Observations about the South

Here in the sandhills, called that because the soil is extrememely sandy (it was the beach a very long time ago), there are a lot of pine trees.  And if you are not cool enough to have pine trees of your own, you can buy pine needles by the bale (smaller than a bale of hay or straw) and use them as mulch.  They make pretty good mulch, and I like the look as well.  But you do have to be careful not to walk on them barefoot, not because of the poke-iness of them, but because you might almost step on a giant wolf spider and almost have a heart attack.  Wolf spiders, as a fun piece of trivia, are exactly the same color as pine needles.

I got some new rugs, which the kitties thought were awesome (there is nothing more fun than moving rugs out of position and hiding things under them), until I got some rug tape.  Now they are firmly in place, and the kitties, particularly Patty-cake, are sad.  They might get over it though, since one of the rugs is jute, which is the same stuff they use on scratching posts, and the girls are gradually wrapping their little heads around the potential benefits of a rug you can really sink your claws into.

I bought some real furniture recently, my first time ever.  I actually went to the furniture store, found a couch, chair, and end tables that I liked, picked out fabric, wood colors, the whole nine yards.  They aren't here yet, so I can't send pictures yet, but it was a very interesting experience.  My living room is empty, with nothing to sit on, and I had guests over twice the last week I was off, and this moved me to get furniture.  I decided I'd rather go ahead and get real furniture than crap off of craigslist.  I also didn't want to get some giant over-stuffed furniture, which is all you can get for cheap, because its not a very big room, and what the crazy land lady had in there was too big for the room and made it feel tiny.

I'm planning an experiment where I cover the counter tops with contact paper, because the existing granite counter tops may have been expensive but are ugly.  We'll see how it goes.