Love,
Mrs. Goodding <3

yet another adventure as a married couple

Well our A/C decided to turn off yesterday..actually we think it was sometime in the middle of the night, but we didn't notice it until the middle of the day yesterday! As the temperature in our townhouse got higher and higher Danny finally called the 24 hour maintenance number to have them come and look at it..apparently our blower motor is broken, and they won't be out to fix it until Monday or Tuesday.

As the temperature got up to 85 degrees, Danny decided that he was going to look at it himself and tinker around with it figuring he couldn't do anything worse to it if it was already broken. He got it to work..periodically. It runs now but will cut out on its own after a few minutes, sometimes its 20 minutes. At least its semi working for now..I don't know how they would have expected us to wait until Monday or Tuesday when the temperatures here get well above 110 every day. Doesn't really seem fair to me.

On a different note, I had a job interview Tuesday that I felt went really well, minus the head vet leaving out early without saying a word to me about anything. I haven't heard anything yet, I keep telling myself it hasn't even been a week yet but I'm still disappointed. I felt that it went really really well and I made sure I was involved in everything I could be doing and I learned SO much in that one day! I want that job sooooo badly!! Cross your fingers that I hear from him soon!

For the mean time nothing else new to report :) I've been sick for the past few days..and our health insurance doesn't start until Danny starts school in September, so hopefully it goes away on its own :( I hate being sick!! My body just couldn't wait one more month haha.

Life is a series of experiences..

SO much to update this blog with!! It's going to be a long one, so please bear with me as I ramble through the past 3 weeks of my life :)


Moving to Texas:
After Danny's transmission being replaced Tuesday morning thanks to his dad, and my AC fan motor in my car replaced (an added bonus of staying in DSM one more night, Danny's dad was able to fix that for me too!) we were on our way (once again) to Texas. The drive was nothing short of long and incredibly boring to say the least! I have never driven more than 3 1/2 hours in one drive, and anything longer than that I have been a passenger for, and have also been asleep for most all the drive. We stopped ever couple ours to fill the cars up with gas, stretch our legs, and take a break from driving; but it was still a long trip. The first night we drove about 30 minutes past Oklahoma City, OK and stopped in a little town over night after driving a total of 9.5 hours. In addition to being totally exhausted from driving, dinner decided to not sit well with me so I spent most of the night sleeping in the bathroom since I couldn't stop getting sick. Danny came and put me in bed around 2 or 3 am when I finally was able to sleep without waking up to get sick again.
The next morning we had about a 5 hour drive left ahead of us. We ate breakfast and continued our trek to Texas. We thought we were hot at our wedding, this was nothing compared to how hot it was that day in Tyler! 101 with a real feel of 108..what an awesome day to move in... Luckily I had made it through the drive without getting sick, but I seemed to lose my lucky streak as soon we got there because as soon as I started trying to carry things in I started getting sick again. Unfortunately it was only Danny and I moving in so my move in consisted of carrying objects from the truck to the townhouse, then going to the bathroom to get sick and then go to carry more things back in. It sucked to say the least, but I couldn't let Danny carry in everything alone, and some things required two people to lift and carry them in. Eventually we got all moved in, I stopped feeling sick and we had to pitch camp for the night with Danny on the couch and me on the love seat. We had the box spring for a bed, but no mattress yet :/ regardless, we made it in one piece, and successfully filled our new townhouse with what felt like millions and millions of boxes.


A week in Tyler, Tx...
Tyler is much different from what I had pictured. It is very pretty here, tons of roses everywhere. I guess Tyler has a rose festival every year, and is well known for their roses :) 5 minutes from our townhouse is the main strip where all the businesses are. Tyler may be smaller than Des Moines is, but I think what makes it seem about the same size or bigger than Des Moines is that all the big businesses in Tyler are scrunched onto one really long road. I'm not complaining though, it makes it super convienent that there are so many stores near by, and I can't wait to check out the mall! :) I had two job interviews the first week that we moved in, one at PetSmart for the same job I had at Petco as a groomer, and the other was at a vet clinic. I have a job shadow tomorrow at the vet clinic to see how I like the job, how well I work with everyone, ect. Just to give it sort of a trial run, I'm hoping it goes really well because I feel like I could learn a lot from working at a vet clinic. I guess we will find out soon! :)

