Inspiration

This book is one of the most beautiful additions I've made to my home library, ever. It's chock-full of creative inspiration and makes you feel good about wanting to do nothing but sit around at home and knit, or sew, or bake, or garden, and that it's not wrong or degrading to women to want to do these things, it's a lost art. I LOVE IT. Mom would be proud.

We close on our house this afternoon! As of this weekend, I will finally have my own kitchen where I can get my cook on, and a craft room where I can read, write, sew, knit, and collect snippets of inspiration for future projects. Then Elska Aprons may actually launch one of these days. Score!

Update: As it turns out, we did not close on the house this afternoon. The bank wants to do a three-day review of the documents, so now it won't be until next Tuesday. A week late. This is indeed a frustrating process. All I can say is that I hope all the putting off of the paperwork resulted in the lower interest rate we were told we could get.

It's been a while...

I gotta be honest, I haven't felt like doing much of anything lately, especially blogging. All of my creative energy has been zapped by some pretty crappy and hurtful circumstances that I won't get into here. And besides that, Obama won the election- that's enough to send any true conservative into hiding for a while, no? Anyway, on to the actual, non-political reason for this blog... shocking, I know.

Yesterday was an exiting, life-changing day for Cody and I... we got news that the bank approved our offer on a house! We have been searching for a couple of months now and every time we found something we loved someone else had beaten us to the punch. Let's just say that when the media tells you that the housing market is frozen, they are full of it. Haha. But seriously. The process was becoming so frustrating it was beginning to feel like we would never get a house before we had to move out of here. Well, it turns out God had a plan for us indeed.

Last April, we were thisclose to buying a 1300 sf home in Gilbert for $195k. A day before the inspection period ended, I lost my job and our income was cut in half. We had to give up the house, and I was devastated. Cody assured me that we would be OK and that we had to trust God, and after a while I got over it, and we moved into his mom's house. OUR plan was to live there for about a year and pay off the one loan that we had and then buy a house. GOD'S plan was a little different, however. And since only hindsight is 20/20, I was freaking out when I found out we had to move out sooner than expected, and I didn't know what we were going to do.

As we all know, the market has changed dramatically in the past few months. Foreclosures have skyrocketed, interest rates have dropped, the stock market has been frighteningly volatile. All of these things, however, have created the perfect storm for people like Cody and I as first-time home buyers. So we set off on a mission to find the perfect home for the perfect amount of money, thinking we would snap one up in no time.

Fast forward a couple of months, and we were at the end of our rope, with no desire to rent an apartment in the meantime but feeling like it was inevitable. Keep in mind that we have the most incredible agent ever (if you are reading this and are looking for an agent, I INSIST that you employ him!), but often the seller's agents are flaky, lazy, and just plain don't know what they're doing. So the MLS status will say one thing but something entirely different will be going on with the house. Scott, our agent, knows the process better than we ever could, so we trusted his advice and direction as we navigated our options and knew he had our best interests at heart.

Then Tuesday arrives. We get an email from Scott about a bank-owned listing that had just been reduced that day to $150k... on Monday it was listed at $240k. A $90k drop?! I knew the banks were desperate to get rid of inventory, but that seemed a little ridiculous. I called Scott after work and chatted with him a bit, and we decided to meet at the house to check it out that afternoon. Cody was still at work, so he couldn't be there to meet us. When I pulled up to the house, there was a car in the driveway... someone else was there checking it out. My heart absolutely dropped and I thought there was no way that these people were going to leave the place without going straight to the agent's office to submit an offer, it was that nice. So when Scott showed up and opened the front door, I stepped inside and here's my reaction: "OK... we need to leave right now and put an offer down. We can't let these people beat us to the punch... again!" Thankfully, Scott just kept walking through the house and I followed, and the whole time was beside myself with excitement because this place was beyond anything we had ever hoped for. Scott just kept saying, "What is wrong with this place? There has to be SOMETHING wrong with it... $150k? The bank is crazy!" But we found nothing. Just an amazing house with upgrades galore in a beautiful neighborhood in Gilbert.

I thought we didn't stand a chance.

We all headed straight to Scott's home office and submitted our offer. Wednesday morning, Cody sent in the earnest check. Thursday morning, Cody received a message from Scott saying that there was another offer on the house, which didn't surprise us but was a huge let-down. We thought that even though ours was the first to get to the bank, the bank would be foolish not to take the highest offer, if this other offer was higher than ours. Then, just as Cody was about to encourage me with that day's entry from "My Utmost For His Highest" Scott called us again. He started off the conversation by saying that he had good news and bad news. Sounding rather grim, he shared the bad news first: over the course of the day, several other offers had been submitted. Pause for effect. Then he said, "But the good news is... I got a call from the seller's agent. And the bank accepted your offer immediately. Just like that. I almost peed my pants. And the seller's agent is completely shocked that they took your offer so quickly. I don't even know what to say... this was the nicest house out of all the ones we've seen. And it's worth so much more than you guys are paying for it. Congratulations, friends." I was so happy, so relieved, felt so incredibly blessed that I cried. Behind our wedding day, it was the happiest day of my life.

