This afternoon I learned the heartbreaking news that Ruth Graham passed 
6/22/2010
Dear Julie and Chase,
Hello to you from OK! My son and and I have only met you once briefly just before you left. (I graduated from JBU, if that helps!) We read your emails together and talk about how you help the children in Nicaragua.
Ethan, 3, has a couple of questions for you!
About a year ago, Julie and I decided that it could be really fun for us if we began writing down the stories of fun and/or significant memories in our lives. This is the only one we've done so far, and it was recently.
In the month or two leading up to our wedding, we shopped around town for an apartment that would be our first home together. 
Should cost around $450-$500 per month
Should preferably be on the east side of town to be closer to all of our friends. (At the time it seemed that anything more than three miles away was rarely worth driving to since it took around 20 minutes to go through the 10 poorly-timed stoplights and painfully slow speed limits you would surely encounter along the way.)
Should be free of any kind of notorious infestation. This ruled out even looking at Essex Square (bedbugs) and Sooner Crossing (roaches).
The fact that Julie and I are both detail-oriented people means that tracking our expenses is a relatively conflict-free part of our marriage–we both agree on the need for accuracy in maintaining a budget. 
We live with ants. They're in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom….actually, I can't think of a room they aren't in except the pantry, which is really quite nice of them.
There are two main classifications: little and big.
The little ants actually come in a wide variety, from "biting" to "non-biting," "see-through butts" to "all black," etc. Some people even classify them by what they eat, but what they all have in common is that they can set up shop anywhere, and they come after the food on your counters and your plates. We've found nests underneath tiles, inside power outlets, inside door frames, inside picture frames, in the small space between the table legs and the table top, inside our car door, and somewhere inside our car A/C system. Basically, if there's a gap of half a millimeter, little ants can build their home there.
Well, it’s been a year now since my life drastically changed – for the better, of course. Life is so “normal” now that it’s easy to forget that I ever had kidney problems to begin with. With the exception of continuing to take multiple pills daily and have regular lab work and doctor’s appointments, life looks very much like it did prior to January 2011 when my kidneys mutually decided their time was nearing an end.
Here are some of those drastic changes:
Our house has two stories, which means it has stairs. Every time we're faced with the prospect of moving (which has been six times in nearly seven years of marriage), I declare that I would like to live in place with no stairs. Stairs make the moving in/out process far worse than it would be without stairs. In daily life, the term "all the way upstairs" or "all the way downstairs" translates to "not worth getting."
In the six places we've lived in our marriage, however, none of them have been stair-less. We've had bare concrete stairs, concrete stairs covered in tile, bare wooden stairs, and wooden stairs covered in carpet. Some have been creaky, some have been dangerously steep, some claustrophobia-inducing, some "awkward," some cracked and falling apart. In other words, I don't tend to think kindly on stairs1. The stairs in our current home are no exception. Let me walk you through a journey up them:
