Back When I Made Spiderweb Cotton Candy

I had forgotten that I used to have a spiderweb harvesting stick.

The trailer we rented when we first got married was full of spiders. We'd have to walk from our bedroom across the living room to get to the bathroom that worked, and the webs would spring up across the living room overnight, and I'd walk into them.

I found the stick picture while searching my Pictures folder to find out what me and Joe were doing on this day in history six years ago. On July 14th, 2007, we were fixing the place up; Joe was working on the floor, and I was raking leaves. We'd be married and moving in a month later.

The cast-iron woodburning stove against the front door added extra security.

Raking in progress! How exciting!

And below is a nice picture of the moldy-carpeted rotting-wooded broken hot tub I later pulled the carpet off of with the back of a hammer. The tub was never used for anything but garbage and storage, especially after the water pipe under it burst and had to be sealed off.

It wasn't the type of place we ever imagined ourselves living, but it was ours. (Kind of.) And despite the mice and the spiders, and the mystery of HOW ARE THESE WASPS GETTING IN (they had a nest in that yellow rectangular stove vent next to the little window,) I haven't been more attached to any of our other homes.

Some Cool Stories About Our Life

1. Sometimes we go to the IHOP near our hotel. It's the first restaurant we visited when we got back to the States, 'cause it was in the middle of the night and 'cause we'd eaten there before, like three years ago when we first were stationed here. The other night, I wanted to go there. We got in the car and started looking for it. It's three minutes away from our hotel and also never where I expect it to be, and we didn't see it, so I just figured we drove past it. I turned on the GPS and we turned around and it said "Arriving at destination on right." BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE! except some dirt in a parking lot. I commented, "Wouldn't it be crazy if it got torn down," and then we ate at Denny's instead, and saw a cockroach, and then I researched that IHOP and found out that it had been torn down and we'd eaten there in its last week. CRAZY.

(the newspaper's picture)

2. When we went to the hotel's front desk for our weekly Thursday week-renewal on the room, the price was lower than usual. "The price is lower than usual," I said to the receptionist. "So it is," she said. "I wonder why." It turns out that we're no longer being charged a hotel tax because this is now considered to be our place of residence. LOLLLLLLLL

3. I feel like the greatest right now because I'm taking three classes to become a licensed Realtor and investor. Joe's on night shift, so I'm awake all night, which makes things complicateder. The week starts on Tuesday mornings with salesperson training at 8:30 (which is like 9:30 PM to me.) I have to leave for that at 8, half an hour after Joe gets back from work. I get home at noon (or "1 AM,") and sleep a few hours until I have to get ready for pre-licensing class that evening. I drive Joe to work (he has to be there at 6 PM) and I go to school (I have to be there at 6 PM.) After school, I drive home at 9:30 PM and watch Flip or Flop on HGTV! Then take a nap, because in eleven hours I have salesperson training again. After that, I get home at "1 AM" and finally get some sleep. That night, I do homework and the week's first session of online Real Estate Investing class (which is only like 30 minutes of reading.) After that Tues-morning-Tues-night-Weds-morning set, things are easier because I don't have class again until Thursday night. Friday is my second weekly session of online REI class. Saturday Sunday Monday, relax, sleep, homework.

This is the first time I've ever felt like I'm "doing something with my life."

4. Between the hours of 4 AM and 7 AM, all HGTV plays is infomercials for anti-aging creme. The Krispy Kreme near us closes at the stupidly early hour of 11 PM. And the McDonald's next to our house hotel shuts down its icecream machine every night for cleaning from the hours of, like, 2 AM to 6 AM. It's the worst. I guess. Last time I was over there at 3 AM, a guy asked if I had a place where he could sleep. I went back to the room and used all the locks.

5. We've been buying gallon bottles of water because who wants to drink gross warm chlorine city tap water? Not us. (Even though most bottled water is city tap water - it's "from a municipal source.") Since I grew up in a rural area, I prefer the taste of nice cool fresh water straight from the ground, that still has minerals and sand floating around in it. So I've been trying to find the brand that makes water (hehe) with the least "municipal" flavor. Nestle Pure Life water is the best I've found. Crystal Purified Drinking Water tastes like inflatable pool toys. (Joe just buys whatever's cheap and squirts MiO flavoring in it.)

6. I wanted Japanese food. We went to a Japanese restaurant. It was going to be fun. We were seated and ordered our drinks, one Coke and one Diet Coke. Joe saw our waiter, who was on his way to our table, take a sip out of Joe's glass (I assume the waiter forgot which one was Diet.) We left and ate at Red Lobster instead.

WOW! Those were some pretty cool stories!

