This Old House

So as I sat and stood and sat and stood (more than a Sunday mass) I started thinking about how this house will eventually come together... eventually. I scraped double and triple layers of wallpaper for the last 7 hours or so and found it to be quite a task. I decided to get off of my butt and do some work on what will soon be the nursery for the impending chalupa. Cracks in the wall joints will have to be filled and windows will have to be replaced. Fixing this room up will probably give us a good idea about how the rest will go. Two out of three wallpapered rooms down to the plaster! The walls are kinda scary-movie dungeon green thanks to the old glue that was generously applied to the old paper so hopefully a little scrubbing (and friends) should get the walls prepped for whatever we decide to do with them. Martynas and I did half of the room that I finished today about 2.5 months ago. Here's a link to the evidence:

For those of you got an email with photos of the house... this room is the guest room nearest the master which previously had half of a wallpapered wall.

The Haunted Cauldrons

So I decided to complete some long overdue chores in the back yard... There was 1/4 acre of leaves to rake, fallen limbs to collect and thorny vines to remove that were slowly but surely making their ascent towards complete shrouding of our mature landscaping. This endeavor ended up taking the better part of 3 days!!!

During my battle with the thorny vines, I happened upon something in the ground. Upon closer inspection, I realized that these objects were black spikes made of iron. I ran to the garage (ok, maybe I walked quickly) and grabbed the tools I need to disinter these mysterious treasures. Ends up that these iron objects were two cauldrons that look like they are from the civil war era. One of the iron pots is about 25lb and the other is about 70lb. Although very cool, I

instantly felt like there was something a little spooky about them. Despite my apprehensions and back problems, I brought them into the house after rolling them across the lawn. The story begins:

Alexia and I were really excited about my find and couldn't wait to tell Cass, my mom Diane and my sister Carla about them- as they are all appreciative of things obscure and potentially antique. So there they sit; one on top of a table in our laundry room and the larger one below. Although not a great decoration, they need to stay indoors due to the inclement weather lately.

I spend a lot of time at home given my weekend option status at work so this allows me the luxury of keeping an eye on things. I woke up one morning to my usual routine of coffee and Chorizo (the dog not the sausage). I noticed that it was an exceptionally blustery day out and settled in for a predictable day of homework and laundry. I kept hearing a thumping upstairs and thought nothing of it assuming that it was the wind jostling something attached the house. About an hour later I decided "what the hell" I'm gonna go check this out. I walked upstairs with Chorizo in tow only to find that one of our upstairs closet doors was open. This closet is particularly creepy in that it has a square piece of plaster literally duct taped to the crawlspace opening occluding its passage. Not a huge deal I thought, but the kicker is that the light was turned on. This light is an old-fashioned twist-on light that gets hot after about 20 seconds of being on... when I reached in to turn the light off I found that the bulb was not hot at all. This means that it had turned on shortly before I ascended the stairs. I told Lex and Cass to be on the lookout for spookiness.

Last night Lex and I decided to go see Black Swan in Winterville. While we were waiting to enter the theatre we received a call from Cass in a hurried voice saying "did you guys leave the garage door open?" which of course we didn't. This could be explained by the wind but who knows. Cass proceeded to say "well, I'm not really sure what's going on but the dog won't come to the door- in fact he won't leave his bed." It's important to note that Chorizo always comes to the door and his bed is as far away from the front door as is possible. He was terrified of something. Cass ended the conversation with "you should also be aware that I found the hot water on full blast in your bathroom." In the end, I'm not really sure if there is a correlative relationship between the cauldrons and the strange occurrences lately, however, I am led to speculate that one didn't really happen before the other.... more to follow. These seemingly innocuous cauldrons may have more of a story than we thought.