CORTNEY'S CORNER

You guys... we paid off ALL our school debt.  This whole thing started last January. We were at the Young Life 75 conference in Florida and Dave Ramsey spoke. He was hilarious and wise and I instantly fell in love with him. He gave us all a free copy of his book. I thought that was nice but unnecessary for us. We already "budgeted" and had a (looooong) plan to pay off our debt. But it turns out that Dan needed something to read on the airplane home. By the time we landed in Ohio, Dan had figured out that if we followed this plan, we could have all our student loans, which were our only debt, paid off in 14 months! This sounded a little crazy to me but Dan was sold, so we gave it a try and whataya know... 13 months later and we're already debt free! Here's a picture from that trip last year where we heard Dave Ramsey... and went to Harry Potter World!!! Here's how we did it: Preface: None of these are our original ideas. ZERO. We literally just did exac...

Dan works from home. Our house technically has three bedrooms but we took the doors off of one of them and turned it into the headquarters for Young Life Ross County. YLRC Headquarters. Where Dan and his Associates (pictured, center) spend a lot of time. We love our house a lot but we've pretty much exhausted all of the space inside of it. We don't just have empty rooms for storage or anything. A few months ago I was offered a new job at OCU and after a lot of prayer and deliberation, I decided to take it. I'm putting my Environmental Science degree to good use as their Director of Marketing (hoping that people see what a joke this is). I mostly like my new job even though I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time, but that is an entirely different post. Anyway, with this new job came the offer of working from home about half the time. This was very exciting to me, especially since I spend basically an hour a day getting to and from work. But the...

The past two months have been crazy. I feel like we've been everywhere besides home. We started out December by spending a long weekend in Seattle to celebrate our second anniversary! It was so fun. We spent a lot of time at Pike Place Market, went to the tippy top of the Space Needle, got drinks from the first ever Starbucks and ate a lot of really good seafood to celebrate two years of marriage. In front of the original Starbs! We were then home for two weeks, in which we attended two work parties, two Young Life parties, one church party and one family party. Six Christmas parties in two weeks, guys. It was a lot . We traveled to Kentucky and spent a few days before and Christmas there. Then we drove to South Carolina to spend a handful of days with my parents. Then we drove back to Ohio and stayed at our house for approximately 28 hours. Then we headed back to Kentucky for a few days to celebrate our niece's birthday and see some friends. Then flew to Orlando for ...

We got home from our trip to Timber Wolf Lake a little over a week ago! And it was the best week of our lives! It's hard to blog about camp. SO much stuff happens in such a short amount of time. This was definitely a different trip for me though. We brought 8 girls and 4 boys to camp and all of them were already Christians. So instead of focusing on helping students walk through making a decision of committing their lives to Christ, which is what most of my camp trips have consisted of in the past, we focused on growing deeper in our faith, fostering community and casting vision for what it looks like to go home and radically love our friends and to chase the Kingdom with all we have. And it was GREAT! As I said, I have a hard time writing about summer camp, so instead I'll just share some of my favorite pictures. And maybe one day our Area Director (ahem, ahem...) will finally get around to posting all of them on facebook (aka go bother Dan to do it!) ...

For the past two months we've been renting a house. It's a great house. It's huge and is the perfect location and has a lot of character. Though, there are some down sides to it. It's very old so the pipes froze a lot in the winter. The walls are plaster, not dry wall, so there are lots of big and unsightly holes. Our backyard is a muddy mess. Stuff like that. But overall, I like our house a lot. Unfortunately we have had a few disagreements with our landlord. After a miscommunication in Mid-February she offered that we could break our lease with no penalties if we wanted to move out. At first, the idea was daunting. We had literally JUST unpacked our last box and hung up our final piece of artwork on the wall. We couldn't imagine packing everything back up again, transporting it, then unpacking again. But we had signed a two year lease and just weren't sure if we could stomach another two years of living in this property. So we started looking around, just...

