there's always money in the banana stand

The title of this post has nothing to do with the content. Sorry.

I got home from work today (a very long, busy day) and had all sorts of surprises waiting for me! My bathroom has a new mirror, light, and toilet paper holder, a ton of trash was out of the garage and waiting by the curb to be picked up tomorrow, we had groceries in the fridge, the laundry was done, and dinner was in the works! It was awesome! It's quite nice having a pseudo house husband. At least he's holding up his end of the bargain to keep getting things done around the house now that we're moved in, because I haven't been doing so well with that. We did a bunch this weekend, but in the evenings after work I haven't been very productive. Partly because we've been busy - we had/are having dinner with Alfred's family on Monday, with Gara yesterday, and with Ilya and Mercedes tomorrow - but also because, let's face it, I'm kind of lazy. And it's hard. And I don't wanna!

So I kind of hurt my wrist a few weeks ago with all this house stuff, so I've been wearing an ace bandage to work for the past few days. I came up with this great story about how I hurt myself while hunting pigs on horseback, nice and period appropriate and all. I was telling one of my employees this story, complete with Southern accent and ending with "we caught 3 pigs, which will feed my family through the winter," and she totally believed me. None of the gullible little kids I told even believed me, but she did. It was kind of awesome. Apparently it's totally believable that I'm that much of a bad ass. I told some little kid the other day that life wasn't fair. I was also asked this morning if the houses behind the museum were real. When I said yes she seemed surprised. She thought they were just models. Ha! Kids are dumb. And funny. I've really turned up the threats with them lately, which is fun. I have to entertain myself somehow. Anyway, dinner's ready, and I'm on my second Kahlua, so I'm out like a deaf kid in musical chairs.

Guess what's got 2 thumbs and had the day off today? That's right, this girl! It was great, because I got to a) sleep in ( I got almost 10 hours of sleep last night, which I badly needed, having gotten less than 10 hours of sleep the past 2 nights combined), and b) work on cleaning and unpacking the new house. Our bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, and the living room are almost done, the kitchen and our bedroom are maybe 2/3 done, and the dining room actually has no boxes left in it. One of the upstairs bedrooms is pretty much set up too, actually, the one that Mike's currently staying in. (Oh, by the way, Mike's here. More on that later.) The office is a complete disaster, it's where we kept putting all the random stuff we had nowhere else to put as we were moving in. At least some of it's going to end up in the attic, but I probably won't be tackling it for another week or so. Anyway, we're much more settled in after today, which is nice. Hell, we're probably almost as moved in as we ever were at our last house.

So, Mike's here! He got in late Monday night (technically Tuesday morning, it was around 12:45am I think). He and Alfred have been palling around, as usual, though today I got to play a bit as well. Right now we're doing a power hour. It's our first, actually, which is kind of weird. Since it's been like 2 days. We were supposed to do one earlier but Alfred had a bunch of errands to run, so he was being all responsible and stuff. Lame. Last night Ilya, Mercedes, Kevin, and Gara came over for dinner. And Mister. He didn't eat, though.

On Saturday we went to Mercedes' and Mister's birthday party, which was fun. They had a barbecue party. It was all delicious. And an ice cream cake. And a dog food cake for Mister, which Ilya tasted. Apparently he tastes all of Mister's treats, too. Full disclosure: I tried one of Mister's treats once, it was peanut buttery, it was actually pretty good.

We're talking about Mike's trip to DC. Alfred and I almost lived in DC. True story. I sort of wish we lived there now. I'm going to go ahead and post this now, because I've been working on this post for approximately 40 minutes.

house update

So, the house. It's going well, we've made quite a bit of progress since last weekend. If all keeps going according to plan we'll be done and ready to move in in about 3 weeks. Here's our updated to-do list:

repair roof - done
pressure wash house - done
scrape popcorn texture off ceilings - done
spray new texture on ceilings and paint them - done
install new AC - done
remove old carpets - done
install new lights in living room and kitchen - done
drywall repairs - done
paint walls
install new carpet
install new wood floors
install new toilets
install new kitchen sink
repair banister

That's it! Unfortunately everything we have left to do is pretty cosmetic, so the house looks like a total disaster right now. We start painting walls tomorrow though, and lots of painting and flooring will go on this weekend. It's going to make a huge difference. We're ordered all the flooring, and I've picked out all the paint colors, I think; I probably have about 1/3 of all the paint color chips that Behr makes. We were at the house the other day and Alfred suggested a color for a room, and I whipped out the suggested color from my purse, right on cue. Don't worry, we'll go on a virtual tour once it's done.

