Hungry Like the Wolf

Yesterday morning, I snatched back my shower curtain to, you know, take a shower and I screamed loud enough to wake the dead. Which; happily enough was still sleeping in my bed.
I found THIS
in my shower. I made Matt get up but told him not to kill it until I took a picture. The thing was as big as my palm. YUCK!
I just wish I could have used Clorox Cleanup around the drain before taking the picture, but I wasn't about to get near the spider. So don't judge me on the cleaniness or lack-there-of around my drain.

Last night, Sarah Spooner identified it as a Wolf Spider. Great.
The only good news to come from that discovery is from Wikipedia that tells me that Wolf Spiders travel in a "solitary style".

Shooey.

One more reason not to welcome the changing seasons.

Happy Birthday to You-Here's a Punch to the Mouth

I woke up this morning with Asher and got him watching some television and snuggled back in bed only to hear a "craaaaaack" and I knew immediately that a tree had fallen in our yard.

The first words out of my mouth were "That's a tree" and the next were "We would have heard my car smashing if the tree hit it right?"

Thank God it didn't fall back towards our house because it could have fallen right in line with all of our bedrooms.

Overwhelmed and (almost) out of time

So we have a 9-day countdown until our house goes on the market and so now is when we decide that we are really serious about fixing the things on our house that have been around for oh, say, two years now. And well, it is a little too little too late. And it is irritating.

I am overwhelmed with work, house crap, the kids are both sick and cranky and so am I. Matt is behind and we are both feeling the pressure of the summer upon us. It really is no way to be.

On the plus side, while we were gone we hired Ben (the guy that lived with us last summer and fall) to come and clean our carpets while we were gone so that is one less thing on our to-do list.

So hopefully, before work week at Windy Gap we can tick a few more things off of our list and feel good about listing our house rather than hope that it looks just mildly better than the trailer park that is down the street.

*sigh*
But who wouldn't want to buy our house and get to sit on our front porch? Doesn't that look lovely?


Here are pictures from our beach trip up on Flickr right now. We are kind of regretting going since we have so many things going on. But it was nice to pretend like we don't have our lives here to catch up on. Just for you, another taste of our time there:

We've decided to be responsible

We have decided that the aforementioned house is not to be ours. While we dream away...someone else is going to buy the house. It just won't be us. We realized that by stretching too much on a mortgage, we won't be able to do ANYTHING much less afford to fix the house should anything break. Plus, our house still needs some work done to it, we need to get the lot next door surveyed. All in all, we are probably a few months away from being ready to sell our house and we can't just put it on the market next weekend. If we did, we probably would take a bath and then not be able to afford the new house at all.

It is a little sad, but I have to say; I am proud of us for coming to a good conclusion that both of us feel good about WITHOUT A FIGHT! Maybe we are become one flesh...

Dream Home

Matt and I found our dream home last night. It is about $30k outside of our highest end price range. But I love it. I love it with a passion that is not to be placed upon a house. It is a 1920's farm house in West Asheville. The owners are selling it themselves. We went and walked through it today. We both know that the price is very fair and that there is great potential to add value to the house in the next few years. The yard is great. The house has 9 foot ceilings and the master bedroom has nine windows in it. The owner called it her tree house room. Arggh, it is so great! So what is the problem? The owners don't want to sell it to someone who will have to have a clause in the contract about selling their own home. They just want to sell it outright without any clauses. We can't do that since we haven't even put our house on the market, nor is it ready to go on the market right now. But if we were sufficiently motivated, we could possibly get it on the market in the next two weeks. But that doesn't guarentee we would be able to sell it by the time that we closed on this other too expensive house. But it is perfect. Perfect size, perfect location, perfect little details. It is not super perfect, I mean we would have to paint and do some work on the house. And it is too expensive. But other than that...I could just imagine raising our kids in this house. It is irrational to love a house like this. What are we to do?