Evil Snek

In a comment earlier, I mentioned to Cederq about my mother's property being an apparent singles bar for copperhead snakes looking to mate. They are everywhere. Why is this a problem you ask?

THIS is why. At a quick glance, can you see that sneaky sumb*tch??? It was hiding out in dead leaves under the metal fire pit we were removing that was disintegrating into a crumbling mess of ferrous oxide (aka "rust"). Hell yeah it scared the daylights out of me. They are ill tempered and quick to strike. While not usually fatal to adults, they are dangerous to kids and pets. And it would ruin your day to get bit by one no matter how you slice it. Word has it that they exude a strong sulphur/rotten egg smell which just proves that they are minions of Satan. 

We have a simple rule here at Annabelle Acres regarding copperheads: Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. 

I've killed two so far this summer alone. The first was the one in the picture above. The second was one that I discovered at the steps to the RV AFTER I had already stepped over it once unawares. I pretty much had a full body shiver both times. 

What A Difference a Day Makes

 As some of you are probably aware unless you live in the artic circle or on a deserted tropical island after a 3 hour tour, Texas weather has been after it this summer with a vengeance. We had over a month of 100+ degree heat. There hasn't been a drop of rain since May, and about the only green in site is a dollar bill being blown by on the wind. 

For example, I offer pictures of the two stock tanks (ponds) on my mother's property taken on August 3RD as the "before" exhibit.

The little pond - bone dry. Not a drop of water or even a mud pie to be seen. 

The big pond. Not quite dry, but well below normal and about 6 feet lower than it's highest level. The green is duck weed which is an invasive algae. 

So, that was just over two weeks ago. Then, the heavens opened up and poured forth a deluge that set records for rainfall. Since midnight, we've gotten 8.4 inches of rain 6.1 of which fell between midnight and 8:00AM. 

The big pond this evening after the rains stopped. I was very surprised by how much duck weed survived.

The small pond around lunch time before the rains stopped. 

An unfortunate casualty of all that rain was a 45 foot tall post oak near mom's house. 

The trunk has a circumference of 6 feet 8 inches. If my math is correct, the diameter is a little over 2 feet (maybe 25 or 26 inches). The canopy was about 40 feet wide. Just the main part of the trunk is roughly 3000 pounds. 

I will be spending quite a bit of time with a chainsaw and safety gear over the next couple of  weeks. Anyone need some firewood?

Shared Pain...Shared Joy

Once upon a time, I did a ride along with a Denton PD officer as part of a college project. During the ride along, one of the things I learned about were “Dear Chief” letters. Anytime an officer made a mistake that warranted the chief’s attention, the offending officer would write a letter to the Chief that started out “Dear Chief, much has transpired since last we spoke….” Also, one of my favorite quotes comes from the Callahan Cross Time Saloon series of books by Spider Robinson. That quote is in the side bar “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased - thus do we refute entropy.” Well….Dear Readers, much has transpired since last we spoke. Entropy has been getting a workout.

It all started one fine Wednesday evening a month ago after we all thawed out from the great polar vortex event here in North Texas. It had been decided by The Queen and Princess M&M that Miss Tater Tot needed a companion to keep her company. Never mind the three cats, two dogs and multiple fish that were already in the house. I was informed Tater was lonely and needed a friend. The Queen had been in touch with a crazy bunny lady in a nearby suburb who had several varieties to choose from. After much deliberation and handling of many buns including a handsome Lop named Beast, a lovely blue otter colored, female, Netherland Dwarf rabbit came home to join our herd.

 

Thus began the naming saga. Many names were tried on for size and found to be lacking. At one point, M&M tossed out “Death” as a possible name. What ultimately stuck was “Graycie”. Now, you are supposed to keep bunnies quarantined from each other for a couple of weeks so they can get used to each other, make sure no illnesses are transferred, etc. Well, Graycie had other ideas. Despite our best efforts, we consistently found the little Houdini in Tater’s cage to the point we just threw up our hands in defeat and made one large bunny enclosure under M&M’s loft bed. They get along famously and are regularly seen flopped next to each other.

 

Two days later, I woke up Friday morning to an email from my niece and nephew from whom we have been renting/caretaking a house for the last several years. The email indicated that they had decided that they needed house back so that my niece and her friends could move in by early June. I had not had my morning caffeine injection by this point. It was a bit of an eyeopener to say the least. The Queen thought I was joking when I told her. I confirmed that I was indeed honest and true.

