Life Transplanet

Schnoodle with some of the various tropical plants in our house -coffee tree is furthest left

We have had a small coffee plant for the last few years.  In the summer we put it in the humid greenhouse and it grows well.  Then in the winter we bring it inside, where it lives..but doesn’t exactly thrive.   Just this year it started to bloom.

Cassie played the role of the honey bee and pollinated some of the blossoms by hand.  We hadn’t thought much of it until just the other day when we saw….Coffee beans!

Colorado Coffee Beans

We will continue to let them grow and I doubt we’d have enough even for a single cup of coffee, but it’s still fun and having tropical plants around us invokes thoughts of Puerto Rico.  Of course the coffee plants in PR are a hundred times more fragrant and bigger!  Perhaps if we have enough beans/seeds we will try to grow another tree or two here in CO.  When we get to PR we might plant a whole acre of them!

This is a coffee bush in Puerto Rico (makes our Colorado coffee beans look silly)

We woke up to quite the mess this morning. A bloody mess to be exact. It looked as if a massacre had taken place….

First thing we saw when we woke up this morning!

What happened? Well, apparently poor old Schnoodle had something wrong with her. The night before there was a little blood on the carpet, but we cleaned it up. We thought maybe she was just getting over her urinary infection. We had only about a week ago taken her to the vet. She was diagnosed with an eye infection and cornea problems, cancer or some sort of cysts, bad rotting teeth, a urinary tract infection, lymphoma, arthritis and some deafness. (Remember she is about 14 years old or in her late 80′s if she were human.)

Old Schnood

So I gave her a piece of an aspirin to help her with some of her pain (thinking that she most likely had some). That was a big mistake!  While we had just a little blood two days ago, this morning, it was like a massacre! There was blood not only on the pillow that she sleeps on top of on the floor, but also…

A bloody wall…

Bloody carpet...

And a Bloody Kitchen

But we still didn’t know what had happened to cause her to bleed so much and all over until we saw this:

Her water dish was bloody which meant that something had happened in her mouth. Perhaps she lost another tooth? We have no idea and she won’t let us look in her mouth. But the aspirin probably wasn’t a good idea in hindsight as it thins the blood.

It was pretty disgusting. And we were joking that it looked perfect for a Halloween haunted house!  We managed to get most of it out of the carpet with oxy-clean. Unfortunately it bleached part of the carpet. We’ve been talking about getting new carpet and I think this probably seals the deal. We are going to wait until we know what to do with Noodle though. We wouldn’t want another episode like that to happen. And tenants wonder why we charge more for pets! Yuck

Our cat Kitty, is so pretty. And so were the changing colors in the field behind our house in Greeley this weekend. I caught a couple of pictures of Kitty hanging out on the fence and thought it was a nice reflection of what we see looking out our back door lately.

Kitty on the fence

I had a phone call recently.  It’s the type of call that is not “the norm”. I knew Cassie had emailed House Hunters International about the possibility of being on their show after she had heard from the Kruses that they were looking for couples who had bought a place in Puerto Rico. But I didn’t really think they would be so eager to talk with us so quickly! This is kind of how it went:

Melissa: Hi, this is Melissa from House Hunters International!
BK: Hi, this is Britton.  How are you?
Melissa: Good…We are interested in doing your story! Can you tell me a little more about it?
BK:( I told her all about our story, the property, why Puerto Rico…so on and so forth)
Melissa: That sounds great! Well, the next step before we line things up is to get a casting video from you.  I can send you some information about what we are looking for in it.
BK: No problem.  We can do that and have one to you in the next few days!

So these past few days Cassie and I (with help from Cassie’s mom the camera-woman -thanks Char!) made a short casting video.  In the video they just want to see how we live currently and why we want to move. They basically want to see how we look “on camera”.  Hopefully we come across well!

It would be cool to be on the show as it is one we definitely like to watch and I think we would be a bit different than their regular shows.  Most of what I’ve seen on there are people who have quite a bit of money to spend.  Cassie and I are very budget-oriented and one of our (my) criteria was that the place be “affordable”.  To me that meant not getting a mortgage. Also we were ok with having a fixer-upper, unlike most people that we’ve seen on the show.

We want to move down there in the next few years, not continue to work and pay for the thing over the next 15-30.  So, we save the majority of our income, we both drive normal little paid-off econobox cars, and we have invested in rentals in the hopes that one day we could use that income to live off of (see Fruitfulista for more on how we do this!)

I’d hope they would present us as the ‘fixer upper/saver/self-sustainability people’ and maybe tell the story of how we ended up with the property. One thing we were surprised about is that nearly all, if not all of the shows are re-enactments, so according to Melissa the producer/casting person in New York, we were perfect for their show!

So, here’s our casting video- wish us luck!…What do you think?

We were driving around Greeley today and Britton turned his head and said, “Is that…Is that…alive? What is that?…Wait, it moved!” So we stopped and saw…an African Spurred Tortoise trying to cross a pretty major street in Greeley.

Tortoise

We were worried it was going to get run over and we were curious so we stopped and checked it out. When we realized it wasn’t a snapping turtle and wasn’t going to bite us, we tried picking it up.

The Tortoise and…the Cassie

We looked at the back of its shell and it had a tag embedded in it that said it belonged to the house we were in front of. We heard some sawing or something going on in the backyard so we walked with the turtle back there to see if we could find someone to return him to. Which we did. We talked with the owner who not only had this cool tortoise but also chickens like us! I think I like tortoises now too…in addition to cows and everything else I am a little more familiar with cows though than with tortoises; that’s just not something you see every day on the streets of Greality.