Officially Official Texans!

Well--it's Official! After being in the Great State of Texas for one full year--we just got our final vehicle's license plates switched over from Illinois to Texas! I'm sure there's probably a law somewhere like there is in most places that you need to switch everything over to the new address / state when you move--so we may have been law breakers while we rode out the full year on the sticker we had just gotten before the move from Illinois. It's so nice to see Texas plates on that car now! No more land of crazy taxes and crazy winter weather and out of control traffic! Yay!

The entire process at the Midland County Tax office was extremely painless. The wait wasn't very long--maybe 10 minutes to get called--and once we were called the lady--Tracey--who helped us was extremely friendly and nice and even CHATTY! My wife and I were like "WAIT A MINUTE--SOMEONE THAT WORKS AT A GOVERNMENT FACILITY IS NICE--AND CHATTY?!?!?!?!"... LOL But she was cracking jokes with us, telling us we wouldn't find deep dish pizza here like we were used to in Chicago, and then the system crashed and she had to re-enter all our information. And even THEN--she was still nice! We just love it here....

In the year we've been here, we have gotten to know our area pretty well. We are completely in love with the Midland-Odessa area. Love the people, love our jobs, love our new house, and love the weather here (for the most part--minus the Frozen Tundra week from this past February that had the power grid freaking out with rolling blackouts. That we ALL could have done without. I have heard the phrase "WE don't usually get weather like this here" quite a bit from the natives over the past 9 months, so I'm hoping now that we are here--Mother Nature can get out of my front yard and go back to Illinois and West Texas can get back to it's usual weather patterns. Thanks again to everyone for the warm welcome--and for making this feel like it's always been home.