Time to play catch up

Whew, its been a crazy couple of weeks. We went to my sister, Sara's, for X-mas. It was fun, we made tamales from scratch. Sara did the hard work but we all assembled them together. My brother in law, Richard, made this heavenly green chili gorn chowder, that I have to get the recipe for.

When we got home from Sara's we packed up Bob's big truck and drove down to Tucson to pick out a house. The drive down took forever, because his giant, heavily laden truck was only getting like 9 miles to the gallon so we had to stop every hour to refill, and he could only go 60mph. So we had to stop in Buttonwillow for the night at a pretty janky little motel, that was supposed to be a 2 room suite. So that I wouldnt have to try to sleep next to Bob who snores like a freight train. But it looked like it used to be 2 rooms that they knocked the wall down between put 2 fulls on one side and a couch on the other. I tried to sleep for a little while, then moved to the couch. I was in a deep dreaming sleep when his snoring woke me up. I got so annoyed I went out to the car. Problem being it was 32 degrees out. I found myself reminding myself of Survivor Man episodes.Cocooned in the blanket, wiggling my toes, I was only out there a little while before my mom insisted I come in. She sat up with the tv on so I could get back to sleep. The next day we drove for like 12 hours or so to get there, my mom insisting she didnt need me to take over driving. So we finally got to my aunt Leslie's house at 10:30pm New Years Eve. We watched the ball drop and promptly passed out. My aunt Leslie, can rival us for animal love, while we have 7 cats, she has 5 dogs (3 Boxers, 2 rat terriers), 3 cats (2 siamese, 1 abyssinian), 1 bird, and 2 1/2 horses ( one of those cute miniature horses). So over the course of a few days we went to see 18 houses. We found 2 we liked and 1 we liked better. We put in our offer and got it.Here's some pictures...
You can't tell from this picture, but the security door has a Kokopelli on it. And just inside the front door, theres a mosaic of a kokopelli on the floor. It's a 1871 sqft house which is much bigger than we have now, and the lot is huge!



Here's the big kitchen, with pass throughs to the living and family rooms.






This is a tri-level with the master bedroom down stairs, and the 3(!) other bedrooms upstairs. I will likely knock the wall out of the 2 front rooms to make a larger room for myself. And we'll still have a craft room/ guest room.



This is the fabulous pool, doesnt it look like there should be a model sunning herself on that raised platform? There are spiggots there where water flows back into the pool.