It's the most wonderful time of the year!

It's about time for an update!  We sent our Christmas cards out this week and anticipate a few new visitors (if that's you, comment on here so we know you're following us!  We'll write back, promise!), so it's time to do a little life summary in time for Christmas.  Dave and I have both been meaning to do a real update for about 2 months now...I beat Dave to it today even though he is all done with school for this trimester!!  He just finished up Wednesday afternoon with his last practical!!  Hurray!  He's now officially a T8 (trimester 8 student, out of 10 trimesters).  One year to go, so we're in go time for planning our office, business plan, adjusting technique, all of that stuff... YAY!  SO exciting!  :)

I have been pretty busy as well beyond working the normal job.  I've been taking a nutrition and detox certification course on Saturdays and Sundays.  It's a four part certification and we meet once a month for 4 months.  Last weekend was the third session, so just one left in January (phew!).  I passed my first 2 tests with flying colors!!  100% on the first one!!  I am a bit surprised as I am the youngest person in the room and just about everyone else is doctors!  Nutrition and detox is becoming a real passion of mine.  Our office isn't just going to be chiropractic.  We are going to create a healing place, a whole wellness center, where patients come to get off the medical treadmill and start letting their body heal from the inside out and live to their full God-given potential.  I'm already getting a ton of training and experience at Revolution every day on helping people get off medications, start exercising, doing a cleanse and start the healing.  It's absolutely a blessing to be in my position at work and to have the opportunity in the Twin Cities to network and get in to these seminars for extra training while Dave and I have the time to do it.  Our path is being laid for us and becoming clearer every day!

Subject change....  Lots of you have been asking us about the mice.  Well, a few weeks ago we caught 4 more within a couple days of each other.  We've been using just one trap and resetting it over and over.  Wait, let me rephrase that... Dave is the one doing the resetting and clean up.  :)  Brave brave Dave!!  He hates mice, but he does it all for me.  What sacrifice!  xo!  For about 3 weeks now I think it's been pretty quiet in the "mouse corner" of our bedroom.  Hopefully that was the last of them.  I think the count is up to 17 or maybe closer to 20 now?  We've kind of lost count.  Dave has talked to our apartment managers a couple times lately about getting out of our lease due to the consistant mice issue, but they said the only thing they could do is move us to a different apartment.  We don't want to do that though because it would be on the 3rd floor, and we're in a first floor apartment now.  The reason we'd like to get out of our lease is so we can move into a slightly cheaper apartment closer to Maple Grove where I work.  In January, Dave will start interning at an office in Plymouth (just a minute from Maple Grove).  So it'd save us a lot of drive time and gas money if we could move...but for now, we're staying put in Bloomington (about a 25 minute drive from Maple Grove).

This year we actually went home for Thanksgiving, the first time in I think 2 or 3 years! And it was our first time home to the U.P. since last Christmas. We were shocked to find we BOTH had the Friday after Thanksgiving off from both school and work, so we decided why not head home for the 4-day weekend. We spent Thursday and Saturday with family, and sandwiched Friday in between with a little shopping and visiting as many people as we could, some of which we haven't seen since our wedding over a year ago!!!   We still have to make rounds to a few more friends this coming week on our Christmas visit.  We'll be in town Christmas Eve evening thru Sunday. Can't wait!!

Over the Thanksgiving trip, we went over to Ashley and Craig's for a few hours. Alanna and Tony joined us and Alanna made a DElicious lasagna meal and brought a couple of pies from her bakery -- the raspberry pie was to die for! Here are a few pictures of the babies -- can't believe how big they are getting!!!!!! Dallas is just over a year old and is as big as Teija!! And yes, that is THE Teija, our littlest flower girl at our wedding. She is almost 2 years old now come January. Wow time flies. Also enjoy the video below of her dancing to the music of a toy. Adorable!

 

On December 7th, Dr. Suzy treated Dave and I to our very first real concert, Chris Tomlin's Glory in the Highest tour!  http://www.christomlin.com/home.php  We were SO EXCITED to go!!  We had been eying up his concert since we heard a commercial for it in October, but we just couldn't scrape together the funds to go.  Thank you so much Suzy, we had a BLAST with you guys!!  We appreciated it so so much!  It was such a great night.  His music filled up our wells!!  All of us were beaming on the way out.  Who knew worshiping on a Monday night after a long day's work could be so uplifting! :)  Christina and Paul also joined us, as well as Rob, Suzy's fiance.  We all went out for some dinner afterward, a pretty late night, but so worth it.