So, the hunt began for a house. We, by that I mean me, had been dead set against ever having a mortgage again. We had been making plans to build a house at Mimi’s property; however, that was a multi-step, multi-year project and we were barely in the planning stages due to the care and feeding of The Queen’s parents the last few years. Calls were made and we reached out to a realtor lady we had worked with a couple of years ago unsuccessfully when we were looking for an alternate situation. We quickly determined several key points in this process:

• In the course of two years, the North Texas real estate market went from bad to bat guano insane.
• Renting/leasing was not an option for several reasons
• Houses are staying on the market for less than a week and in some cases just hours.
• Agents are boldly stating “highest and best offer by Sunday”…and buyers are lining up to wave cash at them.
• It is not uncommon for houses to have multiple offers ABOVE asking price.
• As a single income family, our buying potential was limited which put us in a position of looking at the fringes of the market.

With God, all things are possible as they say.

Thanks, in part, to being a permanent remote worker now thanks to COVID, we literally looked at everything in our price range from the Oklahoma border south to Temple, and from Mineral Wells to Canton in a rough hour to an hour and a half circle around DFW Airport. The state of the market in that general area is crazy. Your choices within my budget are ugly small houses built in the 70s and 80s, sketchy neighborhoods, investor “lipstick on a pig” flip specials or fixer uppers. We agreed that, building not being an option, we wanted a house we could be happy with especially since we were going to have to bite the bullet and get a mortgage. So, we spent several late nights looking at the offerings on Zillow, Realtor.com, Craigslist, word of mouth, etc.

Our agent suggested we look at a house in Sherman, TX which was a fixer upper just on the other side of our pre-qual amount. It was in a nice, well established neighborhood that backed up to a wooded area with a creek running through it. The house was built in the 50s and was in desperate need of an update in addition to foundation work as the east wall was trying to separate from the rest of the house thanks to soil shifting. The current owner is an investor who bought it with the intent of doing a “lipstick on a pig” treatment for a quick turn around. The foundation issues put the kibosh on that thought. I was seeing the potential at the first showing, but The Queen was not. We dithered about whether or not to make an offer for a week or two, and we finally asked our agent to go have a second look at it a week ago today. The Queen finally started seeing what I was seeing as well as the potential financial upside. As we sat down to discuss with our agent what to do about making an offer, she called the listing agent who informed her that it was contingent. This was news to all of us as she had checked before we drove an hour and half to see the stupid thing. I said “I’m done” and walked straight out to the car. She apologized profusely for which there was no need on her part.

Anyway, back to the drawing board. Sunday evening and Monday, The Queen was staying up deep into night looking at houses all over North Texas. She located a few possibilities in Sulphur Springs which is an hour and half northeast of DFW. We made arrangements with our realtor to go see them on Tuesday.

The first house was immaculate. It was like a museum from the 1950s. The original owners of the house were a doctor and his wife who had the house built. They added a wing onto the house in 1960 when they started having kids. It had the original wool carpet. They had three sons who all grew up to be doctors. The original intercom/radio worked.  The original 1950 vintage electric range still worked. They had the old console TVs from the 1960s/1970s. They had the blue prints from when the house was originally built. The widow had moved out in 2015 to go to assisted living and died just last year. The surviving sons had kept the house just as she had left it for the last six years. It was jaw droppingly amazing for a one owner house of that vintage…but not for us.

The second house was nice but nothing special.

That brings us to the miracle house. We almost didn’t see if because there were already two contracts pending on it. The Queen and the realtor decided “why not?” and off we went. After a brief lunch stop, we made our scheduled showing time and stepped into the Twilight Zone. Imagine, if you will, a house originally built in Fort Worth in 1868, disassembled and rebuilt with the original lumber in Sulphur Springs in 1874. The house lives through several owners as a one-story farmhouse just a few hundred yards from the courthouse square for just over a hundred years before the current owner bought it. She and her husband decided that it needed full renovation. They added an entire second story including a grand, sweeping staircase. They gutted the walls, double insulated them, added Anderson double paned windows, rewired and replumbed the entire house, modernized the master suite and the kitchen. The house has over 3400 square feet and the asking price was right at the top end of my range. We loved the house. And we walked away deciding not to make an offer on it thinking we didn’t have a chance at it because of the pending offers.