The really fun thing I got to do this weekend was walk around in drywall stilts! The drywall guy left them behind when he left on Saturday, and I was all over those like white on rice. It took a few minutes to get used to walking in them, but I got pretty good at it. I used them for a couple of hours that afternoon, and then again for an hour or so on Sunday. Literally the second the drywall guy left on Sunday I had those puppies on. Seriously, they're great fun. I felt like a cross between Forrest Gump and the Terminator. If anyone needs a gift idea for me for my birthday or Christmas, keep these in mind. Either that or a massage. Which I could actually use right now, my back and shoulders are awfully sore from all this work on the house.

#3

It's official: we're home owners again! This has been in the works since the end of July. We actually got the call that the sellers had accepted our offer back when we were camping with my family earlier this summer, and we were originally supposed to close September 1. Of course there was an issue with the title, closing got pushed back, drama ensued. Then finally, this past Thursday, the bank calls and says the title's ready to go, we're closing Monday. Yay! The next day they call Alfred and say hey, you've been dicking around too long, close today or you lose the house! (Cause, you know, when they take 3 weeks to fix the title that's fine, but the 18 hours we've spent getting our loan in order from our lender is just unreasonable.) So at about 3:30 I left work, drove 45 minutes up to the bank to sign the paperwork, turned around and drove another 45 minutes back to work to close and lock up, then drove another 45 minutes back to approximately 1/2 mile from the bank we had closed at to meet friends for dinner. 90 mile round trip to travel approximately 3 blocks. But we have a new house!

This one is 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms, 2 stories, attached garage, and a pool! Lots of nice big closets (this is the first time since Alfred and I have lived together that we'll both be able to keep our clothes in the closet in our bedroom!), attic space over the garage, tons of storage, it's great. It's on a big property too, nice big fenced in backyard, plus a shed and pool house (well, what we call a pool house anyway, really it's a little storage type room next to the pool). It also comes complete with some new pets. The pool hasn't been cleaned in probably a year or two, possibly more, so it's basically a nature preserve now. We've seen at least 2 frogs and at least 2 turtles. I think there are more turtles, but I only ever saw 2 at a time today. Here's a good picture of one of the turtles.

In this picture you can actually see 1 of the frogs and 2 turtles. The circle on the left is the frog.

This house is bigger than either house we've lived in so far, much larger than where we are now, which is going to be so nice. I can't wait to actually unpack all of our boxes! At least 1/4 of our stuff is still sitting in boxes in our house now, which makes it easier for this move I guess. This new house does require a bit of work, of course, but we actually did a bunch of work this weekend already. Our to-do list as of right now:

pass electrical inspection - done
repair roof
pressure wash house - done
scrape popcorn texture off ceilings - 99% done (except for one chunk over the stairs I couldn't reach with the ladder)
install new AC
remove old carpets
install new carpet
install new wood floors
paint
install new toilets
install new kitchen sink
install new lights in living room and kitchen

Whew! I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff that Alfred will remind me of as soon as he reads this. The goal is to be in mid-October. Then we sell the house we're in now ASAP. And live in one place for more than 6 months. It's going to be a busy few weeks.

meet the neighbors

So I'm watching this little drama unfolding outside my house. Our neighborhood is a dog neighborhood. As in, dogs next door, dogs across the street, dogs down the road, dogs everywhere. Dogs that bark when you go outside, dogs that bark when you get into or out of your car, dogs that bark when they hear other dogs barking. It's pretty damn annoying. Well, apparently a few got loose from a house down the street, because about 10 minutes ago I heard a bunch of barking and thundering animal running sounds in my front lawn. I looked outside to see 3 big dogs running across our lawn. 2 minutes later, along comes some lady yelling at them. The dogs run back her way. 2 minutes later, more barking and running, and the dogs are running away again. This happens several times, until she finally gets one of the on a leash. The rest sort of trail along with her, stopping to bark at and harass dogs in fenced in yards along the way. Just now she was back out front yelling for another dog to come back. It's kind of hilarious. She's wearing black stretch pants. Not the stylish kind, though.

