Around the House Randoms

We moved into our home in March 2010. Last month, I uncovered this from the top shelf of our coat closet:

The brown paper = brown paper. I know, exciting stuff. I was hoping to uncover a secret treasure map by their two boys, Joe & Jacob. How do I know their names, you ask? Well...

They left their mark in our garage. We half wondered if we'd add to the madness and paint Andrew's name. Then he died. Now we just want to paint the whole darn thing.

Moving on. The large white scroll is a layout of our entire property and the landscaping. Thank goodness they invested in that because we have close to no creativity in that arena. I did, however, pull a grip of weeds today. Why doesn't anyone use "grip" anymore? Dang. Miss that word.

The notebook? It turns out that the two boys wrote a journal together on a family trip to India. They are an Indian family and they now live in Florida. They were the second owners of our house. The first owners also moved to Florida. I can assure you we will not be moving to Florida. I already have my sights set on retiring in the Pacific Northwest. You know. In 30+ years. Until then, we're staying put in the flat-as-a-pancake state.

My favorite entry: January 15, 2003

"Few minutes before landing at Ohare. I am ready for home, for my N64, for my toys and for my friends. But it is sad to leave behind my family. My favorite part of the vacation was climbing the mountain at (?). I am leaving behind in India crowded streets, sales people that never stop asking you to buy their product, bars on the windows of every single house, the kitchens that are too big (who complains about that?), driving on the opposite side of the road, the Indian food except for Dosa, the heat and the dirtiness and the way you wash your butt."

Doesn't that look like a woman's writing? Nope. A boy.

 My favorite is how he writes quite sophisticated and then switches over to crappy kid writing at the end as he writes about wiping his butt. In his defense, the context of his writing suggests that the plane might be landing. That could cause for anyone's writing to shift gears a bit.

And here I go shifting gears. This is the blueberry banana walnut oatmeal from...................................

McDonald's! Anyone else surprised? It was awesome and there were at least 25-30 fresh blueberries on top! The best part, it was free! McD's sent me a freebie promotional coupon for this new oatmeal and I tried it out. It was no steel cut as I'm normally used to eating, but it was pretty darn good.

Want more freebies? How about this! My friend Liz sent me an email yesterday telling me that if I were to drop off a bag at my local Goodwill store, I'd get a voucher for a pair of free Tim McGraw lawn tickets! I sent that bad boy in yesterday. We'll see if two tickets show up in my mailbox now.

We have a huge deck and animals love visiting us. We get raccoons all the time (ick), Orioles, Cardinals, Robins, squirrels, foxes, and bunnies! Here was a little guy I spotted yesterday. They enjoy living underneath the deck so we always have quite a few around to enjoy. True Wilson fact: we can't stand house pets but love wildlife.

Closeup with this baby bunny.

And finally... this almost needs its own post.

We have a plant that has died and has come back to life many times. We received it as a condolence gift after Andrew died. It's about 6 months old. Ugh. It's actually a Peace Lily but the main lily was looking pretty shabby so I chopped it. There's another small one, but it can't be seen in these photos. We treat it much like a houseplant and don't really like to associate the plant with Andrew. As a matter of fact, we held onto most plants we were sent for a couple days and then had a friend come pick them up and take them to the nursing home she works at. They likely enjoyed them more than we did.

Here's what I noticed at about 11:40 a.m. yesterday. Peace lily was looking quite dead.

This was about 3-4 hours later after I fed him water.

And an hour after that... around 5 p.m. yesterday, no joke.

It's somewhat nice because it always tells us when it's thirsty unlike most plants we attempt to keep that end up wilted, yellowed, and broken. Weird, huh?

That's all, folks.