House Guest

We had our first house guest last week--- Kolby's college friend, Jarrett, came all the way from Illinois to visit us. Kolby has been working like a dog on the house for over a month now, and having one of his best friends in town for several days was a great way celebrate the fact that we finally finished the house! Jarrett was due in on Wednesday so Kolby and I stayed up late on Tuesday night finishing up some painting in the kitchen and tying up some loose ends (like installing a new ceiling fan in the pitch dark with only a faint flashlight to help us, etc.). There are a handful of small things that still need to be done, but for all practical purposes- we're saying the place is complete. And just in time!

Kolby and Jarrett lived the dream... playing catch in the backyard,

going to a Rangers' game, hitting golf balls, talking about life, eating out, staying up late (past 9:30, at least!), and playing lots of Super Nintendo.

Over the weekend, we headed down to my parents' ranch and then on to Austin. The guys rode around on the 4-wheeler and dirt bike, shot guns,
and hooked up an electronic scanner to my dad's nice telescope (star-gazing/astronomy is Kolby's new favorite hobby since the sky is so clear down there).

On Saturday we met Kolby's family at their ranch down in Wimberley and had an eventful evening-- eating BBQ and attending the UT vs Texas Tech game.

Since we were +1 in the car, I got to ride in the backseat with Maya, who come to find out also sleeps with her front paws crossed. She does this all the time while she's awake and laying down looking out the back door etc., but seriously... is it totally necessary while she's asleep? Always a lady, that one.

We had such a great time with Jarrett in town and we are certainly rooting for him to relocate down here once he finishes grad school!

In other news, on our walk to the park tonight Kolby asked me to please hold Maya's leash while he tests out the new slides at the park playground. I may not have mentioned this before, but we moved into the same neighborhood that Kolby grew up in. We live just a few blocks away from the playground that he spent hours upon hours playing at until his family moved when he was 3rd grade. Apparently the City recently renovated the playground and put in two huge slides. So yes, Kolby did in fact slide down both of them tonight.

Kolby started substitute teaching today. And he's getting tons of hours at the SAT prep place he teaches at. And the next term for his graduate program starts on October 1st. Busy kid! I'm still working on getting him to write a post about his time in Santa Fe and his grad program in general. I noticed he started it the other day but I'll remind him to get it finished sometime soon.

Now that the house is put together, I'll take some pictures and post a tour. I haven't decorated anything yet because I can't bring myself to go shopping for decorative stuff and we don't have much from our apartment. But I don't know when I'll get motivated to decorate, so I may just take pictures as is. We'll see.

Speaking Of

Here is the family picture from Labor Day that I finally got off of my mom’s camera.

Speaking of getting pictures off of cameras… here is one from my birthday dinner that I just stumbled upon. Kolby has his hair in a mohawk because it was my birthday and I asked him to. What a sport, that guy. Speaking of sports, you will never guess what I did on Tuesday evening. On our daily after-dinner walk to the park, I broke into a jog. Yep, for the first time in my entire life--- I went running.* I know this comes as an earth-shattering shock to anyone who knows me well, but I swear it is true. And no one was even chasing me with a knife and I wasn’t participating in an organized sport. I didn’t last long and the whole time my body was saying “what is this?”, “what are we doing?”, “who do you think you are?”, “what’s the plan here?” etc. I survived, though, and I even ran again on Wednesday while Kolby was playing golf with his dad. It’s all part of my new healthy lifestyle… a concept that has been foreign to me for the past 21 months (aka since I got married and no longer had to worry about fitting into my wedding dress). It all came about when returning from a Labor Day weekend of Olympic-level overeating coincided with the unpacking of our scale. And the fact that we’re in a new place and a new house and can start our new life here however we want. Why not get back in shape and pay more attention to what I eat? We’ll see how it goes….