Most of our neighbors are white, it seems, though a lot of the people in surrounding neighborhoods seem to be black. In the Publix supermarket closest to us, for example, we're generally the only white people there. I texted Alfred all excited the other day because there was another white couple in there. The other supermarket by us is usually pretty evenly split between white and black people. It's an interesting area. Luckily, I'm often in my work costume when I go to the supermarket around here, so everyone's equally staring at me. I bring the races together in my 16th century garb.

In other news, I had the day off today! I have to work all day Saturday, but let's not talk about that. I made strawberry cupcakes for Lucy, who came to see our house and joined us for lunch. The frosting was better than the cupcakes, although they looked pretty cute with a little strawberry slice on top. We drank a bottle of wine while she was here. Because really, what better time for a bottle of white wine than at 1:30 in the afternoon?

In closing, I'd like to share this link to a collection of the Celebrity Jeopardy skits from SNL. We used to sit in the hallway/ghetto my sophomore year in college and listen to the audio on our computers. They still crack me up. Enjoy!

Remember the award I won last month for customer service for a NE FL tourist attraction? About a week ago my boss printed out a picture from the event, wrote a little note on it about the award, and posted it in the break room at the museum. Yesterday I noticed it was gone. So either one of my bosses decided I had had enough glory, or someone else there got jealous. I have my suspicions. I should have checked the trash or something, but by the time I noticed it was gone I think it had been gone for at least a day already. By the way, here's the picture. Not the most flattering, but you can see my award. There was one more of me on the official website, and it's hideous. It's of me walking to the stage. I have an extremely unattractive profile.

Last night Alfred had some super important big shot meeting that went until pretty late, so I was home alone for awhile. Not all that long, actually, because I had a funeral to go to after work (the husband of one of my coworkers passed away, cancer, very sad), then I had to go run errands for work, so by the time I got home it was almost 9:00. However, I was finally successful in my search for a bathroom rug yesterday, so I decided to surprise Alfred and finish unpacking and setting up the bathroom. It looks really nice in there now. No more boxes! Alfred still needs to put up the towel rack and toilet paper holder this weekend, but then it's totally done. Finally. This weekend I have big plans to work on the kitchen and find the iron. I have the ironing board, but no iron yet. It's becoming a problem, because I need wash my work clothes and they then need to be ironed. I'm running out of clothes. I want to go buy a window shade for the front door, too. But really, as long as I find that damn iron, I'll be happy.

in with the new!

Here's an exciting treat: a virtual tour of our new house! I just went around and took pictures of each room, without doing anything to them first to make them look any different/nicer than they actually do in real life. So here we go. The tour begins with the living room. That's the front door at the left side of the picture. That's Alfred on the couch. He's on the phone with his dad and stirring the goat milk we're making yogurt with.

Next to the living room we have the office. The dresser and TV that are in the middle of the room were against the wall and set up until this morning, when we moved them to get the satellite cable run over to the wall.

On the other side of the living room is what we're apparently calling the sitting room. This is the second least unpacked room. Eventually I think the chaise lounge, the bookshelf, and the wine fridge are going to end up in here. Probably some other stuff too, but I don't know what yet. The washer and dryer, along with the new shelf Alfred installed this weekend, are in a little closeted off area to the right of this picture.

Beyond the sitting room is the kitchen. Pretty self explanatory. This room is proving the most difficult to unpack and set up. We have a lot of kitchen stuff and are going from a lot of cabinet and counter space to a little. We also don't have a working dishwasher yet, hence all the dishes drying on the counter.

Through the sitting room in the other direction is the hallway, which leads you to the other bedrooms and the bathroom. First, our bedroom. Alfred's closet is just out of this picture on the right. He gets that closet because the hanging bar is lower and my work dresses were touching the ground when I hung them in there.

Next is the bathroom. I'm still not convinced I love this shower curtain, but I guess it's a little late now. This is probably the room we're buying the most new stuff for. The shower curtain, for one, but we still need a towel rod, toilet paper holder, rug, and some shelves or something to put all of our crap on. Most of our toiletries are still in boxes, one of which is at the bottom left of this picture. Oh, actually, when I said before I didn't touch anything before I took these pictures, I lied. I opened the shower curtain a little so you could see the shelves I put in the shower. I originally bought one of those things you hang on the shower head to hold your stuff, but then I found this shelving unit that you can set up in the corner instead. It's awesome.