You can sort of make out Chris's face on the screen.  He's down there holding his guitar.  We were sitting in the front row balcony.  The concert was actually at the church we attend, Grace, very close to our home!!  http://www.atgrace.com/

 

After the concert. 

Paul and Christina on left, Rob and Suzy in middle, Dave and Elise on right

Just flipping through other pictures from this month...  Here is our Christmas tree, although it didn't quite turn out.  We wanted to put this up to show Calvin, our loving Godchild, what we did with the cute little Santa ornament he gave us last year.  It is dressed in a camouflage suit!  The Santa is sort of shaped like a star, so we put him at the top of our tree.  :)  Maybe you can just tell him about it, Angela?

 

We've been starting a food blog as well, with healing diet recipes, foods and other ideas.  This is one of our experiments -- Chipotle burgers.  100% organic from the bun up!  Grassfed beef (we bought a 1/4 of a cow a few months ago and are slowly enjoying), lettuce, avacado, caramelized red onions, raw swiss cheese, organic whole grain bun with no sugar, and a homemade chipotle sauce!!  These burgers were ABSOLUTELY TO DIE FOR!!  Possibly the best burgers we've had in a verrrry long time.

 

  

Here is the Christmas picture we sent out with our Christmas cards this year at Revolution.  You can see our real tree in the background -- the aroma every day when I come in to work to open up is heavenly!  The nutcracker was brought in by Christina's (far right) father-in-law.  The kids in our office love it! haha

 

This is a photo of Dave doing one of his workshops.  He does talks for our office (and others on occassion).  This one he did just last weekend on Burst Training, the type of exercise Dave and I do and what we will teach our patients to do as well.  You work out for just 6 minutes per day and burn fat for 36 hours after.

And that's about all I have to talk about today.  :)  I know, we covered a lot in this post.  Hopefully you hung in there!

We're looking forward to seeing many of you in just a week for Christmas!  Eek!  It's just a week away, I have just a little more wrapping to do..  For those we don't get to see this year, Dave and I wish you a blessed Christmas and New Year's and hope you create lasting memories this year!  May God shine his light in your heart and for your family this Season.  Luke 1:14  "And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth."  Have a wonderful time relaxing and celebrating!  Blessing for good health and happiness for 2010!  And again, if you're new, shoot us a quick message on here and we'll look forward to getting back in touch with you soon!

Love, Dave and Elise

Wish Dave LUCK!

A little delayed, but just wanted to let you all know Dave's Part 2 Boards are going on this weekend. He already took two test today and has like 4 tomorrow (Sunday). So shoot him texts and emails of good luck! (don't call cause his phone might ring during his exam...and then he'd be expelled. :)

We *think * we finally have the mouse situation under control, meaning we think they're all done away with. (Angela, you weren't kidding that it would be a hard process! Still want to hear about the flying squirrels though..) Our personal count, to date, is up to 14 mice caught in your every day traps. We've caught about 3 or 4 more since our last post about the whole thing. The exterminator came 2 more times since then, too, and is coming next week to do a final check. He removed a few mice on his own, too, so there were possibly closer to 20 caught and who knows how many that took the poison treats back to the nest and died there (which was in our bedroom wall mind you...it stunk for a few days!). We are so glad to have this taken care of. It became a daily occurrence that one of us would be screaming and running out of a room because we saw a mouse. And now we can go back to vacuuming only once a month if we wanted to, rather than a daily thing! Joy!

That's about all I have time to write right now. Heading to bed soon, Dave's sitting next to me studying, poor guy. It'll be over soon. Have a great rest of the weekend everyone!


- E

Last Week's Events

August has been a great month for us, full of fun and accomplishments. Dave finished up his 6th trimester last week (and got good grades, yay!). He is now a "T7", trimester 7, student. One more year to go! And besides all this mice junk going on in our apartment (the saga still continues, but more details on that later...), we've been having a fantastic month with lots of fun activities, relaxing and celebrating!

