image

Photos

Hopefully this works.

Duis vitae velit sed

What is going on?!

hh

rwrwr

The Long Await.

After a long time of tedious work, Kelly and I have finally put our apartment in order. All the walls, window sills and based boards are painted. 

Notes: 
* You can click on pictures to make them bigger
* All pictures were taken at night.
* Please click on comments at the bottom of the post and leave us feedback!! :) 
(we've spent a lot of time working on the apartment, and it takes a lot of time to post on this blog, so a little feedback would be great!)  
We can say that everything except for the bathroom floor and wall are finished. We have yet to clean up and around the furniture and carpets and we should be finished. 
The guy in the blue shirt is my suit-mate who helped us with some of the plumbing. Rumor has it that he and I look alike and so we have told people that we are cousins. His name is Joey and he works for the plumbing department here at school, which was very convenient for us. 
These pictures aren't the greatest but they at least show some of what we are looking at. This is the living room that looks far better in real life. In this picture you can see our carpet, Kelly's bookshelf and our refrigerator that acts as half of the kitchen door which blocks the view of the kitchen from anyone sitting in the living room. 
I don't know if mom and dad remember but, we bought this curtain material at a garage sale thinking that we would use them for Kelly's apartment. But the Lord kept us from using it with good reason. They match our furniture and wall really well. They are not complete in this picture by they are hung up just for a preview of how it is going to look. We are still going to hang-up more curtains around the other windows.  
Also, there is that really cool picture that dad gave us from Peru that Kelly and I both love. 
Here is a more broad picture of our living room. Notice the little "G" cup coasters that will stand for Gutierrez! Kelly is excited about filling her book shelf with books for her teaching.
The air-conditioning unit from Delaware was too long to hang out side the window, so I had to modify the window sill with some boards to hold it up and it doesn't look that bad. We are really happy that we have this unit. 
This amazing picture we got at the missionary closet from our church. It looks really good and we believe that the Lord was saving it just for us. It matches not only our wooden furniture but the designs on the frame and the colors match our marble table as if it were part of it. 
This is our little dining room! We still need to put a glass into the middle of the table but other than that it is complete. 
This is the label underneath the picture which we found most suiting for us now. The Lord has been overly gracious to us and has provided more than we deserve. 
The Bedroom! In this picture you can see how the walls from the bedroom have been painted from green to a beautiful white. Also the light fixture is really nice and the lights can all shift and be pointed in the direction you want them to. The carpet in the bedroom is different from that of the Living room but this carpet really makes the wooden furniture stand out and look great. 
This is a broader picture of the room and we are still thinking of putting curtains on the windows. 
You can see the bathroom door from here along with my book shelf and the desk. For a wedding gift, Carlo gave me some books. He was so excited that when the books he ordered had arrived, he didn't hesitate to give them to me. 
The other door is a big walk in closet that is really neat! We have a lot of stuff in there so we are not putting any picture of that up yet. 


Those three pieces of furniture were already in the house when we got here! It was exciting to see how they matched all our other furniture. 
LIGHTS!! 
The view from our room to the Kitchen. The light fixture in the living room also has been changed. 
The KITCHEN! I love the kitchen! It took a lot of work to get to this stage. The floor has been replaced a long with the wall cabinets and base cabinets and everything. The Microwave was another gift from Carlo a while back. I think he gave it to me so that he could use it too. It has been in my room at school and everyday Carlo uses it to make Riamen Noodles. It has been very useful already and now it will have further usefulness. 
Remember you can click on the pictures to make them larger. 
  The two wall cabinets and the base cabinet that is directly under the sink were all found in a salvage store.
These lights are Phenomenal! They give great light and were really really cheap. 


So, after all that work this is what we were able to do. Thankfully our landlord financed all but one small portion of all the modifications. The small part that was not financed was taken out of our rent which is even better. As it is now, we don't have to pay rent till December!

Special Thanks:
 
Special thanks to Dad for helping us by providing some of the funds to help get us started. We know that you care and love us a lot we are thankful. Thanks Papi! Second, we would like to thank everyone who have been praying for us in our time of need, as well as for our relationship.
We are really excited to be getting married!!!! 

We two little birds are ready to move into the nest we've made.

P.S. Don't forget to leave us comments! Just click on the "comments" below this post and write us some feedback. Thank you!

Sorry.

I realized all the the posts that I've made have had several spelling and grammar mistakes. The reason is because every time I write on this blog I'm exhausted. For example coming back from the hospital I was still drugged and couldn't really get a hold of my senses. The other post usually took place after a long day of work plus studies. 


The purpose of this blog is to let the our families and some friends know about how things are going with us. So usually there isn't the utmost effort put into the writing of these posts, but that is laziness from my part. I'm sorry and I will try to improve my writing. If this post itself is kind of off it is because of the 1000mg of hydrocodone that I've just taken. 

Hospital Events

Today I went in for my surgery and I was a bit excited because this was my first surgery. My dearest Kelly was more worried than I was which showed me how much she loves me. She is a very special girl and I'm really grateful to the Lord for her. 


