Our New House! ...hopefully

This is the house out in Severance that we have a contract on. It is scheduled to be finished near the end of June, and then we have another 45 days after that to close. So hopefully our Portland house will sell by then. Since we signed a contract on it early enough we were able to pick out the outside stone and paint colors. We also get to pick out all of the inside colors too.

This is what it looked like a few weeks ago.
And this is what it looks like today. Thankfully there was no major damage during the hail storm and tornado that hit in Windsor. Only a few broken windows. They are almost finished with the paint and trim (still some work to do above the garage). We are very happy with the colors that we picked, I think they turned out great.
The front door, home sweet home someday...
The side of the house, facing west. The builder will do landscaping in the front yard and the side yard, but we have to build the fence and finish the landscaping in the back.


Our view to the west, at least for a couple of years. There are lots directly across the street, but those probably won't be built for a year or two. The field behind those lots is still farm land.The back.

I took this picture from the corner of the property line. Hooch will have tons of room to run around!

Lord willing we will be able to live here in July! But there still are a lot of things that have to happen.

Tornado in Windsor

A huge tornado hit Windsor, CO yesterday around noon. My office is in Windsor, which is just about 11 miles southeast of where we live in Fort Collins. Around 11 am it started to hail so all of us in the office were just standing around looking out the window. The hail started off pretty small, but soon it was golf ball size! The damage to the cars in the parking lot was terrible. My front windshield was cracked (two perfect circles about 1-foot in diameter, kinda weird) and there are "dimples" all over the top and hood. One person's back windshield was completely shattered. Little did we know that this would be the least of the damage around the rest of the town.

Shortly after the hail storm started the power went out. I tried calling Jamie (who had the day off and was at home in Fort Collins) but the call wouldn't go through. She was able to call me a little bit later and said that a tornado had knocked over a couple of semis just south of Windsor. So of course we all go out side and look at the sky (after it stopped hailing). I didn't see any funnel clouds, but there were tons of other clouds in the sky doing crazy things. Right about that time I guess the tornado hit in East Windsor (I work on the west side of town). But at this point we still didn't know that there was a tornado warning (no power or phones, so we were kind of in the dark in more ways than one). Shortly there after we saw tons of emergency vehicles driving by toward the other part of town. One of my co-workers kids were in a day care on that end of town and she just got a strange feeling that something happened to the day care. She was freaking out because she couldn't get in touch with anybody because we couldn't make any cars out. So three of us jumped in the car and went over to the day care trying to assure her that it was just a hail storm and everything was going to be alright. As we got closer to the other side of town we started to see trees that had been snapped in half, fences were blown over, a couple of cars had been flipped on their side with all of the windows blown out... not good. We pulled up to the day care and it was like a scene straight out of a movie. The building right next-door to the day care center was just a pile of rubble, every car in the parking lot had windows blown out, the playground at the day care was destroyed, but the day care center itself was still in tact. There was lines of kids crossing the street and teachers pushing cradles full of kids. They were all headed to a nearby bank that was a little safer. Thankfully all of the kids were accounted for and okay. My co-worker found her kids and was able to take them home. I went over to another co-workers house who lives in Windsor to survey the damage. Luckily only one window was broken (probably just from the hail). I ended up going back home to Fort Collins and spent the rest of the day listening to the radio to keep up with the storm.

All in all I think seven tornadoes touched down in the area. The "path of destruction" was over 30 miles long and about 1 mile wide. The town of Windsor was hit the hardest. The most amazing thing, the biggest blessing, was that there was only one death and very few serious injuries. Quite a crazy day. I am sure this weekend there will be tons of opportunities to help in the recovery/clean-up process.

Today at work we are going to go out and just find some place to help. My co-workers know a lot of people in the neighborhoods that were hit the worst and we might go over and help them out. But most people aren't even allowed back in their homes because of gas leaks and structural damage. I can't imagine loosing my entire house, but most people who have been interviewed on the news have a positive outlook. It is just stuff.

Here are a few pictures from the internet.

A lot of the houses were completely destroyed. Almost every house in Colorado has a basement, so that saved the lives of hundreds of residents.


A train that was derailed near the daycare center.



This is an old grain warehouse that was used by a billiards company just about a mile down the road from my work.

Game Night!

The youth pastor at our church was out of town last weekend so Jamie and I got to run a game night for youth group at the church. It was a lot of fun, but I was dead tired after about an hour and a half of games (I didn't even play any!!) Here are some of the games we played.

This game is called Kajabee-can-can (don't ask me why). The point is to pull the other people into the trash can in the middle of the circle. If you hit the can you're out or if you let go of the rope you are out too. Fun game (I've played it before), but we didn't have the best ropes. After the first round everybody had rope burns! And as you can see, the guy to that is nearly out of the picture pulled really hard, everybody let go of their ropes, and then he flew into a table. Good times, cause no one got seriously injured:)


The point of this game was to see which team could do the best design using gold fish, peanut butter, and a face.
I gave the prize to Rose, that team went with the classic bearded lady / unibrow look. I think the other team just tried to cover Drew's face completely.




The winner!

Pictionary, always a classic!


Chubby Bunny...
How many marshmallows can you stuff in your mouth and still say "Chubby Bunny"?
I think the winner only had 8, I was a little disappointed in the effort...






We finished off the night with a couple of rounds of "spoons"

Starting over with the house hunt...

We lost the house that we had under contract out in Severance. The initial contract was through May 13 (had to close before that date) so we were going to ask for an extension, but somebody else came in and made an offer so we are out of luck. Oh well, back to square one. Not that we could have bought this house until the one back in Portland sold anyway (which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon), so I guess it doesn't make much difference.

Hopefully God has something better out there for us!