Talk about ew!

For all 2 of the readers out there who actually take time to visit me here, my apologies that I've been MIA lately... I've been busy. The sun was in my eyes. We ran out of milk. Wait....um...?

Seriously though, my time has been consumed with work and searching for a house. After how many years together, Anthony and I finally decided its time to buy a house. So here we are, in the midst of house hunting. We know what we want, and we figured that there are those things that are a MUST (like a quiet street) and those things that we want but can live without (like a huge master suite). We thought our demands were pretty easy.... I mean, we want a place we can fix up ourselves (within reason) so how hard could that be to find??

OYE.

After searching for only a couple months and seeing only a few houses so far, we're coming to the realization that maybe we demand a lot. We've only seen a few houses so far because most of the others (and there are A LOT) we've scoped out and found they were on busy streets, falling apart from the outside, or should be sold with a gun or other home-security system included. We had one close call on a house that just went on the market this week but decided it wasn't for us....we just didn't SEE ourselves in it.

We finally went to see a house yesterday that we've wanted to check out for a while. It was sunny and bright from the outside. Quiet street, nice craftsman style house, decent yard (yeah we'd LIKE bigger but the garage that was skewed about 10˚ off plumb would definitely be knocked down). We thought this one would be a shoe-in.

O-M-G

We walked in and I should've known to run when I smelled the stale pee smell from the front door. Now, these people had no cat/dog, so YOU tell me who that stale pee smell was from!

The house was falling apart. How can a house that looks so nice from the OUTSIDE be so bad inside?? Now, we're not just talking dirty and messy (both of which it was). We're talking all tours should come with has-mat suits. NAS-TY! OMG it was bad. Seriously the place had to be GUTTED in order to be livable. It says something when the musty old basement smells better than the main living space. And lets not talk about the condition of the bathroom. I still feel itchy from being in the house. I showered when I got home..

So the house hunt continues. We're going to an open house today. If this one doesn't leave me skeeved, I'll consider it a one-up from yesterday's disaster.

Wish us luck! :)

Faith

When good people do things like this to help our fellow furry creatures, it gives me faith in mankind...

Give A Squirrel A Helping Hand @ Yahoo! Video

Best news yet!!!

From the US Humane Society:

Victory For Seals! The European Union Bans the Trade in Seal Products

"This is the beginning of the end for the Canadian seal slaughter. The EU was a primary market for Canadian seal products, and the Canadian government estimates the loss of the EU market will cost Canada’s sealing industry $6.6 million (CAD) annually. Given that the landed value of the Canadian seal hunt last year was less than $7 million, the implications are enormous.

With this ban, the EU joins the United States (which outlawed seal products in 1972) and Mexico and Croatia, which ended the trade in 2006. Soon there will be nowhere left to trade the products of cruel commercial seal slaughters, and seals will be worth more alive than dead.

Seals' lives have already been saved. Just the promise of an EU ban was enough to drive this year's price for seal fur down to $15 (CAD) per skin—a decline of 86 percent since 2006. As a result, many sealers stayed home. Out of Canada’s quota of 338,200 seals, fewer than 60,000 have been killed to date. By the regulated closing date of the seal hunt—May 15—it is likely more than a quarter of a million baby seals will have been spared a horrible fate."

WOO HOO!!! Maybe there IS hope yet!!!