As we arrived, the hospital provided free valet parking which was a blessing. Then after I signed in and was filling out the paper work I saw that there was a part that required dad's information which I didn't have. So of course I was wondering how in the world were we going to contact dad since that phone in Peru didn't work. Fortunately by God's grace I had brought my computer to the hospital. It was even more of a blessing that the hospital had and provided free wireless internet. If that wasn't enough, Ben was online using skype and we were able to talk to mom and get Dad's information. We knew that the Lord was watching over us all the way because of all the prayer that was offered in our behalf. I want to thank everyone that prayed for us during this time because prayers were answered.
Everything went well! Once I went inside the preparation room the nurse gave me two pills to swallow with a small cup of a water. Mom knows this best but I have a really bad gag reflect and I can't swallow pills without food. Well this time I did. My throat was very uncomfortable afterwards but at least I did :) Then the nurse took me down the hall with an elderly lady by the name of Lois. We started talking about how much we missed food and how hungry we were. Then we were taken into a room to put on our fun hospital clothes and then were moved into the "i.v.-putting-in" room. A few nurses came in a and out all asking the same questions. 

"Are you allergic to medicines?" 
"Have you had seizures been or a past history of them?"
"Heart problems?"
"Anything to eat after midnight?"

I really wanted to say, "I'm pretty sure my answers haven't changed sense the last three nurses." Literally about 7 people asked me the same things. So next time I figured I'm going to write a resume with my answers on it and hand some out while I'm there :P 
Then they moved me to the operating room where all the doctors and nurses all knew that I was getting married and were asking all sorts of friendly questions as if they were going to show up at the wedding. I was about to say something until I figured that it wouldn't been a bad idea if they did come, because they are all doctors and have plenty of money to buy gifts! Yes! So I was sure to tell them, "Tacoma, Washington in Faith Presbyterian Church which is right next to K-Mart and Tacoma Boys. If you have any question just call me." 
As we were all talking I passed out and woke up in the recovery room where I enjoyed some fun conversations with the nurses. They even brought me water and offered coke or sprite if I wanted. 
Then I was taken to a room where Kelly was going to come and pick me up. When she came in the room my head flopped as I mumbled "Kelly, is that you?" she said, "Yes it's me," as she looked at me with pity. "My leg is really hurting," I continued, "where are we?" She answered, "I know, I know, we are going home soon...." then she asked the nurse "is he joking?" My head was aimed downward as though I didn't have strength to look up. Then I reached up and gave her a hug. Everything was okay. Then she called me a "stinker."

All to say that the Lord was very gracious to us and made it so that everything went smoothly. Thank you everyone for your prayers.  


Our Apartment

Kelly and I have been working on our new apartment for about 5 weeks now. Actually we only work on the weekends and have been working a total of 8 days all together. The place needs a lot of work.  In the Kitchen the stove was covered in grease and black charcoal and only one of the burners worked. The walls were equally bathed in grease and spaghetti sauce which Kelly spent 4 hours cleaning off. The sink was rusty and very dirty. Yuk. There was dirt in side the sink and the base cabinets. The flooring had mold and water underneath it. A bunch of food participles were found in the cracks along with a coupon from 1971. The coupon read, "Now you can save 5 whole cents!" I don't even know what it was talking about, but it looked good.  The wall cabinets were made out of tin something I hadn't seen before and they had plastic to cover them inside. The plastic was moldy too. Gross.. But they were in far better condition than the refrigerator. That poor refrigerator looked as though it had been a P.O.W. from Vietnam. It was so mistreated and dirty that even the ants formed a conveyer line going around it, probably for health reasons. Okay maybe the fridge wasn't that bad but it was still really gross. Once I took off the wall cabinets it was obvious that many mistakes had taken place in the installing process. There were a lot of holes in the wall and no paint at all. The refrigerator itself had a left a mark on the wall some how.. we didn't even know that was possible. 

When we began sanding the window sills I found that the frames had been poorly installed. There were spaces between the wall and the windows which were filled with paper and small pieces of wood to compensate for the mistake. This spacing allowed moisture to enter in and riot the wood. I learned about window frames in California since I work there for the summer in a neighborhood construction site. 
When we moved into the bathroom to our horror there was toilet there. I mean, it would have been better if there wasn't one. The toilet seem to have rusted on the wall some how and when I tried to unscrew one of the bolts on the toilet seat, the bolt burst because it was so rusted due to the urine.
  The bathroom sink was rusted as well and the faucet had this green sulfur like substance (probably called calcium) on it that made the handles hard to turn. The shower had mold coming through walls and it didn't even have a shower-head. All it had was an expansion hose that reached to the top and made it look like a shower-head. 
My favorite part was when I turn the faucet in the kitchen I heard the shower turn on. I thought that maybe once we were married we would have to have a string tied to the kitchen faucet and have to pull it every time we wanted to take a shower. 
But we can understand that the apartment had all these problems because it was over 50 years old. The previous renters just hadn't put too much care into the place. 
Outside the apartment was a different story. The view was absolutely amazing because the house was right next to the bluff-trial on the side of the mountain. There was also a big yard with several beautiful trees and flowers that you easily could have a picnic anywhere and enjoy it. The drive-way is not concrete but gravel adding to its beauty. 

Needless to say, though the apartment had a handful of issues to fix, Kelly and I are very thankful to the Lord for providing this wonderful place for us. 
 
We began to work on apartment every opportunity we had.