Now, here is where Entropy really started to get a workout. First, at the miracle house, there is a bedroom upstairs that is pink. M&M immediately fell in love with the pink room and claimed it as her own. She then proceeded to have a great old time running around the upstairs playing. This will be important later in our story. Second, on our way home from Sulphur Springs, literally 1 minute from our house, The Queen’s chariot took one on the chin after a driver, whom I shall charitably call “clueless” made a sudden left turn from the middle lane smashing right into The Chariot.

The whole thing felt like it was happening in slow motion until things started flying everywhere. The Queen made a valiant effort to avoid the crash, but there was not much she could do. I was in the front passenger seat (since I was working remotely from the car). Disentangling myself from cords and cups and papers gave me enough time to chase the inner ogre down and put him back on a leash. I got out of the car to check the damage and ask the other driver if she was okay. Instead of answering that question, she said “I had my turn signal on.”  To which I replied, “That does not mean you can turn left from the middle lane.” “Oh”, she said. I got on the phone with 911 to get things rolling. Fortunately, there were three witnesses who stopped to give their information. All had the same story to tell. The Chariot still runs and drives and does not appear to be leaking any vital fluids. It just has the automotive equivalent of a shiner with a few scrapes. Hopefully, the insurance company won’t try to total it. I’ll be getting an estimate from the body shop for my carrier first thing Tuesday morning. The other driver’s carrier has called but not connected with us yet.

Ouch

Physically, we all have soft tissue aches and pains. M&M and I seem to have faired better than The Queen even though the impact happened on our side of the car. The Queen has taken it a little harder. She will heal though. That’s all that matters.

So, Tuesday evening after the accident, we were on the phone with our realtor about whether or not to make an offer on the miracle house. Our realtor told us that the Sherman house came back on the market as the contract that came in under the wire of our second showing had fallen through. The layout of the Sherman house actually works better for our current situation, and there are some other personal benefits to being in Sherman that are unimportant to our story. So, we told our realtor to make an offer.

Turns out that the owner on the Sherman house doesn’t really want to sell the house for what it’s really worth in its current condition and is convinced that someone will come along and pay him his asking price. That won’t be us.

So, I’ll skip the back and forth between the realtors on the Sherman house which took up all day Wednesday and most of Thursday. Thursday afternoon, I get a call from the realtor that the owner of the Sherman house countered our offer by increasing the price to effectively net the same amount as his asking price on clean contract. Our realtor also mentioned that she received a text from the listing agent for the miracle house. Word was that the owner had rejected the pending offers, was pulling it from the market for three weeks to do same minor repairs but that if we were still interested that we could do a deal.

Huh???

So, you’ve heard people say when one door closes another opens? This door not only opened, but it was taken off the hinges.

Our realtor had given feedback to the listing agent including the story about M&M loving the pink room, etc. Turns out the lady of the house, a woman in her early 70s with a serious health issue, decided she didn’t like the investors who had submitted low ball offers well below asking price (one of whom she called a “jerk”) and was tickled at the idea of a little girl playing up there. So, the listing agent told our agent to give them an offer as close to asking price as possible and they would see what could be done. I immediately told our agent to terminate the contract on the Sherman house, and we drafted up the contract on the Sulphur Springs house.

Friday passed with no word. Apparently, the owner was out of town visiting her children. Saturday evening, we got a call from our realtor that they executed our contract with no changes. We were floored.

But wait….there’s MORE!

Our agent says, “So, would you be interested in the washer, dryer and refrigerator that are there at the house?” I had been planning to ask about that as we do not currently have those appliances in our personal possession. So, we said, “Absolutely.” Then our agent drops the kicker. The owner is giving those appliances to us as her gift to us. These are practically new appliances.

Body…meet floor. Floor…body.

I was speechless for several minutes. The Queen and I could not stop tearing up. Our agent sent us a packet with the history of the house which we did not have prior to making the offer. The house is essentially a 153 year old house that was completely rebuilt from the inside in 1983. I can’t wait to share photos. All because a little girl made an elderly woman smile. 

FREEDOM!!!!

Well...not complete freedom, but freedom from a mortgage at least. As of last Friday, The Queen and I closed on the sale of Castle Erickson closing out 10 years of residency there (with an interlude in Houston thrown in there as well). We are now officially and blissfully homeless (temporarily and figuratively of course).