Last Wednesday, Dr. Suzy and Rob gave me a huge bonus gift for holding down the fort while our office manager was out of town for most of July/August. They gave both Dave and me tickets to the PGA! They knew we love golf and would die to go, especially with the PGA being basically in our backyard this year, so they surprised me with the gift during the morning shift last Wednesday and gave me the rest of the day off. Dave was in on it, too, but he never said anything! He had already cleared out his schedule from work and exams...bad boy! So we went to the PGA from about 2pm til around 7ish. It was so amazing! We got to watch just about all the big namers. The only ones not there were, of course, the realllly good guys (Tiger had already been there at 5am and left before 10am to beat the huge crowds). Phil WAS there, but we never caught up to him. And when we got through the front gate, I scoured the name board for my beloved Ernie Els, but he wasn't on it for Wednesday's practice. :( I was so sad!

Ernie is my favorite because back about, oh, maybe 12 years ago my brother Matt decided to raise a bet while watching the start of the US Open (1997 I think??). Joel, Matt and Eric all said the names of who they thought were gonna win it. I, not being the sport fanatic as they were, had no clue what golf was, how to play it or who any of those guys were. Ernie came up on the screen and the E's drew me in. I remember saying, "E + E forever! That's my pick." Matt laughed at me and said okay. I didn't watch any more of the US Open. The final day, Matt was astonished as Ernie won the whole thing, MY Ernie! I don't remember the exact bet, perhaps a silver dollar coin or a piece of copper, but Matt did pay up because he was so shocked. Since that day, I've kept up on Ernie's progress and everything. So sad that he got 6th overall at this year's PGA..

So I was saddened that Ernie wasn't out there when we got to Hazeltine. But we moved on and toured the course with Rob. Rob had gotten us Clubhouse tickets, meaning we had access to a lot of the buildings. We got to go inside the clubhouse and saw a lot of the stars in there, escaping from the heat. Also got free drinks. Who can complain about beer and cocktails on the house?

After walking all 18 holes and 3 drinks later, we decided to relax at the driving range, where we saw Ryo Ishikawa, the youngest golf prodigy at 17 years old. He was the only one out there, so we stayed and talked for a while hoping others would come to practice. We were in the stands for about an hour when Rob looked over his shoulder while in mid-sentence, paused, then said, "That's Ernie!" We immediately jumped up, I grabbed the camera from Dave, ran down the stairs and took this video:

Then we went down further to get some pictures.




And when I thought the day couldn't get ANY better, he packed up his clubs and started walking out the gate. Rob grabbed my hat and started running. Dave and I ran after him and I snuck in next to Ernie as he grabbed my hat from Rob. After he signed my brim, Dave asked to take a picture.. And he said sure! :D I was a little historical at this point. Couldn't stop smiling and laughing! But it got even better! Ernie had hit a few balls over the fence, so we ran over there and I found one of his balls!! We also got one of Tiger's! It was meant to be. :) Seriously the best day ever, next to our wedding day, Dave! After leaving Hazeltine, Rob and Suzy treated us to a delicious dinner and drinks and great conversation. SO much fun, guys! THANK YOU!!!!

Holding my fav!

Friday thru Sunday, Mom V and Joel came for a weekend visit. Friday we did some wining and dining after work (Cheesecake Factory for dinner!! And drinks at Majors. Classic.). Saturday, the boys did their own thing with a Twins game and some Mall of America browsing. I took the digicam with us, so Dave didn't get any pics. But he had a really good time and enjoyed being at a baseball game for the first time in a long time. The boys took the light rail over to the stadium from the MOA and it seemed to work out really well.

So while the boys did all that, my mom and I got up early and hit the MOA, but not for shopping. We wanted to check out the Underwater Aquarium which is in the basement floor of the MOA. We had a half off coupon that I got from Subway a few days earlier. We highly recommend going to the Aquarium if you are ever in town and have the time or if you have kids with you. It's amazing! The coolest part was going through their tunnel of sharks, so you feel like you're underwater with them. My mom's favorite was the alligator fish (looked just like an alligator with fins!). It was kind of scary when the sharks flew over head with all those rows of teeth (although the 3 year olds in the tunnel ahead of us were a lot braver than we were!). We also really liked their newest addition, a seahorse exhibit with probably 10 different types of seahorses. They were so cute!





