Neighborhood News and Orange Cat in the Sun

This day brought thunderstorms to our region, and just a tiny bit of rain for us. It was not nearly enough rain. Yet some areas got drenched; before day's end, one of my siblings sent me photos of golf-ball-sized hail!

Overall, conditions have been so dry here in central Pennsylvania. The flowers have been coming and going quickly. The vernal ponds are getting smaller and smaller. We keep putting water out, every day, multiple times a day, in a half-dozen or more locations around our yard, for the birds and other critters.

The system that moved through, though, dropped temperatures quite a bit, which was welcome news. The past week had some hot days, which is always a challenge for me. I'm your cold-weather, 6-degrees-F, frost-mist-rising girl. At temps above 90 (which it was on Friday), I want to find a cool, dark hole, crawl into it, and pull the hole in after me!

The day's evening also brought a milestone: the first fireworks in our neighborhood. It was a Saturday night, it was a full moon (though I missed that), and things were lively. When I heard the first few pops, I went out and walked down our drive way to the road, but I could not see a thing. Just the sound: pop! pop! pop! It didn't last long.

But before all of that, I went for my walk, and this is an orange and white kitty that I met. It was nestled into a row of forsythia, watching the birds, sort of tucked into the hedge nicely. It was there when I walked past. It was there when I walked back.

The big news of my walk is that the house on Stonerow that was the last house I looked at when I was house shopping in 2004 is back on the market. It's on about an acre of land, and it was listed for $200,000 then, and now it is listed at $314,900. (Here's a link to the current listing.)

My agent and I visited two houses that day over my work lunch hour. First, we saw the house that I really wanted, and that I eventually got. Second, we saw the Stonerow property, which is just a few streets away. The Stonerow property even then was quite a bit more expensive than the one I ended up with; at that time, it had a swimming pool attached to a deck along the back of the house.

My real estate agent (no, I won't tell you his name) had an odd habit of weighing himself on the scale in the bathroom of each house he showed me. I have no idea what number he was looking for but I hope that at some point, he actually found it.

I remember standing in the kitchen of that last house, telling my real estate agent, no DEMANDING of him, that he GET ME THAT HOUSE THAT WE HAD JUST LOOKED AT!!! Which is the house we currently own. You see, I had already fallen in love with it!

I told him I wanted to have my morning coffee on that deck every single morning for the whole rest of my life. Within three hours, I was holding a contract in my (shaking) hand, trying to decide what to offer! So you see that house on Stonerow is where I found my way HOME!

So anyway, that's a long way around about it, but that's the neighborhood news. The story itself wandered far afield, I fear, but the song I'm picking is for the languid peaches-and-cream feline above, sitting in the sun: Harry Chapin, with Cat's In the Cradle. Many have covered it. NOBODY has done it better!