And last of all, the guest room. A complete and total disaster area. When we were moving, whenever we had no idea where to put something we put it in this room. We have big plans to make this a guest room at some point. Hopefully before we have any guests. I think we should put a lot of this stuff up in the attic, but we'll see.

The biggest thing we did this weekend was landscaping. Unfortunately I got home after dark, since I had to make a detour to do some birthday shopping, so no pictures of the new landscaping yet. At least this way there's still something for everyone to look forward to!

our new house

I realized that I haven't gotten around to posting about our new house yet. My bad! So, here you go. First from the outside.

Cute, no? That's a pecan tree to the right of the picture, there's another one in the backyard too. Plus there's a really big backyard too, which means I get to have a garden! I need to start getting some gardening books out of the library or something, because otherwise I'll kill everything in minutes.

Anyway, the house has 3 bedrooms, which is nice, but only 1 bathroom. In general I feel like only having 1 bathroom is not so great, but then I think about how that means I only have to clean 1 bathroom. I like that part. The living room is a little small, and sort of weirdly set up. Three of the walls have doorways, and the fourth has a fireplace, so it's not exactly ideal for furniture. The carpet's all been pulled up now and the floors are wood.

Just past the living room is this weird dining room-like area. It's bigger than both the living room and the kitchen, which is unfortunate. The kitchen is through the doorway on the other side of this room and, again, is small. Not the smallest kitchen ever, but definitely a step down from our current kitchen.

The main benefits of this house are a) the location (closer to Alfred's family and job, and all of our friends who live down here), and b) lack of a mortgage. It's a little longer drive for me to work, by about 10 minutes, and it's an uglier and more boring drive. But I'm willing to take one for the team for a little while. It really is a cute little house. The plan is to move next weekend. Should be awesome!

house pictures!

I'm not at work today! I'm babysitting for Xyla all day so her mom (Lindsay) can work. Lindsay's husband, Jeff, already started his new job in St. Pete, so he's out there for the week and Lindsay's still working, so I got to volunteer for Xyla duty for a day! Hopefully I'll have a cute picture or two to show off tomorrow, and maybe my baby fever will be appeased for awhile (Alfred's crossing his fingers!)

In the meantime, here are the house elevations to go along with the plans I posted last week. The picture on the left is the front and back view, the picture on the right are the side views. I'm pretty happy with how it looks, we had to add a bunch of windows so it looked nicer (and it didn't feel like we were living in a cave) and I like how it came out. The stem wall at the bottom is (probably) going to be brick, and the rest is siding like our house now. I don't know what color yet, maybe we'll go with pink and blue like these pictures.

sorry!

I just got a text from my mom, heckling me about my lack of posts. We were out of the office all day yesterday, we were actually out of the house from 7:45am until about 9:30pm, except for about 15 minutes around 7pm when we came back to shower and change. Alfred found a tenant to rent a house that Max's company owns, so we were cleaning it out and getting it ready for them to move in, which they are probably going to do today or tomorrow. This happens to be the house that we were planning on living in, if/when we rent our house until our new house is done, so we now have nowhere to live if/when we do rent our house. Which is now listed on Craig's list, and which Alfred has gotten 2 calls about already. So things are chugging along in that department, sort of, although now that we have nowhere to move to I guess it's ok if nothing happens right away.

Speaking of the new house, I don't think I mentioned it yet but we met with a drafts person a couple of weeks ago to work on our plans. We had drawn up a plan a couple of months ago, but Alfred decided he didn't like it (you like how I throw him under the bus?) so he got a bunch of books out of the library, found a new plan we liked, drew it up with some changes to fit what we want/need, and then the drafts person got to work on it. Here's what we have so far (first floor on the left, second floor on the right):


I'm happy with how it's coming along so far. She's still working on the elevation, so when she gets that finished up I'll post that so you can see how it will look from the outside. Now if we ever get all our permits, at least we'll be ready to get started.

