Obsessed

Today work was quiet.
Work was slow.
I had plenty of time but no book to read.
Too much time to think.
I browsed online until I had an epiphany, mistake, idea and decided to check out iPad.
After reading half the manual and checking out all the features and specs I have literally become obsessed with this little thing.

I want one so I can take my blogging on the go.
I have so many great ideas and thoughts that I lose because I can't get to a computer fast enough.
I've taken to writing them down on paper or making drafts in my text messages but remembering what you thought just isn't as great as running with it when you first think it.

I want one because I fear that any day now my computer is going to crash.
My laptop has so much junk on it that I can't even put one more picture on it.
Its literally full even though I have bought an external hard drive and transferred everything I care about to it.
I've tried to wipe my computer clean of everything by doing disk defragmentations but they don't help much.
I don't even have enough space to update my virus protection!

With iPad I could blog, upload pictures from my cameras to iPad then to my external hard drive, I could email, create documents, and read ebooks.
I have wanted a reader for a few years now but I never could decide between Kindle, Reader, and then Nook.
iPad has made the choice for me.

I want an iPad!
If I had an iPad I would name it "Escribir."

I really want an iPad.
Did I buy myself a graduation present?
What about Christmas-- did I buy myself a Christmas present last year?
I'm basically looking for any excuse to run out and buy one but I need to spend money on the house instead.
I'll just wait for my computer to kick the bucket.

House Hunting

Apparently, my computer has lost its mind and unanimously voted that the relationship between it and my camera's memory card has ended.
They're no longer speaking.
(Sigh.  I never thought it would come to this.)
Therefore, I cannot show you any house pictures that I took Tuesday on the latest mission.
I'll just have to tell you instead (again!)

The House with the Red Carpet Porch was the first house we found.
Boots has been stalking it online for a week or two and we finally decided to check it out.
Drove out to The House with the Red Carpet Porch's neighborhood and matched up the numbers.
The house is cute.
It has a big front yard and a stone wall on the left side like The House on the Left.
A big kitchen and big living room with a side porch covered in red carpet.
We saw the pictures online and really liked it but once we got there we nixed it.
Location really is everything.
The neighbors across the street have toilets in the yard.
Waking up in the morning and seeing somebody's shining hiney on the pot out my kitchen window is not my idea of starting the day off right.

We turned around real quick-like and went one street over to our next address (this is kinda like geo-caching, right?)
The Wood College House.
The name tells it all.
Big, beautiful cedar house stained brown.
Big front porch.
Big yard.
Big carport.
Open the front door, step inside, big racket from the door pulling the linoleum back.
Not a good sign.
(I was feeling hopeful about this one because there was a huge pile of pennies in one of the carport windows.
I figured if that many pennies followed me to that house, it had to be a good sign.)
It had obviously been lived in by many college kids.
The carpet was nasty.
Nasty, nasty, nasty!
The walls all had stains and big holes knocked in them.
The furniture was nice though.
And for sale.
Boots said, "Can we buy the furniture but not the house?"
Sure these are minor asthetic problems but living in an old frat house for the rest of my life isn't exactly home sweet home either.

The last house of the day has no name yet.
My creativity for names has run dry with this house.
The Secret Garden House?
The Enchanted House?
The Mc House?
The Yard House?
I got nothing.
You've probably guessed by now that this house has some kinda yard.
Oh, yeah.
You drive inside the gate and there's trees, bushes, flowers, grasses, shrubs everywhere!
Its like you just stepped inside Better Homes and Gardens or something!
You walk through the carport into the living room where the walls are painted butter yellow.
So cozy.
The walls in the kitchen are painted a pale mint lime green with white cabinets.
The doors on the white cabinets are painted pale mint lime green to match the walls with little hummingbirds painted on the tops of them.
The lady's taste is eclectic but mine is too.
The dining room, oh, the dining room.
Its robins egg blue.
So pretty.
Boots' grandma's furniture would look so good against those walls.

The whole house is just gorgeous and I wish I could post the two pictures of the front yard that I took but, like I said, my computer and memory card aren't speaking and I can't figure out how to help them reconsile their differences.
You'll just have to trust me when I say that this is my dream house and I didn't even know it.
It just feels like home.
I want this house to be my home.

Boots and I are negotiating with our realtor lady and the people that own the house.
I hope this one is the one.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming and scheming, trying to come up with a good name.

House Hunt

I've been really busy lately.

I'm talking really busy.

So busy that I've neglected all my reading.

I haven't been reading my blog subscriptions, half my emails, or even my school books.

Well, I have been reading my school books but not as much as I'd like to read them.

This is crunch-time after all.

One thing I have been doing though is house hunting.

Boots has been heading up this expedition but I have been doing my part too.

We've been driving around when he comes to town to see me and searching the Internet and making phone calls when we're not together.

I've been doing some house dreaming about all the things I want to do when I have my own house and not living in an apartment.

Boots and I found a house back off the main road.

The house was at the end of a dead end street and I called it The House on the Left for obvious reasons.

The house has a big yard and lots of bedrooms.

It has a hole in the roof that needs to be fixed and a stone wall where a carport used to be.

The sign stuck to the door said call the tax accessors office.

Boots did some digging and that led us nowhere.

Can't find out anything else.

(Sorry, no photo)

We found another house but haven't seen inside it yet.

I call this one The House in the Curve for obvious reasons.

Its got a fair-sized yard with a little shed.

