Good grief….there’s some crazy stuff out there in the world.

Here’s a video of a group of houses that are inside the Great Smokies that were abandoned.

Reading the comments on YouTube, it looks like the houses were in use up until the early 1990’s, when the leases with the park service were not renewed.

And since the leases were not renewed, the houses were left empty and allowed to degrade.

This is not the house we’re considering buying.

But “left empty and allowed to degrade” sounds familiar.

I think that I must either be naïve enough…or optimistic without reason…to believe that when I see a video like this that I’m looking at something that could be reclaimed.

You can get into a lot of trouble if you have enough optimism without some good solid experience to go along with it.

You can get yourself into some crazy projects if you don’t know enough to quit while you’re ahead.

But I guess that’s how you get experience…you make wacky decisions and then deal with all the consequences of those decisions as you go along.

That’s a picture of the house we’re going to buy….

a smaller house on a bigger piece of land.

That’s the way you do it with a growing family!

I watch videos like this and I realized this morning that it’s kind of like visiting the animal shelter…I always meet animals that I want to bring home with me.

When I watch a video like this, I always see something that I feel would make a great house with a lot of work…and probably a lot of money.

“A lot of money” is the key phrase…it’s key. That’s the part where inexperience is going to get you every time.

It’s like going to the home improvement center and buying four times as many plumbing supplies as you need because you just don’t really know what you need…and you know that you can return what didn’t get used.

You slog through this stuff and the next time you do a project, you only buy twice what you need because you have a new found confidence that you might be getting closer to understanding any of what’s going on.

And then, 20 years on down the line, you remember how much of the process you’ve forgotten so when you go to buy supplies, you’re back at close to square one…buying four times what you need again because you never can tell…

Actually, I’m hyping this stuff up…it’ll be alright, we’ll keep our heads above water…we’ll figure this all out.

This video is not my house.

“My house” is not “my house”…it’s just a house that I want to buy.

I think it sounds like I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maybe your dreams help pull you along….maybe you need something to keep you moving forward? I don’t really know.

I know that I’m a lot less tired at the end of the day when these dreams stay up in my head.

I get a lot less fatigued when my dreams only happen when I’m sleeping.