We've needed a change for sometime now. The Queen has had her hands full taking care of M&M and trying to recover from her ongoing health challenges. Working full time allowed me very little time to keep up with home improvements and maintenance much less attempt to clean out the shop and get any kind of use out of it. We had been working on tiling floors forever with very little progress. Other projects had been started and then put on the back burner after priorities changed.

Despite our intentions to the contrary, we were moving, cleaning, repairing and purging right up to the day of closing. Literally. I left the house with the last trailer load of stuff at about 11:00 PM Thursday night before closing, and did not finish unloading until 1:30 AM the day of closing. The Queen was cleaning until about 11:30 PM. She made it to the hotel where we planned to stay the night a little after midnight. I finally made it there and crawled into bed around 3:00 AM. The Queen's 7:30AM alarm to wake us up to get to closing sucked horribly.

Closing was not without its hiccups. The first came on Thursday when the title company called to say that the buyer's lender had screwed up on the rate lock and was looking to stick The Queen and I with an additional $608 in closing costs AND move the closing date back AND move the closing to another title company. I allowed as how that I was not in favor of any of those developments. I further explained that I had no intention of paying extra for their screw up nor could I move the closing date because of other commitments. After several phone calls, the buyer's agent and the buyer worked it out with the lender and closing proceeded according to schedule.

If only it had gone according to plan, all would have been golden. Well...nickel at least. The next snag was The Queen's driver's license. You have to bring your DL to closing to prove to the title company that you are who you say you are so that they can notarize the closing papers affirming that you really are who you say you are. Well, The Queen's DL had been left at the hotel because the reservation was under my name and not hers and the front desk held her DL for some reason that still escapes me.

We tried having the hotel fax a copy, but they only succeeded in sending a blank page. So, after signing a mercifully short stack of paper, we trudged back to the hotel, took a picture of The Queen's DL and emailed that to the title company. Apparently, a photo of your DL is perfectly acceptable as a form of ID to prove that you are who you say you are.

While we left behind a neighborhood full of nice people that we've gotten to know over the years, both The Queen and I feel no nostalgia for the old neighborhood. There are certainly no regrets in selling the house. For the first time since we have been married, we are truly free to take a step back and make a thoughtful, unpressured decision about what direction to take. Our initial plan is to look for a rental in late fall/early winter after my busy travel/work season is over. We will likely rent for at least a year perhaps more while we decide where/if we would want to buy/build. Our current thought is to save up cash and buy a piece of land not in town but not too far out in the sticks on the 100% down payment plan. From my little bit of research in the last few weeks, that is doable in 2-3 years depending on how aggressively we save money.

Once that is done, I want to design and build a house of our own suited to our needs and desires. Nothing too fancy. Nothing too big. 1500 square foot max (if I could get away with 1000, I'd probably do it...The Queen won't let me do a tiny house except maybe as a guest cottage). Open floor plan. Architecturally, The Queen and I lean towards "modern rustic" (I think that's the term). We'd be happy in anything from Craftsman Period style bungalos to a cabin though. No carpet. Wood floors and/or tile. Just enough room to host a few friends or family from time to time but not so much that we will have wasted space that we don't use 99% of the time and would just accumulate junk.

I'm still waiting for a chance to actually relax. The weekend was mostly spent running here, there and everywhere at warp speed taking care of one thing or another. I may actually get to go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. That'll be a shock.

Kill Me Now...

So, yesterday was my second official Father's Day. It was a day filled with hard labor in the hot sun, and I am paying the price today.

The Queen had decreed that we should go ahead and get the antiques moved to storage. As a result, I woke up yesterday and picked up a 16 foot rental truck. Best friend Number One Follower arrived a little after 10:00 AM followed shortly thereafter by the youngest nephew Baby Huey (that's what his mother calls him...so, I'm going with that).

What followed was several hours of championship level 3D Tetris in high 90 degree temps involving old wood and glass including a piano, first into the truck and later into an elevator to get to the third floor storage unit. The saving grace of the day was a steady, cool breeze that felt great on sweat soaked shirts.

After 9 hours in the sun, I'm completely soaked, smell like a goat and have no critical reasoning skills left.

The end result was this:

10' x 15' storage unit with space left for boxes. The Queen vetoed my bonfire suggestion

The Queen promises me that she will locate someone to appraise this clusterstuff as a prelude to an estate sale. We just don't have time for it right now.

