Since I don’t have all my kitchen gadgets and things, I decided to make this unused drawer into a snack drawer so that the kids can serve themselves. Not a single, organic thing in there; it is chock full o’ preservatives.

Picked up these cute mugs for 99 cents a while back. Bri keeps buying bigger and bigger mugs and I have been wanting normal size, so these are perfect for me.

Any bets on how long it takes for one of these guys to break one?
(my guess is within one month)

I don’t know how much rain we’ve gotten this year but I am just sick of it! We’ve it so much work to do on the house and the rain and mud are not so helpful. C’mon Phoenix, where you at?

Our Internet access at the house is positively primieval. The max speed I’ve gotten is 60kb/s. Horrendous! We see some telcom work going on nearby, so we can only hope that they are updating our lines. Please!

Found this notice on our door from the HOA:

If you are feeding the wild animals please STOP! By leaving food out for the animals this attracts some potentially vicious creatures like wild bores.

While I realize that we do live in one of the two big retirement cities in the US, I think it was a big much calling the old crabby rich people “bores.”

*click to enlarge*

We have only one month left here in the condo before it is foreclosed on. I don’t know how or why the owner is letting it go, but Brian’s dad is letting us move into the house he owns in Chandler that the moved out of about 9 years ago midway through restoring it. (In other words, it needs a lot of work)

This will be an ambitious project for us. We’re going to have to do lots of work on the addition and it has been home to come feral cats, chicken and many rodents for a while. The whole thing is incredibly nervous-making, but to have a house we can finally call our own (and a nice chunk of yard to go with it) makes it a must-do.

Quite a bit of the yard is emptied out already. We looked at it the other night and it is looking much less Sanford and Son.

Counting down till the end of October!

I’m so glad that it’s finally September. While I certainly loved sleeping in almost every day with the boys and staying up late watching movies and swimming, I have kind of reached my limit with long, hot days of sunshine. After last winter, I didn’t think I ever could get warm again, but now that I’m faced with plenty ‘o heat for a plenty long time to come, not so much.

I’ll be watching out the window for fall, or the imitation of it here in Arizona.

We had to say Goodbye to our Savanna again on Monday. She’s moving back to Reno to be near her boyfriend. At least this time it was all her decision, so I don’t have the guilt of leaving her this time. (that was no fun)

I don’t know how it can be so quiet…the circus didn’t leave town.

I’m sure the next stressful thing is just around the corner!

So far, it has been quite interesting. We drove down here only to find that the pool is closed due to some law that required new drain covers to be installed and inspected and it seems like the HOA didn’t do it in time. The very first night, our neighbor downstairs knocked on the door and complained about our noise…at 8:30. The following Monday night when Brian came home from work, we found out the hard way that George had managed to set the door alarm, for which we didn’t have any codes. He ended up pulling it off the wall and cutting the wires. That same day we had a clogged toilet and no plunger. (I won’t tell you how I unplugged it-way too gross) We went to check our mail only to find that our key doesn’t work…hoping the owner will take care of that very soon.

On the big plus side, we have been climbing over the wall and going swimming anyway. (aren’t we rebellious!) We didn’t bring our coffeemaker since it was on death’s door, so we’ve been going to Dunkin’ Donuts every day for x-large coffees. (lovely!) There are some very brave hummingibirds around here who will fly right up to your face to get a good look. Pretty startling the first time. Went to IKEA to get a cheap desk for the computer and it cost about the same as the gas to get mine would have been, so now we have an extremely ugly but cheap bright yellow table. I think I will eventually Krylon the crap out of it and re-use it for something else.

Kind of new, kind of like the good old days, and overall a good thing.

We still don’t have internet access at the condo. I’m using Brian’s cell phone, so here’s some cute kitty fun for anyone who stopped by.

Regular posting to continue soon!