Saga of the house

Sitting here in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport waiting for my connecting flight to San Jose and I find myself with a little bit of time to finally put together a blog post. Yeah, I have been extremely busy this week helping my group finalize networking for our new dorms. Now it is time for a little R&R in California! My good friend Christie Beetz arranged for me to come out and judge for her clubs this weekend. Last year I was fortunate to come out and judge for the same two clubs, and what an experience that was!!

Anyway, I promised a post with pictures of the house. I'll get to that next time and regale you with another story of the continuing adventures of owning a repo house. This time, I want to tell you about what the idiot former owner did to the trees in the yard.

According to my neighbor (as well as all the IRS notices and industry mailings we still get to our address) the previous owner had a business grading and installing drainage for developments. Naturally he owned heavy equipment that he would use in his job. From what I gather, he also enjoyed himself by bringing a backhoe/loader to the house and driving around aimlessly moving dirt. The neighbor (who has been here for a few years longer than me) passed on the story of how he liked to hop on the equipment supplied with a stock of wine miniatures and red plastic cups. His delight was to push dirt around while drinking himself into a stupor, draining bottle after bottle of wine into the little red cups. This wouldn't be much of a problem if the yard didn't have a bunch of trees! Suffice it to say that in his stupors, he'd have problems avoiding the trees that darted here and there throughout the yard. Many still show the scars of his handiwork to this day. Some are beyond help and have died or are dying as we speak. One has developed a nice little rotten spot near the base and has rotted out almost all the way through. This specimen will have to come down later this year since it has developed a crack on the opposite side of the rot that expands and contracts when the wind blows. As our 11 year old said, it looks like the tree is breathing when the wind blows!

One of the other nice side effects of having a drunk as the previous owner is that the dogs periodically find little wine bottles under layers of leaves or half buried in the yard. They'll dig up the bottles and proudly bring them to us when we're out on the deck. Everett has a special love for these bottles and will run around the back yard with the neck in his mouth looking like quite the lush. Of course, you really need to know Everett to understand how absolutely hilarious this is!

Just another amusing chapter in the story of our home. In case you're not familiar, I bought the house back in 2001 out of foreclosure after the previous owner mortgaged the property to the hilt and built his "dream home". After his "dream home" was complete, he and his family picked up and just abandoned our fine home. It's a shame, really, since the house has such great "bones". It's a fine home in a beautiful style (even if it was built in 1979). We think we'll keep it.