Around-Town Houses

Here's a catch-up on Oriental, for those of you who like to know what's going on. Here's a house (a brick one!) that's about to be moved.

The location for it has been prepped, just a few hundred feet away. Its back will be against a little creek.

Below, you see the garage of the house on the ride side. If you peer at the photo, you can see some little structures in the background, behind some small trees -- those are Rotary Club trailers, and the new location for the house is just to the left of those.

However, the home-owners do not own the property between the house and the new lot; someone else owns it who would prefer not to have the house dragged across their lot. So the house will have to come down the driveway, down the street, around the corner, and into its new spot. Should be exciting!
Immediately down the street from that house are FOUR houses in a row, all for sale. You can see all four signs -- the last one is a tiny brown one. One of the houses, at last, is under contract.

For a while I assumed these four houses were all flooded in Hurricane Irene, and thus hard to sell, but that's not the case. They're all selling for various reasons. Oriental, as a retirement town with many second homes, always has lots of places for sale. I don't worry about it anymore.
Remember the cute little cottage I've showed you before, being redone? It's nearly there!

Here's a back view, with the little pond off the back porch. The builders have tarps enclosing the porch temporarily, because it's cold.

It really is lovely. I would have picked a color other than white, but it's very pretty.

They've done some fine stone work on the side steps -- also coming down both ways from the porch in the background.

On our rather-chilly bike ride today, we met up with Goldie, whom you met in my short story recently, "Billy, the Sailor Dog." In the story, Goldie has a bit of a rough personality, but the real Goldie is a sweetheart. She was out with her owner, taking a walk, hunting pecans.

Miss Faye, Goldie's owner, had some interesting tools in her golf cart.

These are pecan picker-uppers :) In the Deep South, it's helpful for one's back to have a device for this tedious job. You roll them around on the ground where the pecans are. The metal loops are flexible, allowing the pecans inside the ring. When the ring is full enough, you dump them into a bucket. Miss Faye had a couple of buckets full. We discussed the excellent pecan year.

Humorous boat name of the day: "Private Idaho" I wonder what that means.

We came home from our bike ride. Adam wanted to take a nap. He was just heading down the hall when I said, "Where's that water coming from?" Always a bad thing to say. A little puddle was dripping onto the floor mat.

Sure enough, when we checked, there's a leak under the kitchen sink. I keep some cleaning supplies in a plastic tub there ... so the tub was full of water and the bottles were swimming. Sigh. Pretty nasty. You can tell I don't get into my cleaning supplies very often - haha! I took one fuzzy photo because when one's husband is doing plumbing, one does not make a pest of oneself, taking photos. One will become persona non grata. He patched it up, and we'll call the landlord tomorrow.

So there you have it! I successfully did a blog post without a single photo of yarn! Oh, and let me give you a recommendation for online viewing. Adam and I love to watch Time Team -- a 20 year TV series about a group of British archeologists who travel around the U.K. (mostly) digging in people's back gardens, looking for remains. It's charmingly done, fascinating, and good history. There are lots and lots of full episodes on Youtube, and you can subscribe. Choose the youtube subscription with the Indian sounding name -- that fellow has more episodes.