Yay, it's a Snow Day!

Wow. Has it been 2 months since our last blog? If it takes a day and a half of ice falling from the sky for us to blog, you know that we have a busy lifestyle. We are currently snowed/iced indoors in what is being deemed as 'SNOWPOCALYPSE 2011'. Oh how humans love to over-react.

Here are some highlights from the end of 2010, and the start of 2011.

--> BOYS DECEMBER CAMPOUT

Preparing to jump in the lake. (Naturally)

--> CHRISTMAS WITH THE FAMS

Elijah with his 'sweep sweep'.

Miller siblings.

--> NEW YEARS WITH GREAT FRIENDS

Wright Hall RA's minus 1 and our fearless leader.

Fun at the lake house.

--> WE SAW THIS. (and it was INCREDIBLE!)

--> I started playing ball on GOSS'S BASKETBALL TEAM. So far we are 0-4. Last year they lost all their games. They are so bad I'm starting. I am hopeful that we will win a couple games this year though.

--> BATTALION KLONDIKE 2011

Look at my boys tuggin! Proud of them!

--> Kristi has started volunteering with the GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN program at First Glance.

We are looking forward to our first full year as Akron residents. We come to town, Lebron leaves, and the University of Akron soccer team wins a National Championship. Overall, a good year for Akron I do believe (mostly due to the addition of 2 Millers).

Our Christmas Tree and Cousin Eddie!

We had a great Thanksgiving celebrating with our families. First we spent two days in West Jeff with my family. There were so many people this year that we had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' church. Then on Friday we headed out for our annual Black Friday trip. I didn't buy much, but it was fun hanging out with everyone. And we can now publicize some exciting news- we're going to be an uncle and aunt again! Michelle is due July 4th! Then we came back to Akron to have Thanksgiving with Josh's family. Joanna was home from college, so we made a big sibling Swenson's run, watched Ohio State annihilate Michigan, and finished the evening with the traditional viewing of Elf on Thanksgiving night.

And now it's Christmas in the Miller home! Our Christmas tree is up, and the Christmas movie marathon has begun. So far we've watched The Christmas Story with Ralphie in his bunny pjs, Home Alone, my favorite- Christmas Vacation, and Josh's favorite- Charlie Brown Christmas. Speaking of Christmas Vacation, my Christmas Vacation has officially begun! Crazy! It was a great first semester at CVCA. Now we are excited to have some extra time with family and to see our HU friends at New Years!

Our first Akron Christmas tree, with the tree skirt my mom made us.


Our advent tree, made by Josh's mom.


And we finally updated our 'Huntington friends' and 'family' map. This was given to me from a friend to remind us to pray for our friends and extended family.




Merry Christmas!

If you move a lot of dirt, someone will get hurt.

Our backyard has been a slow moving project throughout the summer and fall, however slow moving does not mean easy. Our backyard has caused the scheduling of two separate surgeries so far (a shoulder surgery and neck surgery) both to the same individual which shall remain nameless.

As you will see, we started out with a half-above, half-below ground pool that took up almost all of our backyard. As much as we would have liked to have kept the pool, the possibility of a small yard to garden outweighed the maintenance of a pool.


With a Home Depot water pump and Mom's help, we drained the pool.




A couple days later, an army of teenagers dug out the pool. It just so happened that our neighbors were wanting a pool, so we hooked them up!


It took several days of work to get from the above picture to this one. Several shovels, a couple pic axes, and a couple fathers helped me level off the remaining dirt and slope it from right (higher) to left (lower). The red rock pile were all rocks that were in our backyard, and we are saving them to use for decoration or a path.


Next Step - 5 yards of filler dirt. I found out that I can move 5 yards of dirt from my driveway to the backyard in 4 hours. I'm not sure if you can tell by the photos, but there is about a 5 foot drop from our concrete patio area to our yard. So, in moving the dirt I built a 5 foot ramp with the first 2 yards and let gravity do its thing while wheel-barreling the rest into the yard.


See the pool in our neighbor's yard?


Back breaking work.




Next, Next Step - 8 yards of Super Soil. I found out that 3 Miller men can move 8 yards of dirt from my driveway to the backyard in 2 hours. It went so much faster with extra shovelers!


We live on a pretty decent size hill, so it was pretty important for me to get my yard higher than my neighbor so that my yard wouldn't flood when it rains. With great soil covering most of my yard, it is ready for vegetation in the spring!


I decided that it would be a good idea to plant grass seed and put down straw just five hours before the strongest windstorm in three years. The local squirrels who were preparing for winter really appreciated eating the grass seed that blew all around. Needless to say, I will probably have to reseed in the spring.