We had a good weekend, very busy. We went blueberry picking with Ilya and Mercedes on Saturday,
then had dinner (including a blueberry pie) and a power hour at their house. Sunday we went swimming at our temporary house,
had a delicious pizza lunch,
and then hung out at their house in the afternoon/evening. Whew!

Now that I have fulfilled my obligations and (hopefully) satisfied my legions of loyal readers, I need to get back to work. The job search continues!

so, how was your weekend?

My weekend was just stellar, thank you for asking. I could have done so, so much around the house, but I didn't. I didn't even need to clean because we've barely been home to mess the place up since I cleaned last. I was saying to Alfred yesterday how I wanted the kitchen floor washed, the windows cleaned, the back yard cleaned up and weeded... but I didn't want to do a damn thing. That's not to say I didn't do anything. Here's my weekend in a handy bulleted list.

• Saturday I headed to the farmers market and picked up some delicious, healthy, cheap produce. All of this came to $10. I feel like that's a good price, but I can't really be sure because I've never bothered doing a comparison at the grocery store.

• I got hit on by one of the vendors at the farmers market. He was wearing a shirt that said "Let's flip a coin. Heads, I get tail. Tails, I get head." I was wearing my glasses and hadn't showered yet. He suggested we go to a strip club that afternoon (because he had to give me a bunch of singles as change.) Yeah, it was pretty awesome.
  
• Speaking of my glasses, I didn't put my contacts in once this weekend. My eyeballs thanked me.
  
• We had a delicious pizza Saturday for dinner. Toppings: pears, pecans, and gorgonzola cheese. I was inspired after buying the pears that morning.
• I beat levels 4 and 5 on the second quest of the Legend of Zelda. I'm a nerd, by the way.
  
• We worked on a new set of house plans. Alfred had gotten a whole bunch of books out of the library to look at for ideas and found a really good plan in one of them, so he drew it out and made some modifications to make it fit what we wanted/needed. It looks really good. The next step is to get it drawn up professionally so it can go to an engineer and get approved to build. Then we'll be ready to go once we get all of our permits.
• I caught up on all of the episodes of "so you think you can dance" that were on the dvr. The show where the top 20 all performed didn't record for some reason, so I missed that, but it's ok. I'll live.
  
• Our dvr decided to start to break. I think that's why my show didn't tape (see previous bullet point). It worked a few times this weekend, but not much. Someone's coming out to fix it next Sunday. Luckily we don't have much taping this week, so if it doesn't work, we won't miss much. But I think I'm going to ask Ellery to tape so you think you can dance for me though, just in case. Can't be too careful.

Non stop excitement, I tell you what!

odds and ends

Katie, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to post more goofy pictures of you apparently. I got more comments on that picture than on anything else I've written so far. Thanks for taking one for them team.

So, what do you get when you have 3 19/20 year olds staying with you for a week?


Except for the couple of Red Bull cans on top, those are all from beer. We had an entire second bin full of our other recycling. We looked just like the house of alcoholics down the road this morning.

In other news, Alfred and I hit up the big main library downtown last night. I love libraries. I used to love to go to the stacks in the older libraries at Cornell and just look at all the crazy books they had there. The library near our house now kind of sucks. It makes me kind of sad. But now that I have Alfred's card to this one, and they have a self check out thing, I can go there and explore to my little heart's content, and no one can get suspicious that I'm not named Alfred. Anyway. I checked out a few teaching books, and Alfred checked out like 10 books on house design. He's got a whole station set up at home with the books and sticky notes and a pen so as he goes through them he can mark stuff he likes. I'm getting the feeling this house building process may take longer than we planned.

One last thing. Go look at this website with lots of passive aggressive notes that people submit. I spent a long time Tuesday looking at them and then my computer shut itself down overnight so I had to re-find it today, but I lost my place where I was, and I was several pages in. And I actually have work to do today, so I can't even read them until tomorrow. But you can, and you should. Have fun.

warning: gross stuff about beef ahead

I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which Alfred has already read most of. It's what has really spurred him into becoming a hippie and trying to produce more of our own food, or at least getting it from healthier, local sources. I just got back from lunch, where I read while I ate. And now I get why he's turning into a hippie.

