Genesis

 Well, welcome! If you've found me, it's either because you know me or you're looking for information I've already found and would love to share. 

I figured I might just as well start a blog, being that people are going to be tired of me going on and on about all these good things and trials on Facebook. I reckon this is a better way to have people get the info they want to when they want to instead of being force-fed my Facebook feeds, haha. 

I think it might be better to start y'all off at the beginning. I'm AJ, I have an amazing husband of 13 years, and we have two pretty cool kids. I'm from the panhandle of Florida, born and raised, I joke with people at work that I own the house I grew up in and I work in the hospital I was born in. I'm a nurse and I work in critical care; my husband is semi-retired and is a stay-at-home dad most of the time. My voice and accent sound a lot like Kathy Bates, so if you're reading this, do me a favor and spin that Fried Green Tomatoes drawl on it. Or if you're more an Office fan, some of that Jo Bennett sass. TOWANDA!

I digress. 

Dear Husband (DH) did well with his own business when we were first dating and married, enough so that I could stay at home with the kiddos and go to college in my spare time. After a few failures to launch at career paths I stuck with nursing and, well, here we are. We have had some lean times like paying light bills with the last bit of our credit cards, and we've had some good times like six figures in the bank account-but thick and thin, sickness and health, we've stuck it out and plan on many more years together. He's the other half Zeus was afraid I'd find.

Speaking of that, after we lost our rural home in Hurricane Sally (I'll spare you the lengthy story), we bought my father's house where I grew up in the middle of the city. I miss living out in the country but not nearly as much as my DH does. After everything was settled with the loss of the rural home, we found ourselves with a bit of surplus cash we could purchase some land with. It was always our intention to purchase a few acres in a rural area and build a home one day, but we didn't expect that to happen quite as fast as it has. Well, the buyin' part anyways. We asked around and it didn't take long for a realtor to approach us with some acreage; but there was a hitch. The acreage was tied to a church, and it had been the church's intention to turn the property into a cemetery. The land had previously been zoned as a cemetery and had a body buried there, but the body had been exhumed years ago and moved back to the existing church's graveyard several miles away.

*Fun fact* A cemetery is a large burial area that is not next to a church, and a graveyard is an extension of a church yard. 😉

We drove out to see the acreage for the first time. It was breathtaking. 

Now as a disclaimer, I'm not a "spooky b*tch" but I do enjoy things some would call typical weirdo witchy stuff-tarot cards, moon cycles, superstition stuff, old wives' tales, cemeteries and graveyards, historical sites (especially Florida history), antiques and oddities, I'm a self-proclaimed Pagan Christian; so DH knew this property would be right up my oddball alley and he was so right. The property was so peaceful, it was already cleared with a few cypress ponds, and was 85% high and dry land. It had two concrete angel boundary markers from the previous cemetery that had been left to the elements, forgotten for over two decades to cry stone tears with outstretched arms, watching and waiting for whatever the future would bring. An added benefit was the location-although it was on a dirt portion of the road and frontage to the interstate, it was across the dirt road from my stepfather's larger parcel of acreage that we would have access to. In total it would be 100 acres for us to camp, hunt, ride, shoot, fish, and play on. 

Anxiously, we put in an offer. And waited. And waited. We talked to the realtor and realized we would have to wait for the elders of the church to meet and vote to approve or deny the offer which would take another week or so. 

So, we waited.

A week went by, and the realtor called. With bated breath, we answered the phone to find out the elders had voted....

AND ACCEPTED OUR OFFER!

The gorgeous piece of property was to be ours. We sent our earnest money as quickly as we could get to the bank. It was torture for me to keep quiet, but I didn't want to do ANYTHING to jinx us or have any hoodoo spoken against us to break that thin thread of hope and trust that we would soon have the deed in hand. 

Two weeks later we signed for our 20 acres with a view. The view was of tall timber pines, cerulean skies, and puffy white clouds, and that was the most amazing thing. Just to know that a property is yours, free and clear, 'without lien or encumbrance', it's just a feeling of empowerment and freedom. 

True to my nature and training as a real estate paralegal prior to my nursing career, I decided to do some hunting for information on the property involving the existing well and power pole, and the property lines. The realtor did not know anything about the origins of the well or when it was installed but she was told at one point it was a 'commercial well'-whatever that means, so I scoured the web for information. Florida has very broad laws regarding public records and permits, so almost EVERYTHING is online if you know where to look. 

I'll leave y'all a list of links if you're interested.

Anyway, after searching I found that well permitting is posted online. It wasn't listed under the church's name and the property had no address. This meant that it was listed only by the road name, and the permitting request could have been filed under anyone's name from the church. A lot of work is done in that area through a 'friend of a cousin' type relationship, so it could have been anyone. I tried searching using the names on the annual filing for the church as a business on Florida's business registration site to no avail. As a final resort I called the power company and requested the information for the power pole. I had a hunch that the pole may have been installed to power the well, and I was right. The customer service representative at the power cooperative told me there was no address listed, the service was listed under the church's name and designated 'Well Power.' It had been installed in November of 1998. With that narrowing my search, I found the well permit listed under a random person's name in late October 1998. The next part shocked me to my core.

The well was 540' deep. 

Five hundred and forty feet deep. 

At 420' deep the drilling report says they hit stone, and they drilled another 120'. Almost all of the residential wells in that area are between 130-180' deep. This well not only went through the aquifer, but it was also buried in the limestone beneath Florida. 

A well of this depth would easily cost over $30,000.00 today. There were no documents sent to us about the well, so we do not know how much the church actually paid for the well drilling. The power pole installation and power lines being run, as well as the pump itself for the well would have cost several thousand dollars as well. 

Talk about somebody must be prayin' for us. 

DH and I chattered back and forth about the well, what we needed to fix the well pump, transferring the power into our names, and putting up gates and signs to alert potential trespassers they were not welcome. I opened the property appraiser's site and noticed a discrepancy; on the west side of the property the neighbor appeared to be encroached on our land. I showed it to DH and he agreed, however we did not get a survey of the property done. This was going to be a problem and would need to be handled sooner rather than later. 

Well, that was a problem for the in-person, and looking for improvements and camping gear could be done on Amazon. Which I did. 

Oh, I did. 

And that's where I'll leave this post. More to come. 💖