Speaking of our new house, it is SO CLOSE to so many people and so many places. Here are some drive times, for example:
My parents’ house: 22 minutes
Kolby’s parents’ house: 12 minutes
Brad & Remy’s house: 24 minutes
Tommy & Alayne’s house: 28 minutes
Katie’s house: 22 minutes
Brittany and Andrew’s house: 14 minutes
My office: 17 minutes (28 minutes during rush-hour)
Schools where Kolby will substitute teach: 3 minutes, 6 minutes
Grocery Store: 3 minutes

*OK, maybe the term “running” is a bit strong. Kolby and Maya were basically able to continue walking beside me. And the path to the park and around it is probably less than 2 miles total, and I walked a lot of it. But as I’ve said before, Webbs don’t run… so I’m calling whatever it is that I did this week astounding progress. You have to start somewhere, right?

House Progress/Labor Day

Here’s what’s new in our household these days.

We’ve been in our house for 12 days now and have spent the vast majority of our waking hours doing work on or around the house. For the first 10 days or so, the tag line for our progress seemed to be ‘one step forward and two steps back’. Every project either didn’t work out like we thought it was going to, or cost way more than should be allowed by law.

Botched project number one was repainting the doors. We removed all of our interior doors to sand them, paint them, and replace the old brass hardware on them with nice new oil-rubbed bronze ones. During the sanding of three of the doors, one of the MANY previous layers of paint started peeling off like crazy and the damage was irreversible. So, Kolby had to manufacture three new doors out of large pieces of wood. Then, when we went to re-install all of the doors we discovered that although the doors measured to be the same size as one another, 50+ years of shifting and warping had caused each door frame to only fit one specific door. Of course we didn’t think to label any of them, and the screw holes for the hinges were way too stripped to risk playing merry-go-round with each door. Other compounding problems were that the new hinges are the slightest bit thicker than the old ones, and Kolby mismeasured the doorknob holes on the new doors. Long story short, we now have all of the doors hung but only two of them can actually close all the way. Plans to fix this problem have been postponed indefinitely. Live and learn, I guess!

Next on the list was getting the dryer fixed and the outlet in the living room grounded so that we could get our cable hooked up. After three visits from various Sears repairmen, we dropped $400 on fixing an old stackable washer/dryer that the previous owners had left for us. It started out at $160 but then other things kept happening and once you spend any money to fix something you feel obligated to finish fixing it so you don’t just lose the initial money you spent. Oh well. Then, can you believe that electricians charge $300 to ground an outlet? Sheesh. We found someone who could do it for cheaper but it turns out he didn’t actually do what we paid him to do and ended up becoming this battle between us and the electrician company that I don’t think anyone ended up winning.

There was also a huge issue with the water line to the refrigerator and also the news that we have tree roots infringing upon all of our plumbing, but those aren’t worth delving into. I ultimately reached my breaking point when we went to install a gate for our driveway and it just flat out failed. It is a massive, heavy wooden gate with a metal frame that we found laying behind our garage and it was way too much for the fence post that we were attaching it to to hold. We should have foreseen that the post wouldn't be strong enough, but we didn't.

BUT, we made it through the series of unfortunate events and things are looking up. We now have cable and Internet and we even sprung for DVR and are loving it! We installed our pantry and although the doors aren't on it yet, it looks great and is providing some great kitchen storage space for us. On Thursday, Kolby's dad came over and we constructed a shorter, picket fence-type gate for the driveway that the pole was strong enough to hold. So Maya finally got an enclosed yard and was able to roam around off-leash. She enjoyed tasting all of the various leaves and plants---enough so that she threw up afterwards. She said it was totally worth it.

We have a friend coming in town to visit us on September 16th, so that's the date we've set to have the house finished. It may be a lofty goal, but I think we can do it. It'll be so nice have everything done and to just enjoy it all!

***

In non-house news, we had a delightful Labor Day weekend at my parents' ranch. My dad's side of the family all got together for the whole weekend and it was so nice to finally have a place that can fit all of us! My dad only has 2 sisters and they each have three kids, but since a lot of us cousins have gotten married, we are now 22 in number. It's quite a brood, but we're all really close and we have so much fun when we're together. We played a ton of games (in typical Webb fashion), ate a TON of food, tooled around on the dirt bike and 4-wheeler (with three mild injuries... also typical Webb fashion), and chatted the nights away out on the back patio. It was a great getaway for us and I just love, love, love spending time with family. My brothers and I each have our own bedroom at the ranch but we all slept in Brad & Remy's room this weekend to make room for everyone else. It was fun to feel like kids again-- sleeping on bunk beds and laughing until we fell asleep.

