Kretovic.com

I was so sad when I visited our site this morning and saw the title of the previous post, Warm Fall Weekend. *Sigh.* No more of those, I think. In fact, as I write this it’s snowing outside. Yes, snowing. How sad.

This weekend was pretty boring for us. And painful for me. I had to take this medicine on Saturday that very nearly killed me. Well, the drugs didn’t do it, I nearly killed myself. Have you ever seen the movie Pi? If not, I hate to spoil it for you, but at the end he takes a drill to his head and that’s what I felt like doing. It was a close one, but moving my head hurt too much, so the effort to go find the drill would’ve been too much. For some reason, the drugs caused me to have what I can only describe as a major migraine headache. I’ve never actually had a migraine before, but it’s what I imagine one would be like. Complete with the nausea and being sick. Not fun. So that was Saturday, lying on the couch not moving my head much at all until it finally wore off 14 hours later.

Sunday we finally got around to carving pumpkins. Rather early for us because I think last year we didn’t get to it until the night before Halloween. I toasted the seeds and they’re not too bad. I’m sure Greg was disappointed we didn’t bake them using his magical recipe that we never can find, but toasting was super easy.

Greg’s pumpkin is on the left, mine on the right.

We’re still trying to decide what we’re going to be for Halloween. We’re heading down to Mac’s bar for a party on Friday night and then possibly to Cheboygen for Kingsford’s playoff game on Saturday. Not 100% sure yet on that, though.

Any good, easy costume ideas?

You know, I’m just so proud of Mother Nature. On Monday when the season officially became fall, she decided to give us summer! It’s so wonderful. Although I know that it’s probably summer’s last gasp, I am totally and completely ignoring that. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 80°, which is just awesome. The seven-day outlook is showing 50s and 60s for next week, but I’m ignoring that, too. La, la, la, I’m not listening!

This weekend Greg’s heading to Bergland for the guys’ annual four-wheeling/mudfest weekend. My mom, Dayna and I are heading down to Appleton for our annual shop-while-the-guys-are-gone fest. I’m looking forward to it.

It’s crazy to think that it’s nearly October. Another summer come and gone in a flash. How does that happen? Because I swear that time on Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. just drags. So it’s amazing that an entire season just flew by.

Our house-hunting has slowed down a bit. We’ve still been watching the real estate sites, but not much that meets our qualifications has come up for sale recently. I don’t know if that’s due to the economy or what, but hopefully we’ll find something soon. I’m getting tired of renting and I really don’t want to be moving when there’s snow on the ground. Although, really, we’ve gotten snow in October many a time, so it might be too late for that. Greg’s boss keeps sending him home with House Beautiful magazines for me and I see so many cool decorating ideas that I can’t do because I don’t own a frickin’ house! Hopefully it’s just a matter of (a short length of) time.

Chris and Theresa should be back from Hawaii now. I’m so jealous. Greg jokingly said, “We should go to Hawaii and crash their honeymoon,” and I shouted, “Ok! Let’s go right now!” (Not something to joke about, Greg. You know that.) So I didn’t get to go to Hawaii, but hopefully they took lots of pictures so I can dream about the day I’ll get to go.

So fall and winter are spreading out before us in a long, uninterrupted stretch of cold, bleakness and snow. I’m really not looking forward to it. After we got home from work on Tuesday, we decided to go to the Border Grill (yum!) and sit out on the patio because it could be the last time of the year it’s nice enough to do that. Only by the time we left home at 6:30, the sun was setting. When did that happen? I don’t like it!

Anyway, I’ll end on a happier note: tomorrow = 80°.

This is probably the first week all year that we’ve been in the mid-70′s range all week. It feels actually kind of nice. We’ve had some rain but mainly at night. Leah was also severely sick on Tuesday but she seems to be doing better. There seems to be a stomach flu bug going around which seems a little odd for this time of year.

This weekend is the big company picnic for Leah’s work. It’s usually a lot of fun. We are two-time three-legged race champions so hopefully we can continue our reign. We also do quite well in the water balloon toss as well.

I finally posted the photos from the 4th of July so you can see all of them here.

This past week was pretty boring. I was busy with freelance work and Greg was busy with regular work. The weather here was pretty crummy. Well, it didn’t rain, but it wasn’t exactly warm. We had to turn the heat back on because it was getting really, really cold at night. Today it’s in the 70s so maybe the cold spell is over? I can dream, anyway.

So we made an offer two weeks ago on a house we looked at. It was a foreclosure, so it’s owned by a bank down in Milwaukee. I’m not going to go into it because this post would be way long, but we still haven’t heard back yet. Frustrating. Thankfully, we don’t have to move within a certain time frame, so if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just keep looking.

Today is the first day of summer, can you believe it? Maybe this weekend we’ll finally go swimming. The water last weekend wasn’t too bad (I’ve swam in colder), but the air wasn’t the warmest. It’s supposed to be warm tomorrow, but a chance of thunderstorms, so we’ll see. I love summer. It’s my most favorite time in the U.P. Except for the woodticks. I have a crazy fear of them. Last night Greg was mowing our yard and managed to get a woodtick on him. In our yard. That is just disgusting. He thinks it happened when he was taking these pictures of mushrooms growing in the yard before he mowed them over. Ew.

Anyway, on to the Fun Finds Friday!

Is there such a thing as PRE-traumatic stress disorder? If not, there totally should be. It just seems like we picked the absolute worst time to be buying a house, economy-wise, and yet, there’s really no other option. Our landlord is raising the rent nearly $100, effective next month, because of some mysterious and probably made-up reason. The guy seems to be a bit (a LOT a bit) disorganized, because the reasons he gives for raising our rent never seem to pan out. Last year it was the cost of utilities. Never mind that WE pay all of our utilities. This year, it’s because he never raised the rent last year. Huh? Check your records, dude!

And besides, I WANT to buy a house. I want to paint the walls and pull up the carpet and plant trees and flowers and whatnot. I want to have a pet other than fish. I’m so excited, and so anxious. Greg is hiding his anxiety well, much better than I would have expected, considering. We talked about budgets and financing last night and he didn’t even need a paper bag or even come close to hyperventilating. I have to say, though, according to what we’ve found, we can afford a house nearly twice as expensive as we’re looking at. Yeah, maybe if Greg didn’t drive to and from Munising every day and if we stopped eating. If we actually went by those formulas, we’d probably be the next people getting foreclosed on.

All of this stems from the houses we looked at last weekend. We found one that we think we might make an offer on. It’s a pretty nice house, on 3.5 acres, near town but on a super quiet, dead-end road. Just what we wanted, or close to. So now that we’re thinking this could actually be it, and this whole house-buying thing isn’t just some nebulous maybe-we’ll-buy-a-house-someday thing but an actual holy-crap-we’re-going-to-buy-a-house thing, the anxiety sets in. Of course, we have to see if they’ll accept our offer and go through that whole rigmarole, but still. Yikes. And yay!

I think I’m going to be the one who needs a paper bag before this is all over.