The front yard is kinda weird though because a culvert cuts it nearly in half.

The House in the Curve

(I didn't take this picture)

Boots went house hunting on his own and called me up, "I want this one!"

I don't think I've ever heard him so excited.

We go look at the house that afternoon with our realtor.

Our realtor lady introduced Boots Mom and Pop and helped Brother #1 get his house.

The house has two sheds, a falling down fence, and some overgrown bushes.

We tromped all through the house, stomped up and down the stairs, open and shut every door over and over again and flicked every light switch.

We decided that we liked The Little Box House and got the lady to fill us out a contract.

I had her read the contract to us because I wanted to know what I was signing.

I think Boots was surprised that I asked her to go through all that trouble.

She was super nice and explained everything even though I didn't fully understand it all.

The Little Box House

(I didn't take this picture either)

The realtor lady hooked us up with a mortgage man and the mortgage man checked out credit and approved us for a mortgage.

We can buy a house.

Whether we do or not is up to the powers that be.

We're just kinda waiting and negotiating.

We're going to keep looking but one day we're going to have a house.

Origami Swans

I didn't take this picture, I Binged it.

When I was in the third grade there was a meeting just for the girls of the class which resulted in me bringing home a note on pink paper and telling my mama that I had to be in Girl Scouts.
My mama paid the required $7 to join (was it really just seven dollars?) and schlepped me to all the meetings.

We got the big fat handbook (maybe that's what the 7 bucks was for) and started trying to earn badges right away.
There were so many things that just weren't feasible to do in my mind.
Like spend a day in a soup kitchen.
I'm pretty sure there was no soup kitchen in my hometown.
Or learn to make a campfire.
Why did I need to know how to do that when my daddy made all the fires when we went camping?

We sold cookies, of course, and I'm pretty sure that this was the beginning of my disdain for all things fund-raiserish.
I really dislike fund-raisers.
So I did a few things, I don't remember what, out of the book and got a few badges for my mom to sew on my bright green vest.

The best thing about Girl Scouts was the trip we took to the Children's Hands On Museum.
It is what the name says it is, a museum for kids to touch everything.
I don't think places like this are very conducive to teaching kids the right way to attend a real museum, but whatever, it was fun.
The exhibit was on China and everything was decorated all China-ish right down to the paper doors and the sandboxes filled with rice.
We arranged flowers on green metal frogs and I thought that was pretty lame.
Maybe that's where my flower complex stemmed (haha!) from.

I quit Girl Scouts a few months later (I forget why) and have since then resolved myself to learning things that help you out in life that don't earn you badges.
I still can't sew on a button properly though.

Some time after the Girl Scout era, a year or so maybe, I was looking through my old handbook and I came across a page with instructions and pictures on how to make an origami swan.
There was a small origami swan with orange tips stuck in the crease of the page.
My mama made the swan just for the fun of it when I was in Girl Scouts and left it in the book.
The orange tips were dots she had drawn on the paper as linear guides.

I forgot about the origami swan and Girl Scouts for a long time.
I don't even know where that book is now but I think my vest is still in a closet at my dad's house.

In my second semester of mortuary college I had to take Restorative Art.
"Had to take" and not "took" because it was not a fun class or an elective.

Maybe you're not familiar with Restorative Art.
To put it simply, RA, as we liked to call it, is the way of taking something ugly and messed up and making it pretty and whole again, usually the face.

We had to learn all the bones of the skull and face, all the muscles of the face, as well as all the facial wrinkles, make a head with wax to match a picture of someone (living, not dead!), and learn lots of crap about color and what matches with what and what doesn't match with what.

Our first test covered the bones, muscles, and wrinkles.
We were all pretty stressed and trying really hard to make a good grade because there were only two tests in RA besides the final.

I'm usually a pretty fast test taker so most of the time I finish second.
(I have a thing about finishing first.  But that's another story.)
I finished my test and asked to go to the bathroom.

On my way back to the classroom, the sunlight was shining through the glass doors so bright, it made the waxed linoleum look like a mirror.
I saw a tiny shadow in the sun-mirror, the shadow of an origami swan!
I bent down to pick the origami swan up, but it wasn't a swan, just a crumpled up ball of paper with words scrawled all over it.
I unfolded a paper and my eyes read the answers to questions that were on the test I had just finished.

Right when I stood back up, a classmate of mine walked out of the room and was standing in front of me.
I didn't want her to think that it was my cheatsheet and get me in trouble when it was my wild imagination that found it in the first place!

"Look what I found," and I shoved it at her.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked me after she read it.

I decided that the only thing I could do was give it to our teacher, what she chose to do after that was up to her, not me.

I did not know how much grief an innocent origami swan could get me.
My classmates were furious that I had ruined the afternoon by getting us all an hour long lecture about cheating and put the teacher in a bad mood by turning in some dummy's cheatsheet.
I told myself that a smart cheat wouldn't have dropped it and if they were smart they wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Or if they had any scruples.
I had scruples.
That's why I turned it in.

Turning in the origami swan/cheatsheet and sitting through the Cheating Gripe Fest of '08 did not even the playing field between us at all.
After that episode, the cheaters had to figure out new ways to get the right answers.
Our teacher was wizened to their game although she never did figure out who the cheat sheet belonged to.

I have my theories but, theories are just that--theories.

I haven't seen an origami swan since then.

Here's what we started with.

Here's what I made.