As usual, I wasn't great at taking pictures. Here are a few, and I'll post a big group shot once I get that photo off my parents' camera.

Part of the gang playing dominoes.

A family game of whiffleball.

My cousin Kyle is by far the biggest, strongest person I've ever known. Russell should have taken this fact into better consideration before following through on Kolby's/Brad's/Tim's thought that "wouldn't it be funny if someone snuck up behind Kyle and hit him in the back of the knees with the whiffleball bat?"

A similar event happened a few years ago when Russell was dared to give Kyle a wet willy. Some kids never learn.

Under Construction

It was a crazy week trying to get our house ready to be moved in to, but we survived and the place is looking really good already.

Here's Kolby helping his grandfather cut some wood for the pantry cabinet that he made for us. We haven't put it in yet, but I know it'll look really great and we're so thankful for Grandfather's hard work!

Our dads/handymen making room for the pantry cabinet.

Kolby using the drill to take the hinges off the doors. Unscrewing hinges that had been painted over for 50+ years was not an easy task!

Me just sanding away at one of the door frames. You never realize how much trim there is in a house until you have to sand all of it!

Here's a picture of Kolby's grandparents, who came in town for a few days to paint our kitchen for us. Thank you, again--- it looks amazing!

When we moved our stuff in on Saturday, Maya recognized all of our furniture instantly and just plopped down in our bedroom like nothing had changed since May! She definitely knew that we were finally HOME.
It was a long series of full days and late nights, but we got all of the sanding and the majority of the painting done before we moved our furniture in (our main goal). There is still a lot of stuff to be done and everything seems to be taking much longer that we anticipated, but we make a little bit of progress every day. We don't have any of the interior doors re-hung yet and all of the new light fixtures that we bought are still in boxes in the garage. At the top of our priority list for the weekend is putting a gate across the driveway so that our backyard is enclosed for Maya and then installing an automatic gate opener for it. We also hope to put in our new pantry cabinet so we can get our kitchen organized.

I'm really excited to put together a photo tour of the house to show everyone, but I want to wait until we get more settled in. Right now there are boxes everywhere and nothing is decorated. It could be a few weeks, but know that I will make it happen at some point!

89 Days

Kolby and I slept in our own bed last night for the first time in 89 days!!!

Yep, we were nomads for a solid 89 days... a bit longer than we had planned to say the least.

BUT, we have the most wonderful little house now and I fall more and more in love with it every time I walk in. It is so perfect for us and is so much better than I could have ever imagined. It feels so good to have a place of our own again! And our bed is even more comfortable than I remembered.

I promise I'll post some pictures from this past week soon. We have to get the outlet in our living room grounded in order for AT&T to come hook up our cable and Internet. By Thursday we should be up and running, so I'll upload some pictures and write more about our moving week.

MOVING DAY!

It has been a long and hectic week but we just finished moving all of our stuff from our storage unit to our new house! It's so good to see all of our furniture again and I think it'll look really great once we get everything put back together and in the right place.

We got the keys to our house on Tuesday morning and have been working non-stop since. We had the bright idea to repaint all of the doors and trim because they were dingy and yellowed, and they turned out great but it was a nightmare of a project. We just took the panting tape off this morning and the fresh white trim definitely makes a huge difference in sprucing the place up. We also repainted the kitchen because it was a coral/salmon color that would have clashed with our red kitchen stuff. It is now taupe and looks really good.

