Lots To Tell

Wow, long break from posting.

I've been sick for a bit (THANKS A LOT, NAY) but today I feel better than I did yesterday, and I can breathe through my mouth AND nose, and I can also speak. My head no longer hurts, and I'm hopeful that the unpleasantness going on in my lungs will subside shortly.

Soooo much has happened. I neglected entirely to tell you about this guy:


and he's now at Nay's kennel because we got this other guy out of the pound on Friday.


I'm pretty sure both will be adopted quickly. We've got to keep the revolving door turning though, as there are reportedly two more dogs still waiting in the pound. We're the only family in the county who can quarantine during cold weather, so it's a needed thing. I'm glad to be making a difference.

Now.

Onto the bigger news.

Much bigger news.

185 acres big, to be exact.

Remember, a while back, when we started our grand hunt for property, and the big messes we were constantly getting ourselves into? Like, submitting a total of eight offers, for - I dunno - maybe four or five different properties, and how it took months and months and was very painful, and involved things like, sellers taking their properties off the market after verbally agreeing to our offer price, and people putting bleach down wells, and me having to call the Real Estate Commission to recover my deposit on a house that a seller didn't sell me? Remember all that fun?

We found a property.

It's right down the road. Nobody did anything weird when we made an offer, and now it will be ours in a few weeks. When we drafted up our offer and sent it on its way, Mark glanced at me with a far away look in his eye and said 'remember when we used to do this every week?'

Sadly, I do. Anyway Mark's been talking about this particular property for months. Word around the county is that the seller really wanted to get rid of it, so when the price came down - significantly - I went up to take a hike through some of it.


Of course, this is January in Canada. The going was not that easy. I parked on the side of the road, hopped a big ditch into a snowbank, and started to plow my way uphill among the trees and undergrowth. The property has large, whimisical boulders and rock formations scattered all around it.


As I went along I came across a large number of well-used deer and rabbit trails in the snow. It didn't take me long to realize that the snow was shallowest where the deer trails were, so after a while I stuck to their meandering paths.


Every now and again I would stop scrambling through the snow long enough to take out my GPS and see how far towards the back of the property I had gone. The answer was always: not very far. There was rumoured to be a logged and re-planted area behind the untouched trees at the front, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally hit it. I was sure I could see the replanted red spruces sticking their little sapling heads up through the snow, but as the snow was now thigh-deep and almost impossible to walk in due to the uneven ground, scrub, and logs hidden under its pristine white cover, I had to turn around. It had taken me an hour to get that far, and I was tired and out of breath. I was also not yet halfway to the back of the property.


Having seen all that I needed to see, I turned around.

Mark and I looked at pictures, considered our acreage wish list, made a decision, and submitted an offer. It looks like all systems are go, and next month we will own the fabled property that escaped us when we tried this last time.