Educating the Wheelers

Thinking about selling the house puts my stomach in knots. It’s not a great selling climate out there, but at least Austin’s housing market is doing better than most other cities. Lots of CA investors apparently turned their eyes towards Austin recently and it’s near impossible to get a handyman/contractor. Running the most recent numbers in the market analysis for our little pocket of town shows that we could probably get about 10-15% more than we could have if we’d put it on the market a couple of months ago. We’ll see how that shakes out when we list next Friday.

I’m starting to emotionally transition away from this house, which is a little weird since Andrew and I love so, so love our home and had no reason to think we wouldn’t be here forever.

I’m going to miss the veritable cornucopia of weird Texas wildlife that my history in the Northeast, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Pacific Coast never prepared me for. Armadillos! Road Runners! Tarantulas on your front porch!

… but then there are the scorpions. We’ve been in this house for over three years, and though I’ve seen many [many] scorpions, and had quite a few close calls [not the least of which was nearly stepping on one in the shower when I was 8 months pregnant with Audrey], I managed to always dodge the bullet.

Until a few days ago. It was basically my nightmare scenerio come to life. I was sleeping and felt something crawling on my neck. My hand goes to knock it off, and he gets my hand. Then he gets the front of my leg about a half dozen times, then gets my foot, too, for good measure. The silver lining is that Andrew was able to find it and kill the heck out of it before it got to Audrey or Owen, who were lying right next to me.

My tongue swelled up and went numb, and my lips were tingling — not to mention the fact that my leg felt like it was on fire. There was so much venom in my system that I paged my doctor’s office to check to see if it would get into my breastmilk or if I needed to pump and dump and feed older milk through bottles until it passed through my system. Funny enough, we couldn’t find anything via google addressing this issue. Heh.

For the record, my doc said not to worry about it, and both of my kids seemed fine. Well, as fine as a 2 and a half month old who’s teething and a 2 and a half year old who’s stressed about her toys getting packed into boxes can be.

Speaking of crazy Texas wildlife, now we’ve got a dead deer in our backyard. I only wish we hadn’t found it several hours after our dogs did, and after it had been sitting in 105 degree temp all day.