The part I read today was all about what cattle are fed on a feedlot before they're slaughtered: mostly corn (which is not natural for them and therefore makes them sick), mixed with antibiotics (since the corn is making them so sick), protein from sources such as chicken parts and droppings, and whatever manure gets stuck to their bodies throughout their lives on the feedlot that doesn't get washed off. I'm reading this as I'm eating a taco with beef. Lovely. It's also talking about how Mad Cow Disease became a problem because cattle used to be fed protein from other cattle, aka cannibalism. Now it's much better though, cause they eat protein from chickens, which of course are fed beef protein. So now the cattle gets digested by the chickens before being refed to other cattle. There's also stuff about E. coli becoming more resilient because of the change of stomach pH in cattle. Is this sounding as gross as it sounded to me in the book? Cause it sounded really gross. I want to be a vegetarian.

In non manure related news, we should be receiving our permit from the Army Corps to build our house any day now. Also, we're supposed to be getting our official address from the county today. We might really get to build a house! We also looked at a couple of houses that we could potentially rent while our new house is getting built, assuming we can somehow rent our current house. (We're thinking vacation rental for our house, unless Katie finds a couple of friends who want to rent it instead.) One house we looked at today is already owned by Max's company, the other is being purchased this month (or maybe next month, I'm not sure). Either way, it would cut down our commute and, depending on what we rented our house for, our monthly housing cost. Which is a good thing. Then we can use the extra money to buy grass-fed beef! (You like how I connected my two topics? I feel like Dave Barry!) (You like all my linking in this post? I feel like a dork!)

thumbs up, say the astronauts

We heard back from the Army Corp yesterday - he's going to give us a permit! This is fantastic - he's the guy who we weren't sure was going to approve us, so this was a big hurdle to jump. There's still some legal stuff we have to take care of for him and for DEP, but it looks like we're going to be able to build where we want to! Now it's just a matter of time until we have all of the details taken care of and can actually start building. Alfred still thinks we won't be able to start until July, but at least we can do it! Definitely a weight lifted.

house meeting #3

(James Blunt sucks. All of his songs are the same. Lame guitar/piano music, then the same 3 lines sung over and over and over. I bet they're easy to write. I know they're easy to get stuck in your head. Guess what we were listening to in the car.)

So Alfred went to another meeting about the new house yesterday. This one was with DEP, who we had already met at the house site and who indicated it wouldn't be any problem to get a permit from them. There was also a woman from Water Management there, and she apparently was not so easy. We now have to pay an engineer to say that our house will not cause the surrounding area to flood. It seems a little silly to have to go through this step, since we're surrounded by swamp, which is connected directly to a canal, which drains into a lake, which connects to the St Johns River. We are literally less than a mile from the lake, less than 2 from the river. We couldn't flood the area if we tried. But we have to pay someone to write this down for her. Stupid rules.

The good house news is that between moving the house by 5 feet and shrinking the pad a little, we only need to request a permit to fill .06 acres of land now. That's almost half of what it was before. We're submitting the paperwork to the Army Corp today, hopefully he'll be satisfied with what we've done and will just give us a damn permit. He said if it all looks ok, we can have a permit in 3-4 weeks! That would be great. I just hope he accepts it, he said at our meeting it's a 1 try thing, if he says no the first time we can't change it and try again. It's a little nerve wracking, but hopefully it will work out ok.

In other news, my parents are on their way down to visit. They left yesterday and should be here tonight around 6 or 7. We bought lots of meat and TP at Costco last night. I hope we make it through the week. My dad's on a diet because he's either borderline or actually diabetic, so I'm going to make a brownie recipe that has black beans and splenda instead of oil and sugar. I'm obviously not telling him that's what's in them until they're gone. I bet he'll like them until he finds out about the beans, then he'll hate them on principle. I made a similar recipe for the Superbowl and they were actually pretty good.

