Canals and Sudan Foot Race

About a month ago, Ross and I went on a date to The Mandalay Canal at Las Colinas. A few people I know have gone down there and said it was beautiful, so we decided to check it out. The weather was absolutely perfect that day for walking around and enjoying the scenery!

Two weeks ago, mom and dad came into town to see our new apartment and to run/walk The Sudan Footrace with us. The race was a 5k sponsored by e3 partners ministry and all of the proceeds went to help educate the children in Sudan. It was a really cool event!

Anyway, Ross ended up placing 3rd in his age group, dad placed 2nd, and mom placed 3rd in hers. It was pretty funny! I on the other hand, did not place. :(

We are still here...

It's been a while, but we are still here, don't worry! :)

Here is a brief update of life in the Garison household:

In the past month, school has started, and our schedules have been stretched pretty thin. Ross has started his first year of teaching, and even though it is a lot of work, he is really enjoying being in the classroom. I am in in my second to last (hopefully) semester of classes, and then I will student teach next fall to graduate in December.

We are still doing middle school youth ministry at North Point, and I recently got to baptize one of my girls, Rachael. It was hands down one of the coolest experiences I have ever had.

As of Saturday, October 3, we will be moving away from Lewisville to The Colony. We are very excited about moving, and we hope our friends will still come visit us even though we live a little further down the road!!

Side Note: If you have not already downloaded or bought David Crowder's newest CD, I strongly recommend it. The sound is a little different than his last one, but the level of creativity in this CD just blows me away!!

A few weeks ago, I was able to get away from the metroplex, and drive down to see my dear friend Abby. Her husband was on an elk hunt in Colorado, so we had a girl weekend at her adorable apartment in College Station. Basically, we drank tons of coffee and talked a lot!! We had lots of catching up to do. Saturday, she took me to a few antique stores in Bryan, and it made me want to redecorate our apartment!! I don't think Ross would appreciate that very much though...

The yummy fruit pizza we ate for dinner:)

I really enjoyed getting to spend time together, and I miss her already!

Thats all for now! I will be posting pictures soon of our new apartment!!

Look out HGTV...

This past week, Ross and I were on the hunt for a new TV stand. After spending about an hour in a few stores, and quickly realizing that these things were way out of our price range, we ended up at CCA.

We found this...

As you can tell, it's a little beat up, but it's solid wood and it was only thirty bucks! After staring at it for a few minutes, we decided that we wanted to take on the project of stripping it and refinishing it. Pa Paw came over and let us borrow his tools and gave us a few words of wisdom. And then it began. A really really long day of sweating, sanding, and stripping the finish off.

We had no idea the wood underneath all of that stain was so light!

We sanded everything that we could, and then we used a liquid stripper to take the rest off. Let me just say, that stuff is stinkin messy!

Finally, we got a coat of the cherry stain on. Don't worry, we didn't actually stain it in the apartment.

After a couple of coats of stain, a finish, and new hardware, this is what we came out with

Our conclusions from this project:

-Refinishing was a lot harder than we anticipated

-We have a very small balcony..

-It was definitely a thirty dollars well spent

More Baseball!

Last night, the Garison clan drove to Arlington for yet another Rangers game. (Ross says you can't get enough baseball...) This time, the Rangers were playing the Seattle Mariners. The first half of the game was going by really quickly and the Rangers were playing pretty good baseball. Long about the six inning, a HUGE storm cloud came into view from the back of the stadium. This was the rain storm that was supposed to arrive at 2am. Obviously, it didn't have a watch because it was only around 8:30pm.

As we were sitting at the very top of the stadium, I was feeling quite uneasy about the lightning storm that was going on behind us. They finally called the game, and thus began a 2 hour rain delay.

We still got to see some pretty awesome fireworks, and we had a lot of fun entertaining ourselves during the delay under the concourse. The Rangers pulled out a win and the final score was 5-4. Since most people had already left, traffic leaving the stadium was a breeze, but we were all pretty tired on the way home.

Ross loves taking pictures..

Hardly anyone stayed for the last part of the game..

Another fun evening at The Rangers Ballpark in Arlington!

Mommy Daughter Time

This past week, Mom made the trip up to Lewisville to spend a few days with us. We had big plans to spend most of the day on Monday in downtown Grapevine, but we woke up Monday morning with lots of rain in the forecast. We still went to Grapevine, and walked up and down Main St. with our umbrellas. We had a really great lunch (you can never go wrong with tomato basil soup) and some tasty wine at a local winery. On Tuesday, we just relaxed and ran errands around town. Mom was very impressed with Teachers Tools, and loaded up on supplies. They don't have one of those in Tarkington!

Here are a few of the pictures that I took...

The most delicious croissant I have ever eaten..

I had so much fun spending time with my mommy for a few days!

America's Pastime...

Friday evening, Ross and I drove to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington to see the Rangers take on the Minnesota Twins. We had some tickets that were from a rainout, and parking is only $5 on Fridays. You can't beat that!

The stadium was pretty packed once we got there. We chose to sit at the very top of section 334, which is in the upper deck behind the first base dugout. Sitting at the very top = being as far away from the drunk idiots as possible. It was never really that hot, and we had a nice little breeze going on the whole night.

The Rangers lost, and Ross was sad. But we got to see an awesome fireworks show after the game!!

Even though I am not nearly as big of a fan of baseball as Ross is, I still enjoy spending an evening at the ballpark, especially if I get to see fireworks too!!

Day 2...Noah

I'm about two days ahead of posting these notes online, so I can't really say that I just finished studying this stuff, but I just finished studying about Noah. Interesting stuff in the Bible. A lot of it gets overlooked in kids' sunday school classes (see the first vineyard).

Coolest newly learned thing: Shem's descendants vs. Ham's descendants