La-dee-la

So you would think with Dustin being unemployed that I have all this extra free time, but it's not true. Everyday has something different to offer. I'm in the middle of potty-training Lillie (which isn't as easy as I was hoping it would be), Dustin's spending a large portion of each day looking for work, I'm still training for this 1/2 marathon on Saturday (which takes up quite a bit of time), plus the regular day-to-day things that just need to be done. On top of that, Dustin has been fully maintaining his Grandma's yard plus the past 6 weeks. Also, Dustin and I have been doing huge "jobs" around the house in order to earn gas money to get to the family reunion in July (Pacific City, OR). We recently cleaned out the disgusting back garage. That took 2 days. We found disturbing amounts of dead mice, a couple of bird nests, cat pee, and risked disease by cleaning out the huge bird aviary room that, might I add, hasn't even been occupied by any birds for at least 12 years- yet had about 3 inches of bird seed on the floor covered in bird feces. Oh my gravy- it was disgusting. It's all nice and sanitary now. We ended up taking 3 loads of crap to the dump.
This past week we spent many hours scraping off the paint, then repainting this wooden canopy thingie in the back yard. It used to be white, but now is a pretty burnt orange color. It looks really clean and new especially with the pretty greenery behind and flowers all around.
We're also painting the trim and doors for the entire upstairs next week! It'll be hard work, but we've been tight on spending money and really needed to find a way to pay for this family reunion trip. It's nice to be independent and not have to rely on money from anyone else! Even at our poorest, we've always found a way to pay for every single bill and expense. Whether from me working, us selling plasma, selling items we don't need, doing odd-jobs, or whatever it be- we've thankfully never needed or asked for money from anyone else. I'm a firm believer that there's always a way to get more money if you really need it.
Besides that....
We never thought we would be unemployed for 5 months now! I guess you could say that I'm more than ready for Dustin to find work. He's putting in a lot of hours in the job search. He's applied to over 400 jobs in the past 5 months. He's getting frustrated and a little discouraged when he calls to check on the status of the application, only to hear from the HR rep that they've received over 200 applications for that one particular job posting. Ahhh! Whatever, he'll find something! He's been applying all over the country, too-- so if you hear about anything.....
Tomorrow's my big day! I'm running in the Teton Dam Half Marathon in Rexburg at 7:30AM. I'm a little nervous. My knees and ankles have been a little sore lately. My goal is to finish and to run the entire time. We'll see how it goes!