You know how when you move into a new place, there are certain quirks and things you don’t discover until you are actually living there? 

At our old house the faucet in the upstairs bathroom was leaky, and if you didn’t notice it was dripping down the faucet, it would eventually spread across the vanity, and start dripping onto the bathroom floor.  From there, there was some sort of leak where the flooring met the wall, and the water would trickle all the way down the ceiling, and eventually drip, drip, drip it’s way down through the living room ceiling.  This happened several times while we lived there, the first being only a few days after we moved in.  I came downstairs to find that there was literally a shower pouring out of the ceiling in the living room.  It is those exact moments that remind me why we rent.

It happened a few more times over the course of the year, because the faucet was super tricky and totally silent.  You couldn’t actually hear the drip, you had to watch for it.  The ceiling was yellowed and flaking and gaping for oh – ten months – until our landlord decided he wanted to put the house on the market, so he finally came over to fix it.  He said he would replace the faucet, but didn’t, and instead just painted like ten coats of paint over the yellow to mask all the water damage.  Casey and I have had many laughs since we moved, sitting and wondering how long it took the new suckers that bought that house to figure out that the faucet can basically single-handedly destroy the living room.  Poor silly homeowners.

Anyways, so when we moved to Charlotte, it was inevitable that there would be certain weird things in the house that we would discover once we lived here.  Things you can’t possibly know when you tour as a prospective renter.  While those things definitely exist, the number one discovery is something I could not have predicted…

TURTLES.

Yes, turtles.  Here’s a fun little fact about our house.  There is a creek that runs behind our lovely park-like backyard.  Waaay beyond the trees and the fence, this little creek runs all the way down to the big McAlpine Creek.  Well that’s all fine and great, right?  We can’t even see it, and it has nothing to do with our house – nooo big deal.

So apparently this creek is home to a large turtle population.  And when it rains, the turtles climb up from the creek to…get away from the water?  I have no idea why.  But when it rains here, our backyard becomes a turtle sanctuary.  Oh, so cool – turtles are so cute, right?  Not so much, when you have two turtle hunters that go completely ape-shit when they discover one.  And we are talking lots of turtles.  No sooner do I do a rescue and release turtle mission, that the dogs are back at it, sniffing out another. 

So when it rains, we basically can’t even let the dogs into the backyard.  They have become expert turtle hunters.  And they don’t actually know what to do with the turtles since they are city dogs.  They just bark and snap and create a huge scene, so proud of their amazing hunting abilities.  Every time, I have to go find my shoes, go racing outside, and save the turtles with my bare hands.  Seriously.  I have to pick these things up and carry them over my head, while the dogs jump and leap around me trying to get it, and then I release them in the front yard. 

It rained all day yesterday, so I’m off now to take the dogs for a walk, since I can’t actually let them out in their one acre backyard – ridiculous.  Here’s hoping for a dry fall season.  No telling what the turtles are capable of if it snows!