Welcome to the News from the Ninja room!

Welcome to the News from the Ninja room! 

First of all, you should know that this is pass two of this Blog.  Karen wrote an awesome first blog entry, with a very sweet introduction about how we wanted to start it so the folks back on the East Coast who we love and miss could keep up with us and see what we are up to.  Her mistake was giving me edit access so I could review it before we published it.  My mistake was starting to edit it, then hitting ctrl-z one too many times, which deleted the whole thing.  Doesn't sound too bad, right?  Just hit ctrl-r to redo, or exit without saving and come back into it, you say?  This is what I thought too except that Blogger.com has this great autosave feature that detects when you make a mistake and immediately saves.  So goodbye to Karen's hard work and now you're stuck with my hack writing.  Thanks Google!  As a tribute to the effort she put in to it, I am going to write this from her perspective, so here we go.

Hi All.  As most of you know, Ed and I moved across the country from Raleigh NC to Santa Cruz, CA in Jan 2012 so I could pursue a great opportunity as a post-doc at UCSC, and we could experience what it was like to live on the beautiful Pacific coast.  To avoid paying sky high rent, we bought a little purple house at the end of a cul-de-sac, right next to a cute park and community garden.  The name of our blog comes from one of the rooms in this house.  The place was tenant occupied when we looked at it, so we barely even got to glance into the bedrooms before we put an offer on it, and did not get to look into the garage at all.  When we went to have the inspections done, the tenants who were living there conveniently 'lost the keys' to the garage, which had a room in the back, so we were not able to see it.  We speculated that there may have been some semi-legal horticulture going on in there, but when our realtor, Shemeika (if you are buying or selling a house in Santa Cruz, use her.  She’s awesome.  Here’s her website), got in, here is what she found: 

Just because you can't see the ninja doesn't mean he's not there.

Note the sweet assortment of weapons above the bed and respectable collection of action figures around the perimeter.  She sent us the photo with the label ‘Artist Studio.’ Ed, having a quick wit to match his dashing good looks, dubbed it a 'martial' artist studio.  Based on the secretive nature of its occupant, who we never were able to see, we determined (s)he must be some sort of ninja.  We also forgave the tenants for not letting us in previously because you obviously don't just let somebody into a ninja's bedroom without some pretty serious repercussions.  So now that you have seen the Ninja room, here is the rest of the house.

Check out the crazy layout of this place.  They managed to make a 850sf floor plan seem even smaller.  Most of these walls are getting moved.

Here's a view of the kids playground from our living room window.  We can stare out this window at the children playing any time we want to feel like creepy neighbors.

Check out some of the awesome things this place came with:

•  Gas fireplace - check

• fruit trees - check

• flowering shrubberies – check

• Hot tub time machine with ladder - check

• remodeled kitchen with leaky gas stove - check 

Looks like remodel was about 20 years ago.  Also coincidentally, the last time it was cleaned

• creepy little plastic toys - um...ok, check.

• Urine soaked carpets- check

Carpets came up on day 1. Hello subfloor.

• termites - sorry...we had to gas you

you don't want to go into this circus, kids.

• cat - what?

Yes, the house came with a cat.  He even had a back story.  'Westin,' or 'Kitty,' as we were first introduced to him, was found by the previous owners during a trip to the Carribean about 11 years ago.  He was abandoned by his mother at about 3 weeks old before they rescued him, emigrated him into the US, and set him up with a blanket, some food and a cat door.   We later found out that he was more commonly called 'Evol' or 'Evil' (not sure of the spelling), due either to his stunt skillz or his propensity to lash out without notice.  Karen renamed...I mean I renamed him 'Scrappy' due to his ability to survive his abandonment and adapt to his new environment.  He is generally very sweet, affectionate and indifferent to what you call him as long as you feed him, pet him when he wants you to, and don't f with him when he doesn't.  The challenge sometimes is determining when he doesn't want to be pet. 

Here he is in a good mood:

I love you!  Pet me!

Here he is in a bad mood:

You come near me and I will cut you

Apparently Scrappy is pretty much legend in our neighborhood and rolls with a gang of feral white cats.  Their arrangement is something like this:  they let him hang out with them in the park and he lets them come in to our house through the cat door and eat his food while we are away, or even just in the other room, secure in the knowledge that there is an infinite supply and we will just refill his bowl.

One of Scrappy's buddies.

And I guess that's about it for now.  Cheers!