From My Comfy Place

We're still living in our hotel room with no definite time to expect to move into our house. We've been in this room for - wow, for 33 days. That's long enough to get settled in; last week, I got back to the room after a long night of class and midnight Wal-Marting and got this instant relieved "finally I'm back" feeling usually reserved for places we actually live. It was weird...and, at the same time, comfy.

So. The house we're buying didn't have a kitchen faucet. Now it does. (The faucet has been riding around in the trunk of our car.) It was our first for-the-house buy. I'm pretty excited about the built-in soap dispenser!

I can't help but think how I would have felt about spending perfectly good money on a kitchen faucet back when I was still getting an allowance, or when we were just starting out. Actually, we did have to buy a faucet back when we were just starting out. Our first place was a trailer from like the early 80's, and the last tenants hadn't taken good care of it, and the faucet was gross. When things get gross, I wash them; if they don't survive the washing process, well, they were too gross to keep anyway. I tried to dismantle the faucet to clean it. Boom, new clean faucet.

A few weeks ago, when no one was there, we visited the house we're buying and trespassed in the back yard. We saw BABY GRAPES ON THE GRAPEVINES. (When we visited again last week, most of them had been eaten by things in the yard. :(  )

Also in the yard was A TREE WITH FRUIT ON IT! I broke off one of the fruits and took a bite out of it and discovered that it was a pear!

So hopefully by the time fruits get ripe, the grapes won't all be gone, and the pears will actually taste good and also not all be gone. And hopefully by that time, we'll be living there to find out.

Almost Home

My family's lived in the same house since I was 6 years old. By the time I moved out at age 18, we'd shared a lot of life there. It was ours. We knew the history of every wall and floor and space: The place in the hallway where I'd accidentally shoved part of a toy up my brother's nose; my sister's old bedroom that I'd snuck into one night to put glue on her face while she slept as revenge for an incident no one remembers; the exclusive resort of My Parents' Bathroom where I've only ever taken two showers in my entire life; the painted-over splatter of red dots on the kitchen ceiling where we kids had flung milky Apple Jacks off our spoons at breakfast one morning. I'd return home after a visit to Pizza Hut or whatever, and walk in, and be like, "I know this place" without even knowing I was feeling that.

It wasn't until Joe and I got married and moved into our first rental home that I found out that your stuff being in a place doesn't make it home. Those walls aren't yours. Tired of looking at that imitation wood paneling? Too bad. Your dog locks himself in the bathroom, scratches paint off the wall next to the door, then gets explosive diarrhea and smears it everywhere, including on the owner's nice curtains? After you clean it up, it's time to be worried about angry landlords while you go buy can after can of paint until you finally match the color of the ruined spot.

Renting is begging someone to let you give them money so you can stress out about keeping their place pristine for months and months while having very little control over your surroundings. Renting is when you don't know where you'll be in a year. Buying, on the other hand, is paying thousands of dollars of hidden costs just so you can paint some walls. What a deal!

We weren't planning on buying. We're going to be here for three years, and the rule on buying a house is five or seven or more years. But when we saw that we didn't have to spend $150,000+ to get a decent house and that we'd get a return of thousands of dollars when it was time to sell, we started looking at listings.

And so I'm sitting in the recliner in this hotel room where we've lived for the past week and a half waiting for the last of the paperwork on our house.

I get tired of being cooped up in here. I spend my time reading about tile backsplashes and siding estimates and how much it would cost to move a toilet across a bathroom. I also watch a lot of HGTV, with this infomercial that comes on ten times a day, yelling "PICK A POCKET HOSE!." I'm ready to get out of this room, get into our house, and see what it's like to wake up to a feeling of stability and a day of getting paint in my hair.

Culture Shock (From My Own Culture)

We landed in Augusta just before midnight on Friday. That was pretty much the longest Friday ever, because we woke up at - oh wait, we didn't wake up because we stayed up that entire night - at 4:30 AM to catch a 6:00 AM bus. My flight didn't leave until 5:45 PM. Then I traveled for like 19 or 20 hours to arrive at 11:38 PM; by the clock it only looked like 6 hours. That day lasted as long as a normal day, plus 13 hours.

Walking into the Augusta airport was one of the first of many mind-blowing experiences I've had in the past couple of days. It was so familiar; WE HAD BEEN THERE BEFORE and had never expected to see it again! The last time I'd been at that airport, I was saying goodbye to Joe with his mom and dad because he was leaving for South Korea.

We got our rental car and stepped out of the airport to see a huge American flag. We drove to our hotel along familiar roads, and we're in the hotel where we always stay when we're in Georgia, and it's just so weird.

