Playing it Cool

Today I am thankful because:
1. We met with a loan officer and feel more convinced than ever that we should own The House.

2. I heard a very good and well-timed sermon yesterday titled Conquering Complaining. In short, change crappy situations if you can, but if you can't, get over yourself and be thankful for all the wonderful things in your life. I'm trying.

3. We went to a new Sunday School class and it was much more our speed with mature adults, a teacher who seems to be secure in his faith, and potential friends.

4. We had a good talk with our Realtor, who I think we can trust. He made me feel better about what we have in mind time-wise versus what people expect (and they jibe better than I thought they would).

5. Mostly I am thankful that Z and I are equally in love with this house. It's not that one of us loves it and the other is settling to make them happy. We are both genuinely excited about the prospect of this house being The House.

Yesterday we went to church and tried out a new Sunday School class. What a relief – it was so much better. That's a class I can see us enjoying and growing in. I think there are potential friends there, too. One couple invited us to sit with them in church, which was nice, considering the other classes we'd attended seem to be full of cliques.

The sermon was also very nice, as mentioned above. However, someone around me smelled horrendous and made it hard for me to concentrate (obviously I didn't Conquer Complaining while listening to the sermon – it takes longer than that). Also, some old woman kept shoving me farther and farther down the pew to make room for her tardy husband. (Yes, she literally shoved me. During a prayer.)

After church we had lunch and changed clothes to go house hunting again. We wound up seeing about 10 or 12 houses. Most of them were big fat "no"s. A few were kept on the list, pretty much out of my desire to be polite. But just The House remains on our real list. The others just do not compare – they aren't even close. The space, the price, the looks, the acreage, the location: it's all almost perfect. So we're feeling much more serious about it now. At first we were in love with it, but we had a dozen other houses on our list to go tour. Well most of those were really bad, some were OK-ish, but none were as great as The House.

In case you're not keeping up with the countdown (what's wrong with you?) it's still 18 days until bar results. So now it's just a tense wait…

We met with the loan officer today at lunch. We pretty much got the news we expected, except that starting Oct. 1st, the percentage required for down payment on our particular loan changes, and we'd be about 30 days late to take advantage of the lower price. But other than that, we were not surprised by anything, which is just the way I like it. Today was not an official pre-approval, but just a running of hypothetical numbers. She says the next step is to find a house. Of course, we have found a house, but – couldn't you tell – we're playing it cool.