And by "we"--- as in "we just finished moving all of our stuff" or "we repainted the trim/kitchen"--- I mean Kolby and I with the indispensable help of several key workers. The list of lifesavers that we are ever indebted to includes Kevin (Kolby's dad), Kassidy (Kolby's sister), Brad & Remy (my brother and SIL), Brittany, Alayne & Tommy (friends), Gran & Daddy Monk (Kolby's grandparents), Kolby's Grandfather, and our friends Zac, Kathy, and Mark. Thank you, thank you, thank you. There's no way on earth we could have pulled this off without your help!

Right now we're at Kolby's parents house to take a break and pick up Maya. Maya has been such a trooper in dealing with all the transition this whole summer, but this week I finally started to see signs that she has had enough. We haven't seen her hardly at all this week because we've been spending all of our time either at work or at our new house and she's used to at least one of us being around most of the time. When we got home really late on Thursday night she came up to me and put her paw in my hand and wanted me to hold it. I did, and we just sat on the floor holding hands and watching TV for half an hour. Anytime I would let go she would put her paw back up in the air and ask me to hold it again. That's how a mute dog tries to tell you that she doesn't want you to leave anymore. Little does she know that we're about to load up and head to our new, PERMANENT home... and that she even has a yard!

Now it's back to work, but I'll post some pictures soon.

Birthdays

We just got back from the most wonderful weekend at my parent's new ranch!

My mom and I both had our birthdays on Saturday (yes, we have the same birthday... old news to most of you!) so our family headed down to the ranch to celebrate. We were also celebrating the completion of the ranch, which isn't totally finished but is finished enough for us to spend the weekend there. We spent Friday evening unpacking dishes, putting sheets and comforters on all the beds, hanging curtains, and just getting things settled. The boys installed the backboard to the basketball goal and called mom out to take the inaugural shot (she played college basketball).

Nothing but net!

Dad cooked a big pancake breakfast on Saturday morning... so delicious!

He even grilled the bacon outside so we didn't have to smell it all day. He's a keeper. Then, we kids pretended to head home after breakfast but really went into town to run errands for the HUGE SURPRISE PARTY we were throwing for my mom that afternoon since it was her 50th birthday. My dad took her to lunch and when they got back we had the ranch set up for a smashin' party and a lot of our extended family had already arrived. I still have no idea how we were able to pull it off, but she had NO IDEA about the party... not even the slightest suspicion. More and more people kept arriving and mom's voice kept getting more loud and shrill every time someone new walked in... especially when her best friend from high school and her college roommate arrived. I'm told I do a great impression of her, if you're ever interested :)

The party was incredible and Mom was so happy you can't even imagine. She was thrilled to see everyone and get to show them around the ranch. Planning that party was insanely complicated (and I mean C-O-M-P-L-I-C-A-T-E-D!) but it was probably even the best birthday I've ever had because it was so awesome to see her BEAMING with joy and hopefully realizing how much we (my dad, brothers, and I) appreciate her. And I know how to plan a great party--- if I do say so myself. I got that from my mom :)

Fun in the Sun

Maya decided that this afternoon--- when it was 97 degrees outside--- was the perfect opportunity to head out to the backyard and catch some rays. I don't know how her fur didn't light on fire!

All is Right

Kolby is home from Santa Fe and all is right with my world again.

We found out yesterday that the tentative date for our BIG MOVE is August 22nd. This is much, much later than we expected, but it's totally out of our control so we're just going with the flow. If everything goes as planned, we'll spend a few days the week beforehand doing some projects around the house and getting it move-in ready and then we'll move our furniture in over the weekend. We're so excited! I'm tired of waving to our house as I pass our neighborhood on my way back from work--- I'm ready to GO HOME to it!

In other, trivial news, I have a new favorite thing about Maya. It probably holds true for most dogs now that I think about it. Maya is SO easy to surprise. When the day came to go pick Kolby up from the airport, I told Maya all morning long about how today was the day we get to go bring Kolby home. I said it straight to her face--- multiple times--- and yet she was still completely shocked with excitement when she saw him. She didn't even know what to do with herself she was so surprised and happy to see him. And then that evening we decided to take her to the dog park and even though we said the words "dog park" out loud in front of her... she almost peed her pants (fur?) when we pulled up to it. Dogs are smart, but they obviously aren't that smart.