We went to IHOP for dinner that night at like 1 AM. That was our first American meal. I was really excited and excitable and I wanted to tell the waitress lady that we had just gotten back from South Korea for the first time in two years, but I didn't. We had a pretty good meal and then went to the hotel and slept until 10 AM and then spent the whole day touring homes with a realtor.

After we decided to buy a house while we were still in Korea, I read the internet about pretty much every single house on the market in Augusta. Once we got here, we had about 11 or 13 places to see. Our realtor took us everywhere we wanted to go on Saturday, which was very nice, and took us to an extra place that I had seen and then taken off the Maybe List...and then fell in love with anyway when we saw it. It's a foreclosed $25,000 split-level from like the 60's or 70's with a pretty much perfect layout. It's sunny, it has a decent-sized kitchen (decent-sized everything else, too,) and one bathroom. There's a second bathroom, too, that had been entirely gutted. There's also probably another $25,000 and 3 months of someone's life in repairs, and tons of competition for the property. We were too tired to talk about financial/house stuff when we got back to the hotel, so we went to sleep. Then for some reason we woke up at 4:00 AM on Sunday, hungry and not tired anymore...so we went to McDonald's and, you know, crunched some numbers, and decided that the fixer-upper just wasn't going to work out. Not at this stage of our lives. I was really sad to let it go. And also really relieved, because since we'd decided on it, I had been incapable of thinking of anything except for how to win the bid for the house with the one chance we would have.

Maybe next time. Next time we look for a house, we can buy a giant project and pour sweat and blood and tears into a place where we'll keep uncovering surprise problems. That would be so great.

For now, we're going for Choice #2, a move-in-ready place that has spots we hate (which makes me happy, because now we can still have major - but not too major - projects to undertake together.)

Like, look at this room:

It's right off the kitchen, as you can see. With the location of this room in the house's floorplan, between the kitchen and the bedrooms, there's nowhere to put furniture, so it's just like a really wide hallway...with a fireplace in it. With the wood paneling and the dark floor and the fact that that room has zero windows, it's REALLY dark. We call it "The Lair." We want to put windows on either side of the fireplace and take out at least the upper cabinets of that part of the kitchen that connects to the room; that would really open everything up (and make a gigantic mess of the ceiling. Making a mess of a ceiling is always a terrible idea.) Then again, we might just move in and decide we have better things to do with our money and live with the flaws. But it's fun to imagine the possibilities. Not optional: painting dat paneling.

If we actually win the bid we'll put in tomorrow. Losing this place would mean settling for choice #3 or, PLEASE NO, #4.

This is so exciting!

This morning, after we went to McDonald's (AND KRISPY KREME!, eating away my sadness at that we wouldn't be bidding on a house where the basement might have been leaking,) I wasn't in the mood to go back to the hotel and be bored. So we went...TO WAL-MART for the first time in two years.

I took pictures. This is a Wal-Mart, obviously, like you probably just saw earlier today.

This was our Commissary. At least five of them could easily fit inside the Wal-Mart.

This is the orange juice selection at Wal-Mart. (The orange juice I had at McDonald's this morning tasted like soap.)

OH MY GOODNESS, LOOK AT THAT SELECTION. Even looking at the picture is blowing my mind. Just...wow. Wow. At Camp Carroll, our entire selection of orange juice, yogurt, and pre-made cookie dough was kept in a refrigerator unit one quarter of the size of that massive row of orange juice.

And the yogurt section!

THAT IS ALL YOGURT. How is that even possible? At Camp Carroll, the freezer containing most of the frozen foods - ice cream, waffles, Hot Pockets, frozen pizzas, seafood, meat - WAS THE SIZE OF THIS YOGURT SECTION.

I know you get the point, but here's the coffee, just real quick.

Wow! That's a lot of coffee!

Joe and I grew up with orange juice aisles the length of moving trucks, and we didn't even know how crazy that is.

Also crazy was when I landed for a layover in Detroit at the end of my flight out of Seoul and I could understand the conversations of everyone around me.

"...had her baby on Monday..."
"...he hadn't eaten or dranken in a month..."
"...showed up an hour early..."

Me and Joe talked about how we've been so used to tuning out the voices around us because we can't understand Korean. Hearing what people talk about made me wonder what they were talking about in Korea. Probably pretty much the same stuff.

Also, whenever I think of talking to our family and friends, I check the clock and automatically subtract an hour and switch between day and night to find out what time it is where they live. Like, it's 11:30 PM right now, so I'm like, okay, it's 10:30 in the morning at my parents' house...BUT IT'S NOT, BECAUSE WE'RE IN THE SAME TIME ZONE NOW.

All this has made us glad to be home. Other countries are pretty great, too, but...that was a lot of orange juice.

We'll be even happier to live in America once we have a house and can stop worrying about bids and inspections and loans and get on with our lives.