We're leaving on a jet plane!
Three days after getting to Tyler, Danny and I left for our week long honeymoon in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. We have about a million and one pictures to go through and edit before we put them up on a photobucket type website. As soon as we have them up I'll put that link on here as well :) I'll do a quick recap of our trip though :)

• Visited Arenal Volcano, and did a guided hike through a rainforest near the area. We saw a few sloths, some poison dart frogs, iguanas, green basilisks, crocodiles, and an agouti (large rodent about the size of a chihuahua) We also ate dinner at a restraunt near the base of the volcano, but unfortunately it had clouded up that evening so we couldn't see any of the lava rocks that can be seen shooting up at night
• Went Scuba Diving on two different dives. This was the first time we had dove in 5 years, so we were both extremely excited about diving again! We saw so many pufferfish, some boxfish, tangs, starfish, sea urchins, a sea turtle, several moray eels, and two white tipped reef sharks. (coolest thing ever!! Can't wait to get those pictures back!)
• Went to Guachipalin and did an all day adventure package, which was one of my favorite days of the trip. This day we got to the location and went zip lining through the canopy, and rappelled down the cliff face of some waterfalls throughout the zip lining tour. After that we went on a white water inter-tube ride down Rio Negro. It was pretty much like white water rafting, but you were in a tube by yourself! It was really really fun, some of the drop offs we went on were about 4 ft down!! Then after that we came back and had lunch, followed by a horseback ride to Symbiosis Spa that was located near the place we were at. At the spa there are several mud pools that are geothermally heated by the volcano nearby, so they would bring the mud up into these basins with paintbrushes for you to paint on each other, then you would rinse off and go sit in the hot springs at the spa. It was nice to have a relaxing afternoon after all of the go go go from earlier in the day!
• Our last big thing we did was go to the cloud forest in Mountverde. This is what comes to mind when you picture rainforest. It was sooo beautiful there, the pictures we took don't even do it justice! While we were there we also did another zip lining tour over the canopy. I wish I could have had a video camera attached to my helmet the whole time to catch everything!! After the zip lining and lunch we went on a hike through the forest over the hanging bridges of Selvatura. It started pouring during our hike (rain in the rainforest..what?!) but it was still neat to hike through it in the rain and hear all the sounds, and afterwards you could hear the animals so much better!
• I can't forget about our epic adventure the last night of our trip. On our down afternoons and days Danny and I would go to the beach that was 15 minutes from our condo we were staying at. If you walked around the cove about a mile or so down and over some sedimentary rocks and through a couple trenches the ocean came up into you would get to a white sand beach. We spent the whole day at the beach, and since we left in the morning the tide was down low enough that Danny could cross the trench without his backpack with our cameras and passports getting wet so we decided to go over to the white sand beach for the day. Now the previous days we had been at the beach the tide had gone up and then come back down as the sun set each day. We figured this would be the same this day as well, so as the sun started setting we started making our way back over to the trench we crossed to get to the white sand beach but found that the water was too high. The sun hadn't set yet so we weren't too worried and just sat near by to wait. The sun got lower and lower, and the tide only seemed to get higher and higher. By the time the sun had gone completely down the tide was the highest we had ever seen it, meaning that there was no way Danny could cross without getting his backpack wet...we were stuck on the other side until the tide went down. This is their winter time in Costa Rica so the sun sets about 6 pm so we weren't too worried about waiting a little longer for the tide to go down..if only we had known haha. Danny and I weren't able to cross back over the trench until 9:30. We ended up waiting something like 4-5 hours for the stupid tide to go down. Not quite how we thought our last day would end, but it sure was exciting none the less!! And we did make it back to our condo eventually that night :)

Welcome Home!
We came back from Costa Rica to a house full of boxes..not my favorite thing to come home to, but we were both soo tired from the 2.5 hour drive back from Dallas after flying home that we just left it until the next day. The next day when we finally woke up we both buckled down to finish unpacking everything else. We still aren't finished, but we did get a lot done yesterday. You can actually see the floor in our living room, and you can actually sit down and eat at our dining room table :) Pictures will be posted once everything is unpacked and looks like a home! :) For now that is all until our next blog!!!

<3 Mrs. Goodding