That's right! Our little family grew by two last weekend! We brought home two super cute and super fluffy little German Shepard pups. Meet Dez and Penny! Dez Penny Dez and Penny are only ten weeks old but we brought them home when they were 9 weeks old. They're brother and sister. We got them from a guy who lives a few blocks away from us. He has two military service dogs who had babies back in January. We knew we were going to get them for a while but had to wait until they were old enough to leave their mama. Picking names for them was pretty hard. We knew that if we got two boy dogs we were going to name them Lewis and Clark. But when we decided on a boy and a girl we had no idea. I suggested Mr. Beaver and Mrs. Beaver (you know, from Narnia). But Dan didn't like that. He also wouldn't let me name them Beyonce and Jay Z. I did some research on the internet for dog duo names and seriously, people have some of the worst ideas. A top suggestion was Ched...

That's right people, I'm a working woman again! For about three weeks I worked part time as a substitute teacher in the Chillicothe city schools here. It was fun and I liked it. I got to hang out with students all day long and I often had time to read or browse the internet. And in a few rare moments in math and science classes, I actually got to teach. But it was hard for me to go to bed at night and not know if and where I would be working the next day. And I was out of work for a straight week because mother nature dumped EIGHT inches of snow on our little town. So although I'll miss hearing things like "Do you think I could get my butt surgically removed? Like the whole entire thing?" (yes, I literally overheard this from a 7th grade boy), I am excited and ready to go back to working full time... and getting paid regularly. I'm now working at Ohio Christian University as the Trailblazer Academy Admissions Coordinator. What is the Trailblazer Academy, you...

Yay! Dan and I have officially been living in Chillicothe for two weeks! It's been a fun two weeks. We've spent a lot of time working on our house. Packing up and getting here wasn't too hard but sheesh, unpacking is a whole different story. We're finished with almost everything and soon I'll dedicate a whole post to our fun little home.  The fact that we're living in a house now, not an apartment, is super different. I've been living in an apartment for over the past four years. I sort of forgot a few things about living in a house like OMG STAIRS SUCK. And it's way bigger than I'm used to. I keep misplacing my phone. There are too many rooms for me to forget things in. We've also been hanging out and getting connected in the community. Dan has had a few meetings with people. I've also had a meeting with the superintendent of the city school district here, started substitute teaching and last Friday I judged a middle school science fair ...

A new year has begun and I feel like all the good bloggers post about the new year. They either look back on big moments in the past year or look forward to upcoming events in the new one. I sat in front of my computer for a long time trying to think of something worthy of a new years post. And I can't really come up with anything. I'm not really a big new year person. To me, nothing really changes except that I'll spend the next four months writing 201 4 5. Which is so annoying. I've made the same new year's resolution for the past three or so years. It's to floss everyday. And I already know that I'm going to fail. I know this because it's the third consecutive year that I've made this same resolution. I want to floss. I enjoy the thought of myself flossing every day. And I hate the condescending look my dentist gives me when my gums start bleeding the millisecond after the floss hits them. I just never actually do it. It's hard for me to l...

I had been leading Young Life at Lloyd Memorial High School in Erlanger, KY for the past four and a half years. I was the varsity cheerleading coach there for the past three years. On a normal week, I was up at the school six days a week. And I loved it. I've met some of my best friends there. Once Dan and I got married, he started leading at Lloyd too (he had lead at two schools previous to Lloyd). I figured we would stay at Lloyd for forever. I started looking at houses in Erlanger, accepted the coaching job for another year and thought nothing would change anytime soon.  We went to Great Wolf Lodge in January of 2014 for a leader weekend. The person in charge of Area Development in the Buckeye Region talked during one of the large group seminars. He spoke about a place called Chillicothe, Ohio. I couldn't understand what he was saying. Chilly coffee? Chilled clothie? Apparently this town didn't have Young Life but a committee had been formed basically out of thin air a...

Dan and I were fortunate enough to be able to go to Texas a few weekends ago to celebrate our anniversary! This vacation was a little bit different from our normal ones, because we actually had this planned out a few weeks before. We found a great deal on a sweet Hilton and off we went! We flew in on a Friday around noon. We checked in to our hotel and headed to a local burger place called Good Friend, that our good friend, Sarah, had recommended. It was tasty! Then we hung around downtown Dallas and checked out the art museum for a little bit. We drove into Fort Worth, which is right next to Dallas, early on Friday evening. We stopped downtown to check out this SWEET water garden. Look at these fountains! And you could climb down into them. It was awesome and I wanted to spend the rest of my life here. Then we drove a little outside of downtown to get to the Fort Worth Stockyards. Dan really likes cowboys but I was a bit hesitant about going to the stockyar...