Taco Tuesday

We've been in Dallas for a little over a week now. I think Dallas and I are getting along pretty well. Between walking the dog 2 to 3 times a day and walking to restaurants for dinners and occasionally up to the grocery store to pick up a few things, I walked 21 miles last week!

I am pretty proud of that, and I've already walked 7 miles so far this week, although I think that number is a little low. I use the RunKeeper app, and it tracks any walks over 15 minutes without me having to open the app to do an "official workout". Up until yesterday, it was working great. Yesterday, however, it tracked my afternoon walk with Copper as only lasting 20 minutes and 0.82 miles. In reality we walked roughly 2 miles. The app isn't perfect, but it gets the job done. I may try doing our walks as official workouts so that the data is more accurate. We'll see.

It's probably no surprise that we've been down here just a week and I've already injured myself. Twice yesterday. First, I put a bookcase together and managed to cut my leg on one of the shelves. Not serious, but it hurt! Then, last night after dinner, Chris and I took Copper for a short walk because she hadn't been on a walk since the early afternoon. We walked a little over a half mile, just around the block really. As we were getting ready to cross the street back to our apartment, I stepped off the curb and must have landed on an uneven part of the street and twisted my ankle. The immediate pain was pretty bad and eventually I was able to get up and limp across the street and up the stairs. I propped my ankle up the rest of the evening while we watched Netflix. This morning it seems to be doing fine, so we'll see how our walks today go.

Our apartment is finally starting to feel more like home. We only have a few boxes left lying around and that's mostly because we've run out of space to put things. We've got pictures hanging on the walls and my books on shelves. I'm hoping by this weekend we won't have any more boxes cluttering the living room and I can finally take some pictures.

Copper and I are getting into a routine and are getting acquainted with our new city. We've walked through some really nice areas and neighborhoods and some that made me glad we were walking in the middle of the day. Sometimes I plan our route in advance and sometimes I just wing it. We haven't gotten lost yet, but I have checked GPS once or twice just to make sure we were headed in the right direction.

Chris will be working Christmas Eve and we're planning on ordering Chinese for dinner and eating some of the cookies I plan to bake (hoping to start on those today). Since I don't have a car here right now, we did our Christmas shopping together on Sunday in what was probably the biggest and most overwhelming mall I've ever been in. Chris basically picked out his gifts, so unfortunately he's not getting any surprises (and therefore I'm not wrapping them!). The weather this week will be beautiful, so Copper will get a couple Christmas Day walks before we head over to my cousin's house for Christmas dinner. He was so nice and helped us unload the U-Haul (because there was no way I was going to be able to help Chris carry a couch up a flight of stairs!) and he invited us to have Christmas dinner with him and his family.

It will certainly be weird not seeing our families on Christmas Eve/Day, but I think it's a little romantic to spend our first Christmas Eve as a married couple on our own. And I'm grateful that we won't be spending Christmas Day completely alone.

I'll be spending the rest of my day walking the dog and getting a few groceries and hopefully starting to bake this afternoon while I anxiously wait for Chris to get home so we can head down the street for dinner because it's Taco Tuesday at Tacos y Mas! We went there for dinner one night last week and they had amazing street tacos, so we decided we would go back tonight for Taco Tuesday. I'm loving the food down here so far, and loving that we have so many places to go within walking distance!

Hopefully next time I post I'll have pictures of the apartment to share. It's the first day of winter and the high today in Dallas will be 72, so I'm gonna get out there and enjoy it!

Our Big Move!

I know, I know, it's be a while. I promised after the wedding/honeymoon I would write more. And I just haven't. It's really just pure laziness on my part. But also enjoying married life and time with family and friends. Because just a few days ago, we moved from St. Louis to Dallas, Texas!

It all happened really fast. It wasn't a huge surprise, at least not for me. Chris had several job offers in a couple different states, so it was really just a matter of time before we moved. We just weren't sure when or where it would be. It turned out that Texas offered Chris the best opportunity for further advancement. So we made our decision and then told our families...on Thanksgiving. It was not well received by everyone. Especially since we would be moving in just two short weeks from that day and would not be home for Christmas. A couple people even thought we were going to announce that we were pregnant--HA.

I think eventually everyone came around to the idea and we all started to get excited, and I started to get extremely stressed. Up until a couple days before we actually moved, we still hadn't nailed down a place to live. I was so stressed that I ended up having to go see my dentist because I had been having severe jaw pain. He said it was definitely just stress and prescribed me a muscle relaxer. He called a couple days later to see how I was doing--better, but still sore. He said normally once his patients start feeling relief, he takes them off the muscle relaxer, but given the amount of stress I was under, and would be under for at least another week or so, he advised me to take it for the full two weeks.

Thankfully, two days after the move, my jaw pain is completely gone. All my stress now is about where to put all our stuff. Most of our big furniture (stuff that we may want later on down the road) is in a storage unit back home. But we ambitiously brought quite a bit with us. And although our apartment is a 2-bedroom, we really have less space than we thought we would (that's what happens when you have to lease an apartment sight-unseen).

Overall, I think we ended up in a good location. We're just a couple miles from Parkland Memorial Hospital (because we all know how accident-prone I am) and we're very, very close to Love Field airport. So it's LOUD. It's definitely been an adjustment for all of us. I think Copper is enjoying all the walks she gets to go on now, and I'm enjoying the exercise!

We've still got some unpacking to do--mostly decorations and such that will need to be hung on the walls somewhere. Once we get some more of these boxes out of here, I'll post pictures! :)