AmandaMoncus.com

Okay, I know that I was tagged by Brooke well over two weeks ago to write this blog and I’m just now doing it. I’ll try to get better at writing more often.

The object here is to write about 10 random or significant things that happened in my life. Hope you enjoy!

1. When I was young I entered a costume contest with my little sister. I was Rainbow Brite and she was a Sprite. My mom made our costumes and I think we were the best even though we didn’t win.
2. The day before I started kindergarten I was so excited that I wanted to practice running out to the bus stop. My mom called out, “Here comes the school bus!” and I ran out the door (with my then 3 year old sister who wanted to go to school too), and ran to our tree house in the front yard (which I pretended was the bus), then tripped and fell up the steps and skinned both my knees.
3. I was in Girl Scouts from the time I was in kindergarten til around 4th grade. I loved it. One year I sold so many boxes of cookies that I won a free trip to Girl Scout camp.
4. I was in the school band from 5th grade to 12th grade. I played flute and still do, just not as well as I used to.
5. Until recently I’ve always had a pet or some animals to take care of. My family always had a dog, but we also at different times had a cat, rabbits, pet goats, ducks, chickens, fish, and turtles. At some point I had to help in feeding them and I even used to gather eggs. I was a little afraid of the chickens, though.
6. When I was in high school I dyed my hair completely purple on one occasion and completely blue on another. Over the last couple years I’ve gone partially pink. I miss my pink stripe now.
7. My favorite part of being in the church youth group was youth choir. We did a musical every year and traveled around singing at different churches and staying in the the church buildings or with local church members and going to the beach. It was so much fun and I loved it. I wish I could still be in youth choir, but I think I’m too old now.
8. I won a scholarship to go to Berry College as a vocal performance major but later decided it wasn’t for me. I’ve been on a long break ever since.
9. I met Chris while visiting First Baptist Church and a week after meeting him, I went with him to a Christian event in Savannah. On the way home he told he had bad luck with girls named Amanda, but I told him “Don’t worry. I don’t plan on ever dating you, so we shouldn’t have any problems.”
10. About 3 months later I told Chris that I thought God was telling me he was the one I was to marry. I think it scared him a little at first, but we started dating a few months after that and married on June 10, 2006!

I hope you found this interesting. And now I think I would like to tag Chris and El Ben to blog on the same subject.

This past Sunday, on June 10, Chris and I celebrated our one year anniversary. It is hard to believe that we have already been married a whole year! The time really has flown by. I guess it’s true what they say - time flies when you’re having fun.

For our anniversary, we went on a mini-vacation to Charleston, SC. We walked around downtown taking pictures, seeing art exhibits, attending a Celtic fiddle concert, eating some of the local food and having a great time.

Of course, we’ve had our not so fun times. Driving a U-Haul in Oklahoma road construction is not fun. Not to mention all the desert we drove across in the middle of summer. Moving in general is not fun, but doing it together did make it easier and more enjoyable. We’ve had our adjustments to make, squeezing a lifetime of collected stuff and mismatched furniture together in a house, and learning to communicate better.

But I can honestly say there hasn’t been a single time when I felt “tired” of being around Chris. Even when we were with each other every second of every day for 2 straight weeks. I love him and I love sharing all these times and all that I am with him. There is never a moment of doubt that we were meant for each other.

So I guess I’m probably sounding pretty mushy right now, but I just wanted to share my happiness and say thanks to all the people who had a hand in introducing or befriending us, taking part in our wedding, or helping us through our moving adventures. It’s been a good year.

This note is to pick up where my previous note left off.

In August of 2006 we were living in Las Vegas and had been there for a few months. It was a very interesting and exciting time, and Chris and I both feel like we learned and grew a lot there. I am so glad that we had the opportunity of living there.

Around mid-September of last year, we started wondering if we really wanted to live in Las Vegas on a long-term basis. Don’t get me wrong, we loved our jobs, loved the church we were a part of, loved the friends we were making, loved the wide range of restaurants and shops to choose from in the city….but a few things led us to feel like itwasn’t for us. Chris’s job turned out to be a little different from what he expected, and though he enjoyed being there, it felt like itjust wasn’t turning out to be a good fit. That, plus the ridiculous cost of living, the dry desert scenery, and the lack of family led us to actually miss south east Georgia. That may sound crazy to some,
but it’s true. It seemed best to go back to “home base” and live and work here for awhile.

So at the end of September, Chris’s mom and aunt flew out to Vegas, spent a night there, saw a magic show and went out to eat with us, then they helped us drive our car and Penske truck back across the U.S. Once we got here, we were able to stay in a family-owned apartment for a little while, and we both got jobs fairly quickly. I
work at an office supply and equipment store helping in accounts payable and other areas, and Chris had several web design projects and was hired at a church as an Associate Tech Director.

Everything has been going very well since getting back. We got to have our birthday parties at our own house with friends and family, spent Christmas with our families, we went to my nephew’s 1st birthday party, my sisters are getting married this summer and fall and I get to be a bridesmaid. Chris will be doing photography for their
weddings and for the wedding of some friends. In June we will celebrate our 1 year anniversary. All in all, it’s been a good year.

I am posting a blog here that I originally posted on Myspace on August24, 2006. Needless to say, things have changed in my life since then, but I wanted to post this again here so that some could see a little of what happened in my life last year. I will be posting a new blog soon to get completely up to date on my life. Sounds exciting, yes?

Here goes….

When I first joined the myspace crowd, I lived in Georgia, where I’d lived my entire life. I was going out with the wonderful Chris Moncus, and had been since September 2002. I worked at ParkSide Cafe, which is now closed, even though I think it had the best food (and service) in Brunswick, then I worked for a realtor on St. Simons
Island. I went to First Baptist Church, sang with the youth band, hung out at the beach, took my kayak to the nearby lakes, rivers, and beach, and had a great time living on the coast of south Georgia. Then things changed a bit…

January 23rd, Chris and I went on a date to celebrate our 4th year anniversary of the day we met, and there he proposed in a carefully planned scheme involving singing a song he wrote for me,dropping his pick in his guitar, and pulling out a diamond ring! It was amazing.

A couple months later he was offered a job at a church in Las Vegas, which he accepted, and flew out to work for about 7 weeks before our wedding, which was June 10, at the Mary Ross Waterfront Park. So, we had a beautiful wedding (even though we’d both been sick for 3 days before it, and I’d been in the hospital)! We honeymooned for a week in the Smoky Mountain area (Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge). We got back from our honeymoon, loaded up a U-Haul on Monday, started driving Tuesday, and arrived at Las Vegas Friday night after long days of fearful, wind-blown, bumpy-road-construction driving. And we still loved and liked each other and had a good sense of humor at the end of it. Married life’s been great so far.

So now we are living in the desert (makes kayaking a little more difficult), staying with friends, looking for a house of our own (we’re almost settled on one), both working and attending Canyon Ridge Christian Church, enjoying no humidity, making new friends, trusting that God is going to use this time to grow us and teach us wonderfully new things. So far, so good. Now if only our friends from the southeast would come and visit us….