Hm, no pictures yet. Well, since Alfred's the one who bugs me when there are no pictures, here's an old one of him holding Ella. See, he totally loves babies!

house meeting #2

We met with the guy from the Army Corp this morning. The meeting went.... well, I think. We were there for about 1 1/2 hours, and the first hour or so was all negative. He's holding all the cards, we have to prove why we need to build on this lot, he doesn't have to say yes, we can't do it for reasons 1 2 3 and 4, blah blah, negative negative, he hates Florida. Didn't want to hear a thing we had to say. I was feeling very discouraged and was totally ready to just give it up. Then in the last 20-30 minutes he slowly starts to turn around. He goes through all these different types of information we would need to give to him, all these things we need to do and document, and then maybe he can give us a permit. Then he talks to our consultant about how much of an area will be impacted, we talk about some of the things we're doing to minimize how much will be impacted, and all of a sudden he says "well we could do a type x permit then." Our consultant just nodded and said "that's what we initially applied for." I guess it just took some time and a bunch of listening to himself talk for this guy to realize we weren't terrible people. Exactly what our consultant said he would do. He also said that once we do have all the things together that he needs, we can have a permit in as little as 3-4 weeks, provided everything is there and he can legally give us one. So we're tentatively optimistic. It was just very strange, we spend over an hour hearing how it can never be done, all doom and gloom, and then suddenly maybe we can do it after all.

Anyway, this would be the view as you come down the driveway, if we are in fact able to build this house:


Please note all the water. This is why there is such concern. However, this is only one little corner of the house site. Well, we're surrounded by swamp on three sides, but where the house will actually sit looks like this:


Some of it is technically wetlands, but not "nice" wetlands. We're hoping that between conserving all the surrounding swamp, and doing some things to minimize the amount of land we'd have to fill, they'll let us build this damn house. That would be nice. Cause driving 2-2.5+ hours a day sucks. And I want to have a baby. Have I mentioned that?

house meeting #1

So when we met with the environmental consultant last night, he told us that he had heard from DEP (that's who we were waiting to hear from, not the county) and we ended up meeting them at the house site this morning. It went really well, I think. They seemed to think it wouldn't be a problem at all to approve building at the site, and that there's plenty of wetlands being preserved to make up for the little that we'd be filling. So that's good news. Let's hope the Army Corp guy agrees with them. Our consultant said he's never seen a response from the Army Corp like the one we got, it was a 4 page letter for filling 1/10th of an acre. Until the rules got changed last summer, that would have been automatically approved. Figures. We went over a bunch of stuff last night to talk about at our meeting with him though, so hopefully that will go well too. I should have taken a picture of the lot when we were there this morning so I'd have a picture to add to this post, but I didn't think of it. Alfred gets bored with picture-less posts. Sorry, Alfred.

In other news, I'm really enjoying the new tracking software I put on this page. The only problem is that it shows every time I look at my own page. (I'm apparently in East Palatka, by the way.) So now everyone can see how often I come see if anyone new has been here. Ah well, you all knew I was a dork anyway, right?

(Listen to this - in looking at our tax stuff, it turns out we paid more in interest on our mortgage than I earned all last year. Sad.)

new house

I know I've mentioned it briefly to some of you, but we have a meeting about it today so I figure I'll write about it. Several years ago, my in laws bought a chunk of land, sold off pieces of it to a builder, and built their own house on part of it. They still own several acres (I don't know exactly how much) but most of it is swamp, and hard to get to. There is one little piece that they have an easement to get to, but again, it's mostly swamp and not right on a road. Well several months ago Max or Alfred or someone decided to try to separate that piece and make it its own lot so that it could be sold and built on. Then that changed into us building on it. So that's what we're attempting to do. It's going to be a bit of a process, because before we can do anything we have to get permission to even build there. It's been legally separated from the rest of their property, and we had to apply to 2 different agencies to get a permit to build. The county has 30 days before they have to make a decision, so we're still waiting to hear from them. We heard from the Army Corp of Engineers (I think that's who it is, anyway) pretty quickly, and they said no in about 5 different ways. Apparently they think it's just a developer trying to wring every last cent out of the property. We have a meeting set with them next week to convince them that we're real people and will actually be living there. So we have a meeting this afternoon with the company who's helping us file all these applications to discuss the meeting next week. Should be fun. Hopefully it all goes well, because this whole hour commute thing sucks.

In other news, I ate a huge piece of cake and then had a piece of pie last night. Since then I've had an old Nickelodeon commercial for the Yogi Bear cartoon stuck in my head. It goes "Cakes, pies, cakes, pies, chicken thighs!" Then there's some music, and then "weekdays on Nick!" It's driving me crazy. I found this picture on a website for a Jellystone campground in Niagara Falls. I think we went camping there once. I think I talked to Boo Boo on the phone. I wonder if that actually happened.