More on our home...

Well we're taking baby steps with this house selling business. First we put the sign in the window (tough work). Then last weekend while Scott and two of his friends were busy watching March Madness I cleaned the house and took pictures plus did the virtual tour of our house. I probably could've slaved longer and cleaned up bookshelves a little more or purchased more plants...but the type of home we're selling is different and the potential buyer we're selling to is a little less picky about those sort of things. So I figured as long as it's decluttered and the pictures are bright then we're good to go. We've received a couple calls just from the sign being in the window. We're putting the flyers out today and we launched the virtual tour on a new website:

http://www.stewartvillehomeforsale.com/

After we have the flyers out for a bit our next plan of action is to send postcards with pictures and information on the house to the local community. After that we'll post flyers around town and Rochester and maybe put a couple ads in the paper and hold an open house. The good news? We're not in a rush so it's pretty smooth sailing so far. Here are the flyers I made up for the house (click images to see larger)




We've really enjoyed living in this house. Of course it's not perfect but it suits us very well. Who wouldn't want a master suite? The community is great, very quiet and some of the most helpful neighbors I've ever met! It'll be sad to leave but for the future it's the best. We would like a yard for kids to play in and a more active community with other families.

Earth Hour 8-9pm

If you haven't been to Google yet today, go! What a neat way to raise awareness for something. Google should do this more often with various charities. It worked for us! We'll be turning the lights out from 8-9pm tonight. Read more about Earth Hour by clicking here.

Practice, practice, practice!

Just learning more about the camera settings and practicing some shots on my two coworkers.

Happy Birthday Matt!

Ahhh yes, one of my trusted blog-readers and my BROTHER! My little bro turned 23 today :) Matt is currently a senior at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's graduating in just a few short months I can't even believe it. Then he hopes to go to law school. He's so dang smart! Anyway, I miss him and wish he lived closer. We have some really great talks sometimes and I'm glad we can just be honest with each other. That's what I love about him the most...his honesty. He can be a little analytical at times but he's a McCasland, what do you expect? Anyway, Happy Birthday little brother...love you and miss you. Hope you enjoy your gift!

Birthday Meal

Every year Scott takes the time to make me dinner for my birthday. He cooks a lot of the time anyway but this dinner is special. He picks all recipes that I have saved in my Allrecipes.com recipe box and cooks up 6 different things (so it's actually 4 courses, not 6). He spends a lot of time planning and cooking and it's SOOO good! Here's the menu:

Mini Reubens


Spinach Cranberry Salad


Jerk Chicken Pasta (served with garlic broccoli and cheese bread)


Jamaican Cake


Last year's menu was:

Stuffed Mushrooms


Greek Salad (homemade dressing)


Garlic Cheese Bread


Angel Chicken Pasta


Dump Cake (this picture doesn't do it justice)

Happy Birthday Ryan!

Our nephew, Ryan, was born the day before my birthday :) So needless to say we've been celebrating our "green" birthdays together. Well you know how that goes...he's 4 and I'm 27 so we're celebrating his birthday and I get a few presents. It's fun though because normally at this age you don't get a celebration at all.

I wonder if in the future they'll play off of St. Patty's day and make it a day to go "green"... you know, environmentally. I guess I haven't even checked...some places may have already done this as a way of advertising green products.

For Ryan's birthday we went to "Pump it Up" in the cities where they rented out the entire place. It's basically a large room with about 4 different HUGE blow-up things you can jump in. Adults can go too :) It was so much fun and I didn't get shocked once!! It's a great workout too. Then after all the kids jump and jump and jump, we all go into the party room to eat cake and Ryan opens his presents....chaos! It was a lot of fun. Then my family all went over to Maple Grove to a new hotel and stayed the night there....let the party continue :) Darren and Laura treated us to our hotel room and it was really nice and new. They had a whirlpool outside! We had 4 different rooms and Abby loved going in and out of all the different rooms. Ryan opened some more presents and I opened some too. His favorite present by far? Little hockey guys with a little rink...he literally played with them by himself for HOURS!

