Serving Suggestion

Nate was making my cupcakes today when I started to think about the "serving suggestion" recommendation in the bottom right corner. What exactly are they suggesting? I should find a fictional character to serve me the cake on a spoon that's twice as tall as he is? I'll pass.

New Cell Phone Case

This is my new handmade cell phone case! I bought it from Helen's brother's Etsy store. He doesn't sell them, but he'll make one if you ask. Check it out here: Underground Grace

I asked for a mating of two of the cubby buddies and this design was born.

Home Buying and the Internet

As most of you probably know, Nate and I are looking to buy a house when our lease is up. I'm am so fascinated by how much information you can find to research home purchases. I knew you could pull up sales data in the public records, but I had no idea about how much detail is there. You can even pull up the scanned documents.
This got us wondering about this odd little wooden house that keeps turning up on our searches on real estate sites. It looks like the exterior is completely made of wooden shingles and the interior is gutted down to the wood frame. Of course, this is what shows up for single family homes in our price range! Still, this property is sold pending inspection. Who would purchase such a strange little house? We had to know.
Cue King County public records website. We find the sales history of the property and see that a lady flipped it in 2 months and made $90k on it. Holy crap. The guy who she sold it to is the current seller and taking a huge loss on it. So we became intrigued about this woman and her house flipping. Was it a one-time occurrence or her business? So we looked that up! An hour later we learn that she started a business of buying up homes at a steal before they went into foreclosure and flipping them for profit. Even ran a blog on how to avoid foreclosure. Last month two of her properties were foreclosed on and one of them is still on the market for way less than she owes on it. Nice upgrades to if anyone is looking for something in South Seattle. It's been foreclosed on twice now. We think viewing it would cross a weird line.
Still, we had a fun time with our public records soap opera. And we did gather a lot of useful information too about which properties we've seen were overpriced and which were priced about right. And I'm glad to finally know the history of the little wooden house.

New Domain

I've settled on keeping my Blogger, so I've moved over the couple posts I made on my iWeb page. Also, work is moving along on the Novielli.org page so I switched over to my new address. Make sure to update your feed reader!

deciphering the cats

I found this really interesting article today about the body language of cats. (here) There are some really good charts with what the different ear and tail positions mean. Most of Stella's usual body language is considered aggressive by this article (go figure). The section on eye contact really applies to The Baby.
In case you're bored, I supplied a few pictures to test your knowledge. It's nearly impossible to catch The Baby acting naturally on camera, so they are Stella pics. See if you can figure out what her body language is saying. I even supplied clues about what sections to look in. What fun!

1. Stella in the snow (tail, posture)
2. Stella with giant reflective pupils (eyes, ears)

3. Stella with airplane ears (ears, eyes)

4. Stella playing with a kitten (this one is a freebie)
If you get all of the answers right you won't win anything except a victory blog post. Good luck.