This was supposed to be about our garage shelves!

Carlene is actually the person that got me motivated to start a blog, and I’ve had to turn to her for ideas on what to put in it. I’m sure it will show through in what I write. Today, for instance. As most of you already know, we bought our first house in March. It has essentially become the only thing we think about. So I guess it’s only natural that I say a little bit about it.

I was pretty worried about getting a house, because I never thought that we would be able to afford one. Luckily, I married someone much wiser than myself, and she realized that it was not only likely, but that we would be silly not to. And besides that, we were fed up with apartment living. So we found a house, and everything worked out perfectly.

The strange thing was, to me, it didn’t really feel like our house at first. I’m sure everyone who has gone through the home buying process is smiling and nodding their heads. My brain told me that it was ours, and I even had (still have, actually) an extensive list of home improvement projects I would like to do, but it really felt like we were only visiting. One of the things on my list was to put an American flag up on our front porch. Carlene and I didn’t see eye to eye on that originally, but after I put it up, I think she changed her mind (I hope). It wasn’t until I got the flag up and flying that it finally stopped feeling like we were staying in a fancy hotel and more like we were supposed to be here.

Now the one thing that is consuming all of my feeble mental powers is how to keep the neighborhood cats from using our front yard bark dust as a latrine. I’m sure that everyone I know is tired of me discussing this ad nauseum. I first tried a cat repellant recipe from a book I got at the library. It consisted of water, crushed garlic, cayenne pepper, and liquid dish soap. Sounds stinky and passably logical. Especially the former. But be ye warned! If someone tells you to put those ingredients in a blender and puree the life out of them, he either has some sort of mental defect, or he has a sick, olfactory-driven sense of humor. The resulting foamy, reeking catastrophe will have you wishing that the author of said recipe was near at hand, and not for pleasant conversation, either.

Anyway, eventually the repelling repellant finally made it onto our bark dust, making our front yard stink like the losing entry to a Texas chili cook-off. Well, maybe cats are fond of badly made chili, because within the hour they were pawing around in our bark dust, and the next morning it had already been pooped in. I’m now trying straight, non-foaming cayenne pepper. If this doesn’t work, I’ve got a lot more ideas, many of them disturbingly unkind.