By the time we got done, I was overdue returning the truck, I was literally and figuratively baked, I was having trouble thinking and moving was an ordeal. As I asked NOF, when the Hell did I become an old fart? Fortunately, NOF married himself up in life. His new bride K3 was very thoughtful and brought a couple of rotisserie chickens, veggies, taters and fruit relieving me from the need to figure out what to do about dinner. After dinner, I filled the tub and soaked for a good solid hour following which I stretched out on the bed and started watching Longmire on Netflix.

Waking up this morning was an exercise in torture. Moving is optional at this point.

The good news is that The Queen has promised to make up Father's Day for me after the move is done. I thanked her profusely and told her that wasn't necessary, but she is insistent. I've learned not to argue with her about it.

Well...Poop

Somewhere in the Dallas area, right now, a home inspector is yelling "I told you so."

When the buyer's inspection took place last week, the inspector noted a laundry list of things to take care of most of which was minor stuff like adding a rubber bushing to the holes in the circuit breaker box in the garage. One of the items he noted was to trim the trees back from the electric service drop line from the  pole to the house.

Here's the page out of his report I'm talking about.

Right under the service line next to the driveway is a line of crepe myrtle trees that I have let go unpruned because I like crepe myrtles and feel that God didn't intend for them to be hacked within an inch of their lives once a year. Also, near the pole in the side yard is an ugly tree that is tall, gnarly and in the middle of trying to die. It had a limb growing over the service drop line as well.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Dead tree limb + service drop line = this:

+ this:

Daddy Hawk is not happy. An electrician is coming by today to let us know how bad the repair cost is going to be. I get to spend my second Father's Day working my butt off cleaning, clearing tree branches, etc. The thing that really chaps my hide the most is that the option period ended Sunday, and the buyer's realtor had said to hold off doing anything until after the option period was over. Naturally, the tree limb falls while I am at work the day after the option period ends.

I blame The Queen. She was just commenting about how smoothly the sale was going.

The Purge Has Begun

Let me preface this post by stating, for the record, I love my inlaws. I really do. I could have done a LOT worse in the inlaw department. They are very kind, faithful people who are easy to get along with.

They are also hoarders.

Now, let me back up the story a bit to give you the full effect.

Around about the end of 2003 when I was preparing to propose to The Queen, The Queen Mum's Mum (who was in her 80s at the time) was living by herself in a modest apartment in California. She was also beginning to have some health problems which was impacting her ability to care for herself. We received calls from the people in her church who were concerned and weren't sure the family was aware.

We weren't.

Discussions were had, and a plot was hatched to kidnap Grandma. She had already been planning to come to Texas to visit the family for Thanksgiving. Little did she know, she would not be going back to California. I proposed to The Queen (making her The Queen To Be at the time) shortly after Thanksgiving, and The Queen To Be made it clear she wanted her Grandma at the wedding.

Okay. Can do.

A wedding was planned in under 4 weeks. I use the term "planned" in loosest sense of the word. Most of our planning consisted of telling our friends "Handle it."

They did. Did I mention we have awesome friends?

Meanwhile, back in California, the church folks were coordinating with my inlaws the packing and loading of Grandma's worldly possessions (all of them) for moving to Texas. Grandma had been "convinced" to stay with us in Texas after the wedding. And by "convinced", I mean my inlaws told her she was in no shape to go home and was staying and that was that. Other people in the family have other ideas about what happened. They would be misinformed. So, shhhh...no talking.

As you might expect, things that should have been disposed of in California were instead boxed up and loaded along with everything else. The vast majority of those items are still in the same boxes they were packed in to this day.

Now, at the time of the Royal Wedding, the then proto Daddy Hawk was living in a modest 1200 square foot house with a two car garage. One side of the garage held a 1973 Datsun 240Z project that never got off the ground. The other side held a motorcycle and other stuff bachelors accumulate. To this disorganized mess was added a significant portion of Grandma's possessions the remainder of which were stored elsewhere. These possessions made the move with The Queen and I when we purchased the Castle in July 2004.

This state of affairs continued until October 2004. That was when the inlaws including Grandma moved in with us. This was necessitated by the sale of The Queen's pre-marital bacherlotte pad (a nice one bedroom condo) which was taken over by the inlaws after the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.