After the Aquarium, we headed out to a matinee at Chanhassen Dinner Theatre. I am SO glad we decided to do this! August is slim pickings for shows as September kicks off the Broadway season, so many theaters take a break in the summer months, especially August. But mom found Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat at the CDT. We decided just a few days before they came that we would buy the tickets and do it. The show was ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR! I want to go see it again! It was hilariously funny and the music was just WOW!!! Dave and I are hoping to see Oklahoma at the CDT in the fall. The theater was so impressive that we will be going back as often as we can afford it! :) That night we had dinner at our place, played Mexican Train for many hours, and enjoyed homemade daiquiris. A very refreshing night!



Sunday, before they headed home, we went over to St. Paul to visit the Science Museum. It was the usual exhibits, but we still had a lot of fun going through each floor. Here are some of the pictures we took.

A huge fish, can't remember the name, but it was found in Kansas...

The dancing micro organisms game...good stuff. Couldn't have passed the test without your help, Mom! No thanks to Dave...(heckler)

AH!! RUN!

Dave driving the tugboat.

Joel driving a barge

Dave lifting a huge fish

This is a video of Dave finding out how many liters of blood he has in his body. Joel had around 11.3 and Dave had about 10.8. WEIRD, hey?? MAYBE it's inaccurate...maybe.

This is a video of me doing the Micro Organisms Dance. It was basically like Dance Dance Revolution, but it showed you a picture of an organism and you had to step on the arrow for which type it was (bacteria, parasite, etc). Dave was no help during round 1 or 2, when they asked all kinds of questions, questions he KNEW from all those Doctor classes he's had to take... It was fun though. We got thru all 3 rounds!

They headed out back to the U.P. after we finished up at the Science Museum. Next time they're in town, we'll probably try the Art Museum or Natural History Museum.

Right now, Dave and I are on the road driving to Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Art's. Our 1st Anniversary is on Sunday! WOW!! Where did this year go?? We are going to spend 2 days in Bellevue with the family doing some business work, scoping out the area/demographics as we're thinking of opening up in Omaha/Lincoln/Bellevue. Sunday and Monday we are dedicating to US. We'll be staying at a historic mansion in Omaha and will be doing a lot of fun, touristy activities. We're thinking of even visiting a wine vineyard!! Can't wait!

Two and a Half . . . MICE?!

It has been a week, boy oh boy! Thursday two weeks ago, our friend Kelly contacted us to say she had finally been offered a job (after graduating in May), and it's right here in Minneapolis! She was in town for some intense apartment hunting because she started work last Monday! She ended up not really finding a good deal for how long she'll be here, so we offered her our 2nd bedroom (which we had been using as our office/storage room). We're excited to have a roommate, especially one as easy-going as Kel! It's going to really help us cut costs for the coming months. And now I have a girlfriend to hang out with!

So Kelly went home and was to arrive at our place on last week Sunday evening. We got up Sunday morning and started clearing out and cleaning up the spare bedroom. Along the floor under the radiator I noticed this row of little black pellets... I asked Dave what the heck they were.. And before he could answer, I found a scattered mess of them under a table next to our futon and Dave said, "I found more over here under my golf bag. They're mouse turds." *MOuSE TURDS?!?* I thought...! So I got the vacuum out and started to clean up the little mess. We figured there had been a mouse going from apartment to apartment or something like that. We live in a super nice complex, so we thought it was weird to find mouse droppings, but we also live on the first floor so we understood that a mouse could get in and float around.

As we were talking about all these theories and trying to rationalize, Dave pulled out the futon so we could vacuum the rest of the carpet and lifted up the lawn chairs we had under it, we were absolutely sickened to see literally hundreds, maybe even over a thousand, mouse turds all over the place! It was like a little next almost, with paper scraps and shiny things. I screamed, Dave dropped the lawn chair and jumped back. We are both grossed out by mice!

Dave looked at me and said, "I think this is from more than one mouse................." **EEEK!!**

We immediately went to get some traps then stopped by our apartment office to let the managers know what was going on. Unfortunately the exterminator only comes in once a week and wouldn't be back in til Wednesday. We told them we'd still set the traps in hopes to catch the one or two mice that were going around. We didn't expect to catch anything, but we used peanut butter and set up 4 traps in the areas we found the turds. We put one in Kelly's room under her bed, 2 in the livingroom and one in the kitchen. Kelly arrived about 10 minutes after we set the traps...but we didn't say anything about the traps. Didn't think it was a big deal and we just wanted the exterminator to come to bait the mouse!