It's so funny what we get excited for as adults. I loved my gifts. I got a heart rate monitor (to help with my training for the tri), little tupperware containers for lunches (with built-in coolers) and a personal blender. Oh and of course green shamrock socks.

Another bonus to the night was I FINALLY got to go to Trader Joe's!!! This is a grocery store that offers lots of natural and good-for-you foods at prices that aren't outrageous (a dream come true for me). I've heard so much about this place through Weight Watchers and there isn't one near here. So when I found out there was a Trader Joe's right across the street from our hotel I nearly wet myself! Darren, my mom, Scott and I walked over to check it out. It was everything I imagined it to be and more. Loved it! And Scott did too. Now if only we could get one in Rochester!

Scott is now preparing a 6 course homemade meal for my birthday and I'm supposed to know nothing about it. He started this tradition last year and I have to say the food was amazing. I'm getting hungry smelling it.

Btw, I'm not going to do this birthday thing anymore once I come around to my year anniversary of blogging...it's just too much work and it's hard to decide who to do and who not to do. Unless we do something like we did for Ryan's this year, I won't be writing about them after June so don't be offended if you don't see it :)

Here are some pictures (taken with my crappy camera...we took more with the better camera just haven't edited them yet). Also some videos:


The birthday boy with his hockey guys


Abby with her new umbrella (Grandma always knows the best gifts to give)

Abby on the slide

Random footage (we mainly wanted to get Abby saying "yeyah")

Happy "Green" Day!

Big News!

No I'm not pregnant.

We've "officially" put our house on the market!!!! For those of you that don't know... it's a manufactured home so it's not like your normal house. Therefore we're deciding to sell it FSBO. Selling our house is more like selling a boat...there's a lot less paper work and legal stuff with homes like this. So although we're not completely "ready" to move quite yet we figured it didn't hurt to put a sign in the window. We'll slowly take some pics and get some flyers out there and of course do several virtual and video tours. We plan on probably doing a postcard mailing in the area too. It's a buyer's market which makes us a little nervous BUT we're in a good situation. See, we purchased our home in Illinois and moved it here. Homes in Illinois are A LOT less. So even if we price it lower than the appraised value here, we'll still be quite a bit ahead. Also, we are surrounded by new homes so that should definitely help. Anyway, it's exciting. We're still debating whether we want to live in a small town outside of Rochester or in Rochester. Hence the location question. Which by the way, Brian does bring up a good point...what defines a good location. This is true, it's different for everyone. For me, a good location would of course be in a decent neighborhood (I assumed when I created the poll that of course people would choose a decent neighborhood no matter what) but I would also like to be within walking distance of either a small downtown area or the grocery store and parks or walking trails. In other words I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere where I'd have to drive somewhere all the time. There are of course benefits to that too but personally I think I want to be closer to town. Still struggling with whether or not we want it to be Rochester.

Put a new poll up, by the way...10 to 1 most people would rather have a great location. That 1 person who doesn't is my husband of course :) That doesn't make things much easier now does it?

Happy Birthday Leah!

It's Leah's birthday today! Leah and Eric went to the cities to see ComedySportz (if you've never been GO, it's SUPER funny and fun...plus family-friendly). So in the mean time Scott and I developed a plan for her birthday. She has no idea about this and probably won't until at least tomorrow. I'm going out on a limb and assuming she doesn't check this before she gets home. Anyway, so for Eric's birthday I think last year we got him a GC and went in their apartment building (shhh, we know the code) and put the GC under their door. They said they found it later under the fridge or something. Anyway, so for Leah's birthday this year we decided to go a little more extreme. So we bought a pack of 80 envelopes and spent about 2 hours at Sky Dragon writing different things in each envelope. Some serious, some funny, some very random and some quotes from movies. And then a few had actual gifts in them. Then we went on a little excursion back to their apartment and slid every envelope under their door. Shouldn't have given us the code, Schillers! Anyway, it was much harder this time because they had since gotten a new door so we had more of a challenge. Then we left a lone Peep sitting on the doorknob. No birthday is complete for Leah without candy.

Happy Birthday, hope you enjoy your gift!!