A Bit of Gardening Stuff & More

I am still chomping away at the Xanax & still beating my head against the nearest wall (see previous post).  On a more productive & happy note I am also still stitching away on Noel Pinkeeps.  I finished 2 & have decided to go for 4.  Part of the reason for that is I finished #2 on Tuesday night & just didn't want to spend time trying to decide on another CRP/Nash design to start right then & there, nor did I want to spend time going through my floss to find the necessary color(s) for another design.  It was easier to just grab another piece of osnaburg, load up my needle with the floss already at hand, & start another Noel.  The plan is to keep one for me & sell/gift the other three.

I spent a good block of time yesterday sitting at the computer reading about the current housing market specifically pertaining to sellers.  I know I posted a while back that we had reached a decision regarding the sale.  That decision was to do what we could do without stressing ourselves out about it & then put the house on the market for 3 months starting June 1st.  It was probably an hour later when we started questioning ourselves on this decision.  Since then we have toyed with the idea of ... you guessed it ... pushing back the start of the sale to July 1st.  We have also toyed with putting the sale off until next year.  The scary thing is that we have also toyed with the idea of just staying put!  I can't believe that last thought has even entered our brains!!!

Some of you know the sordid details of what our life has been like since signing the contract on this house 3 years ago.  Perhaps the root of the problem is that we are too trusting.  I don't know why because we have been swindled in one way or another more times throughout our lives than I care to think about.  However, the swindling we experienced here was truly a masterful one.  The resulting 2 years of depression were ... well, let's just say they were bad.  Almost beyond bad.  I'm not saying this for dramatic effect ... it's just the way things were.  Part of me sees the cheating, swindling face of every person connected to this swindling everywhere I look here in the house ... but another part of me, a very, very, very, very tiny part, sometimes, for a brief second or two, catches a glimpse of what I thought this house was going to be & why I fought so hard to purchase it.  Looking back I think the real estate agent & her husband were/are disciples of satan along with several of the repair/remodeling people we hired to do work for us.  Kentucky is noted to be part of the country's Bible belt but my guess/experience is that there is a large nest of evil operating in this particular region.

I don't know why we are having these second (third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, ad infinitum) thoughts about selling but we are.  Heaven help us, we have even thought "let's just stay here & make the best of it."  The information I have been able to glean from the internet regarding the current selling market is (A) unless your house is a burden to you, now is not the time to sell, & (B) if you do sell your home, you can be sure that it will sell for less than it's worth.  Money has never been important to me which is undoubtedly why I'm so poor today ... lol!  However, I don't want to just "give it away."  The house is certainly not a "burden" to us.  Many things about it & related to it are not what you'd call happy but I'm no longer mentally tortured 24 hours a day because of them.  I do see that there are good things about living here, much as admitting that sticks in my throat.  We have our privacy (important to us).  The mortgage payment is good.  The taxes aren't too bad.  We are basically happy with the health care.  We have become comfortable as far as knowing the best places to shop, the best places to buy gas, & the best places to eat.  It's a semi nice looking house ... from the outside at least.  We live within an hour or an hour & a half of 2 "big cities" so we have access to pretty much whatever we need.  We also live close enough to several other places we might want/need to go which we can drive to in under 12 hours.  On the other hand I live in daily fear of running into one of the satan worshipers that came into our lives.  We sort of did a couple weeks ago ... first time since moving in.  We pulled up to a gas station & parked so that John could go inside & get something to drink.  As I started to get out of the car I noticed on the van parked next to us a real estate company's logo with our satanic real estate agent's name displayed above it.  It was like a big cosmic kick in the stomach.  I couldn't move.  John did go in to get his drink & came out saying he had seen the RE agent's husband (David) inside doing some sort of repair/remodeling work but David did not appear to see him.  I know how ridiculous this must sound to some of you but it is what it is.  There is also the fact that pretty much all the repair/remodeling work we had done prior to moving in ... quite an expensive undertaking ... needs to be redone because it was done so poorly in the first place.  We don't have that kind of money now so all this work would have to be done a little at a  time & would take "forever" to accomplish.  We also discovered after moving in that the previous owners who built this place chose to use the cheapest materials & didn't really care how they put them together.  Then there is the miserably hot summers, the lack of snow in the winter, the unfriendly neighbors, the overabundance of dishonest people, & the bugs along with a few other things.