We also covered up a section of our yard for our garden. Our plan is to have the back half of our yard as our garden, and the front half as grass. My lovely bride really wanted an area in our yard for playing games. The giant 10ft X 17ft area isn't big enough for cornhole, but perhaps she will want to use it exercise by running laps in the spring.


I still have some work to do to protect the foundation of my garage. Spring's project will be to build up a support wall a couple of feet next to my garage, and after filling the space with dirt it could end up being a strawberry patch or something.


A special thanks to all of our family members who helped with this project, but please, don't send us your medical bills.

Us folkies went to the Smokies

A couple weeks ago, Kristi led me on an adventure weekend. Before leaving on our adventure, all I knew was, well, nothing! We both blocked off a Friday afternoon through Monday evening and hit the road. She planned the whole trip, and even secretly packed my bag! One hour on the road turned into nine, and I didn't figure out where we were going until a half hour before we got there. My wife of mine is such a secret planner!

Little Ladies and Gentle Giants - Our weekend adventure in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee:

Adventure #1 - The Hotel

As soon as we stepped foot into our hotel room, looking to crash after our nine and a half hour drive, we caught off guard by the stench of smoke. Did we book a smoking room? Negative. But we did find this, which made the whole room smell like campfire.


So, with it not being what we expected, after one night we ditched the Days Inn and went down the road to the nicer, cheaper Best Western.



Adventure #2 - Gatlinburg

Gatlinburg, the city we stayed in, was a sweet touristy town. For those that don't know, it is connected to Pigeon Forge and Sevierville by a 'strip'. On this strip there are hundreds of restaurants and probably the same number of attractions. It's enough to empty your life savings. So, we selected the couple things that we wanted to check out on the strip.

Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede
(Yee-Haw! Horse tricks + 5 course meal (including a whole chicken) - silverware = a spur tappin good time!)



Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum
(Kristi on a normal size chair.)



Legends Restaurant (& Bennetts BBQ)
(Turns out this is the only picture we have from the restaurants we visited.)



Look! We even saw a bear!


Adventure #3 - Smokey Mountains National Park

With this being my first time in the Smokeys, I was amazed at the sites in the National Park.









What a great weekend planned by my wonderful wife! We are so thankful for everything that has been happening in Akron, and we are also thankful for the ability to go on some adventures from time to time. Through all of our searching during our adventures, we were fortunate enough to see one wildlife animal. A dead deer on the side of the road in West Virginia.

Fuddruckers burgers to finish the weekend was just what the mountain man ordered.



**Disclaimer**
If you do not live in the Akron area, you may be thinking to yourself, "Wow self, all the Millers do is work on their house and go on vacations", and probably rightfully so. Perhaps one of these blogs, we will let you in on what's going on with our new jobs.

Three Leaks in a Matter of Weeks!

When we moved into our house, we thought the kitchen would be one of the easiest rooms when it came to projects. We didn't do any painting and our refrigerator and oven came with the house. We were wrong.

Here is an overview of our kitchen projects.

Ceiling: About two weeks after we moved into the house, we had our first unexpected house project. I was driving home from Indiana and received a call from Josh that our toilet had leaked through our kitchen ceiling. I was expecting a small baseball-sized leak, so you can imagine my surprise when I found this!

Josh put his handyman skills to work. He fixed the toilet and, with some help from a friend, sanded the ceiling (I'll leave out the details of the electric sander that left a layer of dust on EVERYTHING in the kitchen, dining room, and part of the living room) and retextured the ceiling. We just triple coated that section of the ceiling today, and although it's not perfect, it looks much better.

Ceiling Numero Dos: About two weeks after we fixed the hole in the ceiling from the toilet leak, we had a shower leak. This time the shower was leaking through the light in the kitchen ceiling. After a few hours of testing, we discovered exactly where the leak was coming from and Josh fixed leak number two.

Faucet: We soon discovered that our kitchen faucet had a leak. Once again, Josh put his handyman skills to use and installed a new faucet.

Dishwasher: This one's my favorite! Before moving into our new house, we decided we wanted to install a dishwasher. The first week of June, we were blessed with a new dishwasher as a gift. The first step was adding switches to our breaker box. My Uncle Rick made the trip to Akron to install a whole new breaker box and rewire our electricity. What a blessing to have an electrician in the family! Step two was finding someone who could make space in our cupboards and install the dishwasher. So after sitting in a box in our kitchen for 4 and a half months, we finally have a working dishwasher!!! (Well, almost working. Sears is coming tomorrow to repair a broken part.)





Our next project is finding a breakfast nook table. Without the dishwasher sitting in the corner, we have a big open space to fill!