2009

It has been awhile since I posted but since Erica and I spent Christmas time with many of our readers at some point or another we decided to wait till the new year to post again. Hopefully Christmas was great for everyone. We spent Christmas day and the days after in Knoxville, TN and Decatur, AL with my side of the family. I thought I would post a few pics to show everyone my awesome family.

Apparently we started a new tradition this year of taking a picture with our cousins and grandmother eating cookies. I was told this had been done before but I assure you it has not.

The parents with their kids.

The grandparents with their grandkids

The grandparents with their biological grandkids

My better half and myself reading.

Sitting next to the man himself. We found out that we pretty much won world war 2 because of the man sitting next to us.

The family again...in Knoxville, TN.

The lovely ladies.

The men!

The grandkids with Memaw!

There was a lot of time spent around the table.

Me and the bro!

Little socks/shoes for my future nephew. For those that did not know...now ya know.

The wife and I opening presents.

We also were able to make it down to Houston and spend an early Christmas with Erica's parents as well as some of our close friends from church. Sadly I don't have pictures but just know that there was lots of awesomeness.

New Year's was rockin' this year with a huge party at our place which was probably the most people we have had in our house so far. We pretty much went our recruiting people to join our band the rocked the night away for about 6 hours.

2009 looks to be a fantastic year and we are very excited about all that God has in store for us. Hopefully, God willing, we can continue to make trips around the US and visit all our friends and family throughout the year. Love you guys.

Our First Visitors

This past weekend Erica's parents got to come in town and spend a few days with us. We had an awesome time and are really glad that we finally had visitors come stay in our new house. The first thing we wanted to do was to take them downtown and show them Greenville in the Fall. The weather here is perfect (if you like the cold) and the scenery is just beautiful. One of the fun places we got to go to was the "famous" general store. Outside we all decided to take pictures with the toy soldier.




There are so many great places to take pictures in downtown Greenville so we tried to take as many as we could.





The Garzas fell in love with the ambiance of Greenville much like we have. It definitely has a small town feel but is still a fairly large place.

Since it was so cold outside we almost had to build a fire and enjoy the weather.

We had to take a picture of the guys with the new grill.

On Sunday everybody was in a working mood and since our yard and shrubbery needed a lot of attention we spent a good chunk of the day working. We trimmed all the bushes, cut lots more limbs down, dug out all the old pine needles, extended the edges, put in mulch and made everything look 100% better.

Here are the women working hard in the yard.

View halfway through.

You can tell where we extended it so that we are much cleaner lines.

The homeowners in front of the completed yard!

I still have to put up Christmas lights but we went ahead and got stuff for the front door!

All in all it was a fantastic weekend. We had a fun time hanging out with family and look forward to more family and friends coming to visit in the future! I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving holidays.

The Leaves are Falling

Greetings from South Carolina !!!

I'm excited to say that it is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.  All of the trees have turned colors and have started to shed all their leaves.  The temperature has gotten down into the 30's and I must say that makes me very happy.  It is definitely a new experience to live in different seasons.  

Erica's family will be coming in town this weekend which should be a lot of fun.  They will be the first guests to stay in our new house.  Hopefully we will remember to take pictures of "autumn" in Greenville as we show them around the city.

My work has been going much better.  The last two weeks have been a really good learning experience for me and I feel like I am becoming a much better trader daily.  It definitely is a crazy market but also one that has many lessons to teach.  

Erica and I are still planning on coming down to Austin in a couple weeks so that I can watch the guys trade for a week and so that we can attend our friends wedding.  It should be a good time to see a lot of friends since Erica hasn't been back to Texas since we moved.  

We finally have decided on a new church that we really like.  I'm not sure if I posted about it before but it's called Newspring and we really like the worship and the pastor.  He is a very entertaining man to listen to but at the same time he speaks more Biblical truth than most people do these days which we really like.  Now we just need to find a good small group to join and hopefully meet some young new couples.  

World Traveler + more

So this is Erica, it's my first post and I am not a blogger....just a fair warning.

Here's whats been happening...Kevin went to Austin again for work. It went really well and he learned a ton. It's been hard to have him gone for weeks at a time but totally worth it since he comes back with a whole new perspective on the trading world. He is really enjoying trading and is doing much better! Kevin is going back to Austin in December but Ill be going too....my good friend Megan is getting married to Mike (who helped Kevin get started trading). 

I got to go to Dubai for work recently. I didnt get out of the hotel too much but I really enjoyed it. There were tons of high rises and tons of construction its was incredible. I got to go to some souks (spelling?)...just like a mercado in Mexico. Dubai is a trading hub and there is a ton of gold everywhere...if you're in the market for very ornate gold...go to Dubai. There were a lot of Iranian spices and nuts. Most of the population is expats...lots of Indians, Iranians, Pakistanis and Europeans. There is a ton of shopping...I didnt go to the indoor ski slopes but i can only imagine. I got to fly business class and that was sooo much fun! I had a good time but Im very glad to be home!

Other than that...we got to meet our neighbors...they're all widowed and super cute. It explained why none of our neighbors had their lights on for Halloween. We'll be in Austin in a few weeks for Megan/Mike's wedding and are very excited to see all our college friends! Hopefully we see everyone soon.

