I think we’ve come up with a decision for approaching that possible moving quandary. We’re going to work on the house to get it ship-shape for putting on the market, which gives us time to make sure this is what we want, and keeps us from having to rush. (After all, we don’t lose anything by doing this—if we decide not to move it just means we’ll have our house all cleaned up and properly landscaped.) When it’s ready, we’ll call up a realtor and get it listed. When/if it sells, since there are so many houses for sale around here, THEN we’ll go buy a house. I’d love to buy a house sooner rather than later, while there are so many foreclosures that can be snapped up for almost half their usual sale value, but everything’s a whole lot easier if you sell your own house first—particularly in this market, when it could take a week or two years.

In that spirit, I finally planted butterfly bushes out front. I wish I’d thought to take a “before” picture of the jungle of brambles in that area by the street. The last owner planted some fairly high-maintenance stuff down there, and there were wild raspberries going crazy in the middle. We ripped everything out, and this morning I laid out the bags of soil and worked them in a bit, planted the purple butterfly bushes (three), put down heavy-duty twenty-year anti-weed landscaping fabric (not plastic—I hate trying to clean that stuff out of a garden), and put pine bark mulch on top of that.

I’ve also gotten a few reviews done since the last post: of Annette Blair’s Gone with the Witch (fun, but it has some issues) and Katherine Shay’s Taking the Heat (which I didn’t like all that much). Next up, a non-fiction book, although it won’t be ready for review today.

And finally, I’ve also put up two new designs at cafepress: shirts, buttons, stickers, mugs, etc for tabletop roleplayers. The first is ‘Drow are people too’:

The second (and my personal favorite of the two) is, ‘I always fail my save vs. pun’:

It’s strange, but… after almost four years in Maryland, we’re contemplating the possibility of moving once more. We moved down for my husband’s job, but for various reasons that’s ended up being farther away from the home we got than we had reason to think it would be. We’re both tired of the 2-3 hours taken out of his day for the commute, not to mention the gas costs for same. To make matters stranger, most of the wonderful close friends (we consider them family) we ended up making are in Virginia, which is also about an hour and a half from home. If we moved to a spot in Virginia about 20-30 minutes from those friends it would also be about a half hour from my husband’s job. And the property values in some towns there are lower than what they are here, it seems, so we could get a similar house for a chunk less money (in theory, anyway).

Pretty compelling, huh?

It’s just, well, it’s never fun to move. There’s so much to do, so many details to see to, and then you have to hope you sell your house… which seems tough when literally a third of the houses on your street are for sale and they haven’t exactly been going quickly.

Decisions, decisions.

Who knows. Maybe we’ll end up waiting until next year or the year after. I plan to keep an eye on the housing market; since we’re not in a hurry, if the right house comes along… who knows? But there’s no need to rush and compromise on something we won’t be happy with, at least.

Today’s reviews are of two romance/historicals. It really isn’t my favorite time period, but I think Allison Chase’s Dark Obsession is a good sample of the genre, and Joanna Bourne’s My Lord and Spymaster is an amazing book in several other genres (mystery, spy adventure) as well!

The below video of a young lady’s speech to the UN regarding the destruction of our world and resources is incredibly eloquent and moving.