Where We Live

We live in a quaint little suburb of Buffalo, New York. The town is called Orchard Park, where everything closes by nine. Living here is more like living in a forest. There is all kinds of forest creatures. Mia finds this fun because she likes to hunt animals. Brady enjoys this because he likes to pee on trees. And there is a lot of trees. Spencer sometimes doesn't like it because he has to dodge squirrels and deer frequently. My friend Nancy has a dog that wakes her up barking when the deer wander around near her house. Mostly I love it. Except when there are skunks around.

For a couple of weeks there was a large number of skunks dying. And you all know the smell that they leave behind. I wonder if that is their way of punishing those that kill them. Or perhaps it is a way of attempting to be immortal like Shakespeare and his poems. I don't know. But Spencer had a couple of theories about this phenomenon. He thought that perhaps the skunks were suicidal. They might be depressed because they smell and nobody likes them. Kind of like Pepe Le Pew. Another thought was that they were being live stink bombs like the Japanese kamikaze.

My favorite wildlife creature is the chipmunk. They are so freaking cute! When I was little, we used to go to my grandpa's cabin on Palasade's lake. My grandpa taught me how to attract the chipmunks and squirrels onto the porch with sunflower seeds. I spent hours sitting and waiting for these animals to appear on the porch to eat the seeds that I left. We even named them. I loved going to the cabin. One time one of the chipmunks got into the cabin! All of us girls freaked out and it took a while to get him back outside again.

When we were living in "the tower" at our apartment complex. There was a chipmunk that was always getting into the common room. I felt bad for the poor guy. We thought that maybe he was trying to hang out with the fake chipmunks and gnomes that inhabited the cheesy common room.

Here is the common room. Imagine it with the plastic gnomes and chipmunks and lily pads and frogs. Very cheesy.

I actually like garden gnomes. I think that they are cute. My grandparents had some that sat by their stairs in their sweet seventies shag carpet. I loved them! My sisters gave one to my mom for her garden. Gnomes rock! Especially David the Gnome. Do you remember that show! It was one of my favorites!

I especially loved how they kissed... I still do it...

So at the beginning of September, we moved from "the tower" to our nice roomy townhouse. This was a difficult process mostly because Spencer didn't have days off of work to do it. Therefore, I pretty much had to do it by myself. It took forever because I had to carry something all the way across the courtyard to the new house and then walk all the way back. Moving is a lot slower when just one person is doing it. So while I am moving stuff, the door to the house was left open so I could walk through the door when my arms were full. Guess who decides to go on in. Yep. Our friend Mr. Chipmunk. So I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to get the chipmunk out of the house. Not my idea of fun.

My own little Chipmunk Adventure. Do you remember that movie?! One of my all time favorites! Love the songs!! I like the chipettes the best and wanted them to win. Maybe because I am a girl. "We are the girls, we are the girls, we are the girls a rock-n-rollin'!"

This moving experience was actually pretty funny and definitely memorable. So after spending the whole day moving things by myself in the heat and humidity...Spencer would get home and want to move the bigger furniture with me. So we tried to do it and my muscles were jello. They were completely shot from the day's work. I felt really bad but I just couldn't do anything. So we had to put it off until the next day. Well, the next night we try again and guess what?? It's pouring rain. It is not that much fun to move a leather couch in the rain. It kept slipping out of my grip. And I couldn't see because I am vertically challenged, so I ran the edge into a tree, which made the couch run into my face. Yeah, it really hurt.

Then the next day we had to move the washer, dryer, and fridge down the stairs with just me and Spencer. Spencer was holding the dolly with the appliance on it and I was below trying to stabilize and praying that it wouldn't fall and squish me. I hope that you can see this image in your head of me below the huge appliance feeling pretty helpless should it fall. Thankfully, it didn't. We managed to get it done by ourselves. My husband is freakin' strong! Did I mention that we also had to haul these appliances across the apartment property and over speed bumps and up some stairs. Yep. My husband is superman.

So this is our cute little townhouse, number 13. And it has been very lucky for us.

Except that no one told us that we have to shower with the bathroom doors closed and the window open or else we will set off the fire alarm. It was really neat at 5:30 in the morning to set off the fire alarm and probably wake up all our neighbors.

Oh, and it was neat when all the tiles on the bathtub fell off randomly.

Other than that, we love it. Although we do miss the awesome seventies paneling on the place in the tower. But we are glad to have our own washer and dryer again.

This is where our dogs like to go pee.

This is one of the cool lights around the complex. It looks like the lamp-post from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I'm gonna take a picture of it in the snow...

This is the tree in our front yard, just outside our bedroom window. It's so pretty.