August will break our marriage-long streak of living off of a single income. I have now started a real job and Kolby will still get a paycheck for the 2008-2009 school year. But don't worry, we'll be back to our old ways in September. We wouldn't want to spoil ourselves! I worked part-time while I was in school and Kolby is doing the same, but a handful of hourly wages just doesn't compare to a salary. We're fielding ideas for what we should do with the extra money this month, but I'm leaning towards getting a horse for our backyard. Or saving for a car. It's a toss-up.

Work is still going really great but it's definitely a rough adjustment to have such an inflexible schedule. How I miss the life of a student! My best friend, Laura, spent several days this week shopping for a wedding dress and it nearly killed me to have to miss out. Then Kolby and I spent this evening going over a timeline for getting the work done to our new house the week before we move in and I hate that I won't be able to help out during the day. Basically I'm having to finally grow up and I don't think I was quite ready yet.

All in all, our life is wonderful as always!

Hopefully Kolby will put a post together about his time in Santa Fe soon.

SPU Summer Residency

Kolby is LOVING the summer residency for his grad program! He took this picture with his cell phone from the balcony of one of the buildings where they have classes.

I'll let him fill you in on the details once he gets back, but I just wanted to post this picture that he sent and let everyone know that he's having a great time and feels really optimistic about this program being exactly what he was looking for!

Public Service Announcement

If you ever see a "Found Dog" sign in your neighborhood or elsewhere, please do me a favor: call the number and ask if they have taken the dog to a vet or animal shelter to get it scanned for a micro-chip. If they haven't--- suggest that they do. Nowadays, all adopted dogs are micro-chipped (a tiny chip is inserted into the extra skin at the nape of the neck) and it's pretty common for people in general to micro-chip their dogs, especially if they are prone to wander away. Anyone who finds a stray dog (that doesn't have a collar with a phone number) can bring the dog to any vet or animal shelter and they can scan it for a micro-chip. If the dog has one, the owner's contact information will pop up on the computer.

I do this anytime I see one of those signs and yesterday I called about one and the guy said he hadn't heard of micro-chips before and that he would bring the dog to the vet because it was so affectionate that it must belong to someone. Today the sign was taken down. Mission accomplished.

So, spread the word about micro-chips! Our biggest fear with Maya is for her to get loose without her collar and for some well-meaning family to take her in, put up a few "Lost Dog" signs, and then just keep her when no one ever called--- when all they had to do was take her in to get her scanned and we'd get her back right away.

Santa Fe

Kolby leaves for Santa Fe, NM tomorrow for one of the residency portions of his graduate program. He'll be back in early August. We still haven't heard when we'll be able to move into our new house, but our "renters" close on their new house on August 5th so we're hoping the big moving day will follow soon after Kolby gets back in town. He's excited to start back to school--- he's patiently waited 2.5 years and it's finally his turn again.

We are now residing at Kolby's parents' house... our 4th residence in less than 2 months. Things are going great and we are continuing to really enjoy our time with family. Maya doesn't really know what to think about all this but she is always a trooper and knows how to go with the flow. We're very ready to get into our new house, but we all are cherishing this phase that we're in now.

I'm still adjusting to life in the real world. I have to say I don't care for the six o'clock alarm, the rush hour traffic, nor the pantyhose. But I really like my job and I'm so happy to have found something that fits me.

And that's about all that's going on here!

Alaska or Bust

Kolby's grandfather made a dog weight-pulling sled for Maya. As with any project undertaken by Grandfather, the sled is a piece of art. And the sled has a name.