Someone posted a comment on someone else's blog a day or two ago that they had been thinking about selling their home.  They prayed about it & felt that God was telling them "no, not at this time."  I have been praying.  I plainly tell God that He knows how thickheaded I am & please don't just give me a "gentle nudge" type of answer ... give me an answer that a day old infant would be able to understand.  Thus far I haven't heard anything.  Then there are times when I think "hmmmm ... maybe our indecision is the answer?  I just don't know.

So this is my life ... lol!  I do tend to over think things.  I'm a perfectionist with OCD.  It's not an easy road to travel   : )

Gardening stuff!  A couple days ago I posted some pictures of how our gardens are semi-flourishing despite their neglect.  A few things have blossomed a bit since then.  Here are a few update photos.

This hydrangea bloom is about the size of an extra large chicken egg.  I told John they are supposed to be huge.  I thought maybe the bloom is so small because the plant itself is small.  However, we stopped by the plant department at Lowes yesterday (we need a Japanese maple to replace one that died) & they had hydrangea plants the same size as this one.  I called John over to see one of the blooms.  It took both my hands to hold it up!  We didn't find a replacement Japanese maple but we did find a replacement red myrtle.  We also spied a yellow rose bush with a rose on it that smelled pretty good!  It's so hard to find roses that smell like roses now-a-days ... have you noticed that?  Anyway, we decided to bring that home with us too.  Remember the roses I told you about a while ago ... the ones we bought last spring & left languishing in the driveway totally neglected throughout the summer, fall, & winter yet this spring they were the healthiest looking things you ever did see?  John decided they needed to be planted afterward which 2 of them died.  John has a pruning fetish.  It's almost like watching a comedy skit.  He will notice a small dead piece on something, find the pruning shears, & the next thing you know there's nothing left of whatever the plant was.  I keep hiding the pruning shears but he keeps finding them!  I should hide them with the cleaning products ... he'd never look there.  Anyway, he pruned these roses after planting them leaving little more than a bit of a stump & the result for 2 of them was death.

This last photo is of a very tiny nest which a sparrow built in one of our landscape shrubs.  Isn't it the cutest thing?  I am hoping I can retrieve it for crafting purposes when she no longer needs it.  Notice the 2 different eggs.  There is only one now.  That larger white speckled one is a cowbird egg.  I've talked about cowbirds before ... they are nest parasites.  They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds & then fly away.  These other birds don't seem to notice the difference.  The eggs hatch & usually the cowbird babies will hog all the food that mama brings to the nest or they end up pushing the mama's real babies out of the nest.  Not a good thing.

Today's excitement will include yet another visit to the dentist so she can check my bridge which is still causing problems.  We have a real Catch-22 situation here.  The bottom bridge on this side needs to be redone one of these days.  She is trying to make the new bridge accommodate the old one.  However, the old one was apparently not made correctly in the first place & by accommodating the new one to it that means that when the time comes to replace the old one it will have to be made incorrectly again in order to accommodate the new one.  Also, I need to have a bridge made on the left top side at some point.  Of course the right & left parts of your mouth should look alike.  If she accommodates the current new top bridge to the old bottom bridge then she is going to have to accommodate the future new top bridge to the current new top one which may not work well with the bottom bridge on that side which will probably mean that bridge will have to be redone as well.  Argh!  She & I have a lot to talk about today.  Her receptionist thinks this is going to be a little 15-minute visit.  I tried to get her to switch my appointment to the last one of the day explaining that my visit was going to undoubtedly last a lot longer than 15 minutes but she didn't think so & told me to come in as already scheduled.  Sigh!