We three went out to dinner and made it home and in to bed by about 10pm. Dave and I were on our computers in bed and all of a sudden we heard: *Snap! Snap!!* TWO TRAPS went of literally within seconds of each other. I pushed Dave out to go look at the traps.. One had been set right by our deck door, but when Dave went to check it, the trap was GONE! Freaked us out! So we pulled out all the furniture in that corner of the room and finally found the trap, but only found HALF of the mouse!!!!!! Yeah, half. Sick, hey? SO Gross! We luckily had the whole mouse in the other trap. We looked at each other and, even though we couldn't find the top half of one mouse, agreed we did a good job and were glad we could tell the exterminator we got the mice.

We crawled back into bed closer to midnight, after cleaning up the messes, and drifted off. At about 12:58am, **SNAP!** The kitchen trap went off. I heard it and rolled Dave out of bed again. He said it was a bigger mouse, that the first two appeared to be babies or younger mice. This one was bigger (and whole). Two and a half mice caught within 3 hours; caught within 6 hours of SETTING the traps. Pretty scary, but we felt better going to sleep with three less mice in our apartment.

Here's a video of Dave checking the hole in the radiator on the other side of the wall (in our room) to make sure the mice weren't coming in and out of that hole, too. I had already played this trick on Dave before I got the brilliant idea to record it. Let me just say the first time was a ton better. He yelled out, jumped and got really angry at me and said "Don't mess around! I hate mice!!" hahaha :D

Monday morning rolled around and Kelly left for work. Dave went in to peek under her bed. Again, the trap was GONE! "What the heck! Elise, you are NOT going to believe this. These traps are not killing these mice!" We couldn't find the trap right away. We pulled all the furniture and suitcases from the walls and finally found the trap after 20 mins of searching, but again with only part of the mouse in it. Who knows what time that trap went off, but poor Kelly! We were worried she heard it go off, and right under where she was sleeping at that!

We contacted the apartment managers and the sent over maintenance to seal up a hole hear the heater where the mice were maybe coming and going. Dave and I went to Target for more traps. We set them up that night, and guess what. It all happened again! All of them went off that night! I won't go into all those details again, but very similar to the first night. We reset two of the traps. This time we set one in our room instead of Kelly's. Around 2am the one in our room went off. Dave and I were so startled that the first thing I remember is looking over at him sitting up straight in bed and noticed I was doing the same, heart racing. The trap was literally inches from our bed. He removed the mouse and reset the trap in the same place.

The next day was Wednesday, when the exterminator finally came. It didn't seem that he did much, but the note he left us when we got home that evening said he "removed mouse and set trap." No clue what that meant, whether he took a mouse out of one of our traps and reset it, or if he set a bait trap to clear out their nest, who knows..

When we got home from work and school, we checked the trap. Yeah, we WISH it was where we left it, but nope. It was GONE. *Sigh* Again, like the times before, we moved everything around looking in every crevice that it could possibly go. Couldn't find it. Days went buy. Many days, about five. Finally, last night, I was emptying out a mesh hamper of clean clothes and the further I got down, I noticed the clothes were smelling really dirty. Now, to be honest, it was Dave's underwear and socks, so I rationalized it as maybe they missed the wash or need to go through again. But then, I picked up the last few items and at thru the bottom of the mesh bag I saw the freakin' trap! I threw the clothes who knows where and ran out of the room to get Kelly to help me. Dave was out studying for finals with his buddies not to be home for hours. It was so gross. I'm totally washing that entire hamper of clothes again! EW!! We're thinking the trap got caught somehow on the hamper so even when we moved it around, we didn't find it. So gross! I think if the mouse hadn't decomposed over those many days, then we may have never found it. EW!

So now we're at present day, you're brought up to speed on our mouse situation. Our total is 10 mice that we caught personally, not sure if there were more with the exterminator. A few more than 1 or 2.. :S We're going to pick up more traps tonight, just to be sure we got them all.. If any more happens with this, we'll keep you posted. Hope you weren't too grossed out by reading all of this. And sorry to Chris who slept on the floor in the spare bedroom last month!

Off to run some errands now, then to work! It's going to be a beautiful day in the entire state today! High 80's and sun sun sun! Can't wait to go for a walk or maybe some pool dwelling for a change! :) AND I will get my husband back after today! His last finals are today. We're getting excited to celebrate our 1 Year Anniversary in a couple weeks. My mom and brother will be in town this weekend. August is going to be the best!!


Love, E