Now, picture for a moment, the Castle in all its glory. 2230 square feet of living space and the EPIC 1600 square foot man cave/workshop not including the "chicken coop" which is another 300 to 400 square feet of storage (in the "there's a roof...sort of" kind of way). It was a spacious palace to The Queen and I with more room than our respective pre-marriage abodes combined.

Now, picture for a moment, not one, not two, not even three, but four (FOUR!!!...mine, The Queen's, The Inlaws' and Grandma's) households worth of stuff being crammed into every nook and cranny available.

My shop, where I had great plans of building things (especially an airplane), was full. Not just full mind you but "stuffed to the gills with somewhat passable paths through the stacks" full. To make matters worse (from my perspective at least), no thought was given by those responsible nor input sought from me as to how things should be stored.

As you might imagine, this has been a sore spot for me for a long time now.

As a result, I have largely stayed out of the shop since. The rats; however, have made themselves right at home. Which, inevitably, led to the vast majority of the items in the shops being destroyed in one manner or another.

So, the sale of the house has finally led to necessity becoming the mother of disposal. Acquiescence was obtained, and this was the initial result:

That's roughly 20 to 25 feet in length, 4 to 5 feet high at the tallest and 5 to 6 feet wide at the widest. Most of it is covered in rat excretions.

Apparently, that was NOT acceptable to the trash service. They allowed as how all debris has to be in bags not to exceed 50 pounds and all boxes have to be broken down for recycling. So, guess what I did last night for three hours. That became this:

The cardboard boxes are being held down by boxes full of recyclables lest we pollinate the neighborhood with cardboard descecrated by rodents. It was interesting, however, to see some of the things that were boxed up. The empty glass juice jars were a little odd. The potato peeler in the middle of a box of sweaters (that were long out of style when they were boxed) was definitely note worthy. Phone books. Old junk mail. Electronics that were obsolete when they were boxed up. Broken glass. The meat clever in the box with the spices was a nice touch.

We did find a box full of old baseball cards. Maybe there's a Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth rookie card in there, and I won't have to work anymore.

I will say this though...it was very cathartic to dispose of all this despite the risk of vermin borne disease (yes, mask and gloves were used; and, yes, I took a long, hot shower after I was done). The scary part is that there is still stuff in the shop and the house to be dealt with.

If All Goes According to Plan,...

...Castle Erickson will have a new owner on July 11. Acceptable terms were reached late yesterday evening, and contracts were signed this morning.

The funny thing about that is my colleague in the next office has had his house on the market for months with a realtor and no nibbles. I posted my house on Zillow under their "Make Me Move" option not too long ago and have sold it ahead of him. Ain't technology great?

It wasn't all peaches and roses though. I had a few realtors email me wanting to list it for us. Thanks, but no thanks. Back in March, we had a family come look at it. They apparently lost interest. Then, a week and a half ago, a realtor emails me and tells me he was a buyer who wants to see the house "right now". Right now turned into a few days because of family commitments (Niece Juju's college graduation and departure to a foreign land) and my business travel. The buyer and his girlfriend/fiance saw it, loved it and gave us an offer over the holiday weekend. A little back and forth over sales price, and we finalized the deal.

The good news for us is that this is an "as is" deal. In other words, we are giving up a little on the sales price in exchange for not having to finish painting, flooring, etc. and spending the money associated with those tasks. On his end, he gets a smoking deal on a house in a good neighborhood that he plans on redoing anyway.

The Queen and I are excited and looking forward to our adventures as temporarily homeless people. The plan is to sell what we can, trash what we must and donate what we can't sell and don't want to keep. Those things we will be keeping will go into climate controlled storage while we decompress from paying for our own prison home ownership, pay off some debts, hoard some cash and generally enjoy life for a while.

In the near term, we will be camping out with family while we scope out locations for rental property in the general vicinity of my office. Chances are good that we will wind up somewhere in Collin county since we both agree that we have no desire to live in Dallas county or on the other side of downtown Dallas from my office. The current search area is roughly bounded by I-35E to the west, 190/George Bush Turnpike on the south, Texas 78 on the east and US 380 on the north. We may fudge a little on the northern and eastern boundaries a little, but I refuse to go further south or west.

Renting will be a temporary solution while we decide whether we want to buy land and build or just chuck it all and become nomads living out of a yurt or a fifth wheel.

Right now...that yurt is mighty tempting.

In the meantime, anyone who wants to go dumpster diving through a few households worth of stuff...feel free to drop me a line.