Our Little House: Next steps

One day before our one month anniversary and it's time for an update! In the time since our party we have been keeping very busy!

Jay interviewed for a graduate school program and we are waiting to hear the good news of his acceptance (of course he's going to get in!!)
In other exciting Jay news, he will be starting a part time job with a local-turned-global engineering firm working on bioassays for water quality. He'll be going back to his research roots but working on different processes than he most recently used at UC Davis.
I have officially changed my name! New social security card, new drivers license (though it looks like laser beams are shooting out of my eyes....the guy told me it would click on the count of 5 but it clicked on 4!), new business cards on their way. No longer will I get funny looks at the Safeway checkout when they read my receipt and no more "You can just call me Crystal" to avoid the disaster of mispronunciation!
We are in the process of refinancing the house and are very hopeful that we will be successful in saving a few bucks a month to put toward more home improvement. Our goal for a long time has been to live roommate-free and after a whole summer of having the house to ourselves we hope to keep things that way. We did take a look at Room Wanted ads on Craigslist just to see what's out there - with record enrollment at OSU this fall there is a shortage of housing in Corvallis - but we're just not ready to share our home! With Jay's additional working hours coming up and my anticipated 30 cent raise for cost of living (try not to be jealous!!) we anticipate retaining the office and spare room/guest room as is.
In yard news - today is an exciting day! The weeds are finally knocked out, for the most part, and we are ready to move forward! This afternoon we will have 20 yards of Eco-Bark (the cheapest kind!) delivered and we will start spreading it out in paths that we marked off last night. Hooray!
The chilly mornings have begun and that means the pellet stove has been fired up! We had a little incident the other morning, though - the stove was full of pellets from a bag that we opened last season. With a little moisture, then drying out, we had a substantial amount of crumbled pellets and pellet dust, which clogged up the auger. Having small hands came in handy at 7 am on Wednesday when I needed to dig out as many handfuls of sawdust as I could grab from the inside of the stove. Then Jay sucked out the remaining debris with the shop-vac. An evening of sifting dust out of the remaining pellets (frugality = odd jobs sometimes) and we are back in business with a beautiful, warm fire in the stove.
The ants came back....perhaps the rain drove them back into our dry house? They really love our wireless internet router... We reallocated our ant traps around the house and we're seeing some improvement.
The flower garden went crazy and everything bloomed! We even have lettuce growing in there from some free seeds we got in the mail.
Jay uploaded his Septembeerfest pictures - see below!!