Happy Thanksgiving and happy decorating...

We hope that each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We are very sorry we couldn't make it up to North Carolina to spend it with some of you, but had a wonderful time hosting our first married Thanksgiving in our house for those local family members on both sides of the family. We really enjoyed it and hope that this is a new tradition for us to start.

Hosting Thanksgiving helped kick us in a bit of gear of getting things on our To-Do list done. We finally finished our main painting work!! All doors, baseboards and walls are now complete. The one thing we have left is one of the extra rooms...but that is to come.

This weekend has also allowed us to start looking at new flooring for the house! We can't explain how excited we are to get this done, we are ready for the carpet to be removed as soon as possible. We think we have it down to two tiles, both pretty similar to each other yet, one is slightly darker then the other. We also did decide on the accent piece we want on some corners of the tiles. So hopefully soon enough we can get this decided on and get them in here to do this. So you can see what we are looking at, we have included a couple pictures of what we are looking at. The first picture shows the little square of our "design" we are going to add... then the second picture shows the two tiles we are debating between on the floor (pay no mind to the other tile under our design).Third picture is a close up of the darker tile and then the fourth one is the close up of the lighter one.

So that is about it for now. We are still recovering from our huge Thanksgiving dinner and all the leftovers we are still eating through!

Hope all is well with everyone and we will be in touch soon!

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Busy Bees...

So we are definitely keeping ourselves quite busy over here. Work has been crazy for us both, Ben was practically gone all of October traveling for work, and even already one week so far. I have been slammed with work, that has rarely had me coming home to relax but rather continue working. While it has caused some hectic schedules and tired days, we are still both extremely grateful for having work.

In between all this, we are still really trying to get things taken care of with the house. I am going to include a couple pictures of what we have done so far...always a work in progress. One of the biggest things is we sold the pool table. We are going to be re-doing our floors early in the next year (it is way overdue) and eventually the pool table was going to have to move to do so. For those of you who have never dealt with one before, basically it isn't something you want to just move around to get out of your way like you can with a table or chairs. It takes a while to take down and even longer to put back up. We didn't really use it much so we figured why not. It was amazing, we put it up for sale on Craigslist on Saturday at 9 am and had an email at 10 am...showed it at 2 and it was sold! So now we have to start figuring out what to do with all that extra space (though we have some ideas).

We have also gotten new furniture for our family room (thanks Aunt Diane & Uncle Russell!). It is a beautiful couch and loveseat that match the house perfectly. In that room we also put up some more art to help with our large walls. More is to come here.

Painting is almost done, I know we have to be the absolute two slowest painters out there. But we are down to just two doors and they are the closet ones. We are really hoping to get it taken care of this weekend.

Well, that is a quick update of what we have been doing. More to come again and soon, promise!

We hope everyone is doing well.

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Oops!

Our apologies!! We aren't keeping up with our end of the blog :) Things have just been all over the place and there isn't a whole bunch to update at this time. We will definitely have more to update soon though!

So please stay tuned, we promise to write more soon.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween. We had over 135 kids!! It was great, the goodie bags were a hit and the kids looked absolutely adorable! We carved Gabrielle's first pumpkin and it looked great, however, it died before Halloween. Oh well we learned for next year :)

Well, that is all for now.

Talk soon.

Love always,
Ben and Gabrielle

We have slacked...

There is no excuse, we have just been slacking a bit with this. Though you can trust us when we say there isn't much you are missing!

Gabrielle has been very busy at work. Her new role has started, in addition to her starting up her first of two projects at work for her Green Belt (Six Sigma), and then she is, starting this week, co-teaching a certification class for her field. The next couple months are probably going to be rather hectic for her.

Ben's work has also been rather crazy. He has recently started traveling again and after a week long trip a week ago, he is now going to be traveling again for the next 3 straight weeks (at least 3 that we know about).

So between us both , trying to get things done around the house and just function normally has taken a bit out of us. We have at least made a couple trips down to visit the Rivera side of family and were even able to visit with Aunt Susan again down there. We are planning another trip down there in a couple weeks to see Kyle play baseball- we can't wait!

Other than that, we are fine, dogs are fine and both homes are holding up. We will be adding the Palm Bay house to list of things we need to do soon though as the current tenants we have in there will most likely be moving out at the end of November and we are really going to have to have someone in there again ASAP. Wish us luck! We have begun the hunt for a new realtor.

We hope this finds you all very well and we will post again soon.

Love,

Ben and Gabriellle

Martha Stewart can move over :)

So we decided to finally do something with the living room and finish it up. It has a great wall and potential but that was just it, potential. The wall was bare and when you looked in the room it was just a pool table and a couch. Now, though the pool table is still there (but usable for it is finally cleared and ready to actually play pool on again) the room looks cozy and like a real room. We moved out an end table from the master bedroom with some bamboo in a vase out next to the couch and then got really creative and decided to "make our own art." We went to Olde Time Pottery and bought three 23x23 pictures that were on sale. Then went to Joann Fabrics and found some material that we really liked, three different types. We then recovered the ugly pictures with the fabric and now have three great wall pieces that finish the room off! We are really happy with how they turned out, especially for our first project like that. Great thing too is that they were very economical and if we ever decide to change up the room we can the fabric and have a whole new look.