The Past Month

So for the thousands of you that read the blog I'm happy to say that we are back after a very busy last month and you can now sleep better at night. There are so many things that have happened in the past month this blog will be pretty lengthy.

Erica has been crazy busy in the past month. Besides being busy with house things she has traveled to New York for a few days along with Wisconsin for a few days. In a few weeks she will also be traveling to Dubai for about a week. It will be her first trip overseas to a foreign country.

Erica has a friend in New York so she went up a few days early, stayed with her, and was able to spend a few days sight seeing. It was her first time to New York and so there was obviously a lot to see. There were lots of pictures taken and we've got a few to show. We probably will end up posting all the pictures on a more "picture friendly" site later on so you can view all of them.

View of the skyline

MSG!


Time Square

Another view of New York

The most famous street for lots of reasons

The New York Stock Exchange

Erica's boss has noticed that she is super smart, hard working and because of that he has allowed her to go to many different fun places. She went to New York for a conference. She went to Wisconsin for recruiting and she will be going to Dubai for another conference.



I have had a pretty crazy last month as well. In fact, as you can probably understand, it's been about the craziest time ever. Besides the fact that we have been doing house things, trading in this market has been the most interesting thing I have ever been a part of. I have never seen anything like our equities market right now, our credit market, and the collapse of all other foreign markets. If there is one thing I have learned in the past month is that you never know what the market is going to do. I could tell you exactly why we have gone down in length but as far as where we go from here, nobody knows. With all that said, there has been a lot of opportunities for trading. I am still very new to trading so unfortunately I have not been as aggressive as more of the seasoned traders but I am getting a 10 year training course in the span of a few months. You normally are hoping the market will move 100 points here and a 100 points there, but for those that watch the market know that it moves about 400 points a day.

I will actually be heading back to Austin in a week to watch the guys trade and hopefully learn a lot from them. I am grateful to have my bro and sister in law in Austin and will be staying with them. I actually will get back a few hours before Erica leaves for Dubai, but at least I get to see her before she leaves.

Also a random note, Erica got glasses a couple weeks ago so she can see now. Yay seeing things.

Alright now onto the main course. As you know, we recently purchased our very first home and it has been the most awesome, tiring, time consuming, fun thing we have ever been apart of. We closed on our house September 26th but did not move into the house until yesterday. For the past two weeks we spent every night and all our weekends at the house doing anything and everything. I will be honest and say that I am very impressed by everything we did to the house (some of which we took pictures to show).

Just a few of the things we did to the house...

- Installed three ceiling fans
- Installed a digital thermostat
- Replaced all ceiling lights
- Painted 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms
- Ripped out sheet rock in bathroom, installed wall mounts, put up new sheet rock and installed new light fixtures
- Shampooed all the carpets

We definitely had a lot to do and it took us the full two weeks before we got fully moved in. Here are a couple pictures of a few of the rooms in the middle of getting things ready.

One of the rooms with primer on the walls about to get painted

Another room about to be painted

The master bedroom that needed so badly to be painted because of the awful bright red color

Here are a bunch of pictures from one of our biggest projects...

The problem was the last home owners put up their own sheet rock and screwed their light fixtures from behind instead of putting up a support for normal light fixtures. We decided to go ahead and just redo the whole thing from scratch. We had never done anything like this before and are very pleased with how it turned out. We also did the guest bathroom that turned out even better we think. This is a picture of the before.

This is a picture showing where the old lights were in the wall and where there is no support in the middle like there should be.


I started drawing lots of lines to make sure it looked somewhat professional.


Cutting this hole was harder than I thought it would be. My handsaw pretty much broke in half but in the end we have a perfect hole.

This is the contraption that I put together that I put together to connect to the studs in the wall to support our light.

Me installing the support beams in the wall.

The final look before we put the new sheet rock up.



After cutting some sheet rock we installed it over the support beams.


My lovely wife is a much better "mudder" than I am so we had her fills in all the cracks before we painted


The final look before we paint and install the new lights


This is the final product. It was our first big project and we know it is not perfect but we were pretty pleased with the outcome.

Now that we are finally moved in we took some pictures of all the rooms. We hope everyone enjoys what we have done with the place.

Here is our living room as you walk in the entry way

Our living room from the halway


A view of our kitchen and living room


Another view of our living room


Our guest bathroom


This is the project that we did in the guest bathroom much like the master bathroom. Erica also wants to point out that the light fixture is silver and not bronze


This is my office and probably my favorite room. If you can't tell from the picture the walls are burnt orange which is awesome.


Also we painted longhorns on each of the side doors of the office.
They turned out really awesome


This is our guest bedroom. The lighting is awful and our camera wasn't having the best day so although it looks dark don't be fooled. The colors you see are not as they really appear.


This is our extra bedroom that will eventually be Erica's office but at the moment we have no furniture for it.


This is our master bedroom and we love it.


Another view of our master bedroom.


Our master bathroom

I hope everyone enjoyed reading about our crazy last month. Hopefully I will be able to keep this blog updated more often. We changed settings so that anyone and everyone can add comments so feel free to post on the blog. Now that I finally know how to check comments I would love to hear feedback ... unless it's negative.