We asked Grandfather to make Maya this sled for several reasons. Foremost, the ranch house that my parents are building is situated on over 100 acres of land and we wanted to find a way for Maya to have enough freedom to roam around off-leash but not enough freedom to run away since the barbed-wire fence around the perimeter of the property is not what we call "Maya-proof". We entertained several ideas like a shock collar (too risky), a GPS collar (too expensive), and a no-jump harness that keeps dogs from being able to extend their back legs far enough to jump up on people and thus would also keep a dog from being able run (too complicated... we couldn't even get it on her). One day when I was killing time at Barnes & Noble (this happens a lot being married to Kolby), I was reading a book about huskies and it went on and on about how they love to pull stuff. It showed these huskies training for mushing by pulling weighted sleds through grass. Apparently huskies LOVE it and to walk/run 1 mile pulling a lightly weighted sled is the equivalent of walking/running 5 miles. So we decided to give it a shot since she'd probably like it, it'd give her good exercise, and it would be cumbersome enough that she probably couldn't make it through the barbed-wire fence at the ranch and certainly couldn't go too far if she did.

Thus, the Alaska or Bust was born.

Maya isn't too sure about it yet. We can't even get her to pull the empty sled more than a few yards. I think it'll take her some time to get used to the sound and feel of something dragging behind her. She gets better at it each time we try, so we're still assuming that husky instinct will kick in any day now! Although, her penchant for laying outside in full sun during the heat of the day until the point where her fur gets so hot it could burn your hand suggests that her Siberian instinct is nowhere to be found these days. We'll see...

Also, I helped my mom create a blog to document the progress of their ranch since it was getting cumbersome to e-mail multiple pictures to all the curious family members. She just updated it this week: http://www.lostcreekranch.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Weddings, Weddings, Weddings

As promised, here are a few pics from our whirlwind of wedding weekends:

Kolby and I with our friends Erin & Tyler at their rehearsal dinner. Tyler has been one of my best friends since we were in the 7th grade and later became a best friend to Kolby as well. Kolby was a groomsman in their wedding, which was on June 27.

The Baylor group (plus Kolby) at my college roommate's wedding in Memphis, TN on July 3. Her name is Emily but we know her as Griffin because 3 of the 5 girls in our apartment were named Emily so we resorted to last names.

Front Row: Katelyn, Emily [Stocks], Emily [Griffin], Laura, and me.

Back Row: Austin (Stocks' boyfriend), Lynn, Benton (Laura's fiancee), and Kolby.

Laura, Brittany, Katelyn, and I at Brittany's beautiful wedding in East Texas on July 11. Brittany is a dear friend of mine from Baylor and she and her husband will live 10 minutes away from us when they get back from their honeymoon! It was A LOT of wedding festivities but we survived it all and enjoyed spending good time with great friends!

Graduate Thesis

Here's the Abstract (aka summary) for my graduate thesis paper, which is titled Micro-Credit and Household Productivity: Evidence from Bangladesh.

This paper tests the effect of micro-credit on household productivity to determine whether micro-credit programs facilitate productivity gains through skills transfer and human capital formation in addition to the provision of credit. The data come from two rounds of household surveys in rural Bangladesh conducted by the World Bank and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies to analyze the impact of three micro-credit programs: the Rural Development-12 program of the Bangladesh Rural Development Board, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and Grameen Bank. Controlling for macro events and household and village characteristics, I find that participating in a micro-credit program increases output per unit labor for household non-farm enterprises in a large and statistically significant way. These increases in productivity can provide the means for sustained improvements in standard of living and contribute to the economic growth of low-income countries.

And here's an excerpt from my Conclusion:

I use cumulative borrowing to proxy for micro-credit participation and find that a 1 percent increase in borrowing increases household productivity by 0.3 percent. This means that on average, a 100 percent increase in borrowing increases household productivity enough to generate an additional $45 in monthly revenue for the household’s non-farm enterprise. As the median revenue for these non-farm enterprises is $136 per month, a $45 increase is quite significant. After controlling for inputs such as capital and operating expenses, I find that nearly half of the gains in productivity are attributable to increases in total factor productivity. This suggests that the non-financial services offered by micro-credit programs, such as skills training and organizational development, as well as knowledge spillover resulting from the group-based nature, indeed serve to increase the productive capacity of borrowers.

I promise my next post will have some pictures. I'm not sure what they'll be of... but I know it's lame to have posts without any pictures!