this is our life right now.

we are such a mess! whoever thought it'd be a good idea to have jon and a.j. pack up their house by themselves was mistaken. 

i am a daring chick posting these photos. see what we are living with? it is the worst! nothing has a place. 

we cleared out the linen closet (everything but our D.I. pile) and bandit immediately jumped up there to lounge. 

my FIL gets here on wednesday to help us pack up the U-Haul and we head to texas on saturday. so sad to leave our house!

i think now you can see why we've been stress eating: 

amidst the chaos, we've recently taken a liking to screaming "HUMAN SCWEW!" and using our pointer finger to painfully "screw" into the other persons ribs. part of the fun is seeing who can scream human screw loudest and most like a child. do you think my in-laws will like living with people who scream for entertainment?

 on friday we finally got to go on a trail ride together! jon hasn't ridden any of the horses since i've been riding, so i was really excited to have him up there with me. he rode a 5 year old mare named Magic. she was so sweet. i rode old reliable, gerry, who only spooked once when he heard a sprinkler nearby. he is such a calm chap, i love riding him. 

i'm so obsessed with this series of photos:

saturday was a rough day. it was my gran's birthday, her first since she's been gone. all day i was wishing i could call her and hear her silly little laugh and hear her ask "how you doin, dear?"

my dad called me in the early afternoon to tell me that my kitty back home died. i knew as soon as i picked up and heard him say "hi..." that it was about the cat. it was an unfortunate mishap involving a garage door. i think it sounds as bad as it was. it broke my heart.

(this was the first time my granny and chrissy had seen each other after a few months. they were both so happy!)

saturday afternoon we took bandit up to our old roommate, hanke's, house to stay until we officially leave for texas in may. i kept telling him that he was going to live with hanke and he obviously acted like he didn't understand, but i swear on friday and saturday morning-he knew! he was being soo cuddly and sweet all morning, it was not usual. it was really sad dropping him off and was just a reminder of what this move really means-lots of big and scary changes.

 look at those eyes. terrified.
it's not that alarming though, he's had a shocked look on his face since we got him:

after dropping bandit off, we went to the mall for some retail therapy. when we left the mall, jon handed me the bag and said "happy birthday." my birthday is next month, so i thought this was his easy way of getting me a gift. when i said "that's mean." he replied, "remember, your gran would get you gifts on other peoples birthday's so you wouldn't feel left out? i got you a gift on her birthday."

 we got balloons in my grandma's favorite colors and sent a card up up up into the sky. it was surprisingly relieving to watch them go and disappear into the heavens.

determined to have a better day sunday, we woke up at 5am (normal for jon, horrible for me!!) to head downtown for the hot chocolate 5k! 

we ran it with sara, it was really fun! the course was actually very challenging with tons of huge hills and quite a bit of downhills as well (my thighs are so sore from the downhills). my 5k personal record is 29:39 and i was really hoping to beat that, but i didn't. the hills were what were so hard and my nike+ sensor died so i didn't have it make sure i stayed on track to beat my time. however, if i hadn't been trying to keep up with jon the whole time, i wouldn't have finished as fast as i did! 

(jon is beautiful isn't he? he's also really sweet and put chocolate on my mouth right before the photo...)

they gave us a mug with hot chocolate and fondue with all these things to dip in it like a banana, pretzels and marshmallows. in theory, getting rewarded after a race with chocolate is an awesome idea. in reality, it was quite unpleasant. it didn't feel like we had ran a race at all, the chocolate totally cancelled out the good post-race feeling you usually have! but would i do it again? definitely.