We have included some pictures of what we did :)

Got to admit that not all the doors are painted yet, I think we got a little burnt out on paint, however as you see in this picture to the right, that door is painted properly.

Tomorrow we will be delivering meals for the Meals on Wheels program and then having one of our awesome married couple friends come over to watch the Gators and have some dinner. For the game we have some munchies, Gabrielle already pre-made the Buffalo Chicken Dip (Kyle, your favorite!!) and made a batch of brownie-cookies. Yum can't wait!! Then it is looking like Sunday may be a day for outside work.

In other news, after a lot of hard work (that could be a blog in itself) Gabrielle has finally been given a Lead position at her job. The formal announcement is going to be made on Tuesday next week but it is a good opportunity for her and she is looking forward to kicking butt and moving on :) The even better part of it is that usually this is the next step for a full promotion and she is going to be the youngest person in this position for her organization.

Ben has decided that he wants to study for the Patent Bar exam to become a Patent Agent. He has been doing a lot of research on it and has a great desire to learn and try it out. We have started to look for study material and then as soon as we find it he will begin to study for the exam. Once he has done that, he is allowed to be an Agent and see how he likes it. He still plans on staying at GE during this and starting out by doing it on the side. If he really enjoys the agent side of it, who knows what that may bring....we may see law school in the future (well not we, Ben :-) ). It is a really great chance for him though, so we will be keeping our fingers crossed that it all works out!

That just about covers it for now. Everything is going well (dogs as well- they are great) and we hope it is the same for you all.

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

Back to Reality

As with all good trips, our time in NC ended when we found ourselves on the road again Monday afternoon. We got back home late Monday/early Tuesday and fortunately for us we both took it easy with work on Tuesday so we had time to sleep in and then ended up doing errands all day. It was such a wonderful trip, we had a great time!! Thank you to the Graingers for inviting us to join them and sharing a wonderful cabin and then Aunt Susan, Uncle Lenny, and Grandma and Papa Darden for spending a wonderful day with us as well. We hope to do it again adn for a longer period of time.

We aren't quite sure if the dogs have recovered from the trip yet, they had such a great time playing with Cayman and Turbo the whole time. We haven't seen Rory rest this much since we got her. They loved the weather and the land that they had available to run in while there. Speaking of the dogs, Rory has been losing her baby teeth! It will definitely be nice to have the teething part done, as I am sure she is looking forward to it as well.

There is not too much else planned for this weekend. We are going to go to Orlando and get a new desk for the office. This will allow us to finally finish up the office and getting it all set up. We will post new pictures when we finish it up! Getting so close :)

Well we don't have much else to report. All is well here. We hope everyone is doing well as well.

Love always,
Ben and Gabrielle

R & R in the Mountains

As we mentioned in our last post, we left for the mountains of NC Thursday evening after work. We drove for about 6 and a half hours and stopped in St George, SC for the night. We got back on the road by about 7 am and made it to Gabrielle's parent's cabin in Hendersonville around 10 am. We forgot how beautiful it is up there. The mountains are absolutely gorgeous and the air just feels clean. The trip was definitely well needed and all of stress seemed to slip in the back of our minds.

It turns out that this weekend Hendersonville is having their annual Apple Festival downtown. We decided to go and check it out. The food there was extremely yummy and if you can make it with apples, they had it there. Ben enjoyed a nice piece of fried apple pie, Gabrielle had some ice cream (shocker we know!). Robin, Gabrielle's mom, also shared some sliced apples with caramel dip (that was so warm and beyond good). Gabrielle also was able to sample some apple bbq sauce and loved it so she bought a bottle. Can't wait to try it on some food back home. She loves her bbq very much, to a point where the next blog we set up may be for her to do on bbq places and food she has tried, so stay tuned you may see that apple bbq sauce on it soon! We had a great time, so good, Ben is planning on making another trip there while we are here in order to try some more food (next time apple bread pudding pie).

Today we spent the day with Ben's family in Waynesville and had such a wonderful time. We really enjoyed ourselves and are so glad that we were able to see them. Thank you guys so much for visiting with us today. The dogs had an absolute blast meeting everyone and visiting with the other dogs. Hopefully, we will be back again soon!

The weather has been perfect here, we really don't have any complaints. The dogs are having a wonderful time and getting plenty of exercise. They have a great amount of yard here to run around and are loving the weather.

Well, we must go and finish our Gator game (go GATORS!!!). So good to see football back on TV :-)

We hope this finds you all well.

We love and miss you all,

Ben and Gabrielle