As excited as I was when I was in the house, I knew I couldn't let myself get too attached to the idea of living there. We had been through enough disappointments to realize that wasn't a smart move. But I honestly had never felt that excited about a house, ever. After we submitted the offer, we submitted the process to God in prayer. I almost felt silly bothering Him with our house troubles, but we both knew that God is always in control and we had to believe that He had our best at heart, whether that meant we get the house or not. Considering the circumstances, I can't help but feel that He intervened to make it happen because He wants us to use our home for His purposes. It has been a dream of ours to do so. I must be honest and say that it was the first time I had submitted the process to God since this whole ordeal began. It was the first time I believed that He had the perfect house set aside for us and it may or may not be the one we liked, but we had to trust in His timing and plan. I know it's easy for me to say now because things worked out... but believe me that if it didn't work out, I would have firmly believed that it was because it wasn't the one. It doesn't mean I wouldn't have been scared and wondering what was going to happen... it just means that I know and believe what Romans 8:28 says.

We feel incredibly fortunate and blessed. All that to say... here it is!

My current obsession with food.

I swear to you, I can't surf around 101 Cookbooks or Smitten Kitchen without uttering the words, "ExCUSE me?!" at least seven times per visit when I look at their recipes. Because who wants to eat Amazing Black Bean Brownies... really? I should be offended by this. And then I totally want to eat them. Why this is appetizing is beyond me. But I am sure that blogs like this inspire me to spend as much time in my kitchen as is humanly possible.

Also, when I walk into stores like Williams Sonoma or Sur La Table I can't help but get a thrill at the thought of a huge kitchen filled with every cooking gadget under the sun, and me inventing culinary delights so ethereal that the heavens open wide and the angels sing upon my creations.

I think the world might actually be coming to an end. I want to do things like sew, cook, and plant a garden. When did I become a vegetarian, chocolate-obsessed, weird brownie-baking, lentil-consuming, Martha Stewart wannabe who actually wants to eat the aforementioned ingredients... all in the same recipe?

...

On another note, I made Cody eat a whole steamed artichoke the other night, and it was *nearly* disastrous. Not quite cooked all the way through, but not entirely a loss for a first-timer. All in all, a thoroughly weird experience. When he got to the part where he had to slice and dice his way through the furry mess to the heart, he sat there with a very concerned look on his face, staring at what was left of the artichoke, and said, "I think I just ate a wombat."

No job, no house.

For the past week, I have been trying very hard to not be bitter at my former boss for letting me go last Monday. VERY hard. And I've found it to be nearly impossible. I have to take responsibility for my terrible judgment call the preceding Friday for calling in to take a personal day (GOD FORBID), but it was certainly an offense I didn't anticipate would result in being accused by my boss of blowing him off on a Friday immediately followed by, "That was your last day. Here's your paycheck." I could go on and on about all the reasons I think this situation was handled with outrageous (mis)judgment, but I'm sure it's best to leave that for my anonymous blog and/or venting sessions with my closest friends and family.

It isn't so much that he fired me for inconveniencing him that hurts the most; it's that as a result of my loss of income, Cody and I lost the house we had been mentally occupying and building our future around for the past several weeks. While I had heard that buying a home is an emotional process, I had no idea that losing one would ever be this hard.

My heart is breaking for another reason: the couple who owns the house has been trying to move to Arkansas for who knows how long (when we first started looking, the home had been on the market for 437 days). Before we came along, they had another buyer who started the process and didn't qualify either. I don't know the details of their situation or why they are moving or when they need to move, but I can only imagine how hard it is to be disappointed repeatedly on such a major life change as moving across the country. I actually kind of want to go knock on their door and tell them how sorry I am for messing up their plans. Fortunately, I think that they would have to admit, just as Cody and I have, that God obviously had something else in mind for all of us.

This past week has been devastatingly hard, and yet a perfect illustration of how sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. Cody and I are so ready to have a permanent home for us and our pups, but as we faced this astronomical change in our circumstances, we came to the realization that 1. We must have been in denial about the numbers, and 2. God is clearly saying, "Not right now." When I say we were in denial about the numbers, I don't mean that we wouldn't have been able to pay our bills; I mean that we ONLY would have been able to pay our bills with little to no wiggle room for a life. We would be house-poor. We became very thankful at the timing of this, because if the process was already finished when it happened, we wouldn't have been able to pay our mortgage. We would much rather lose the home under these circumstances than foreclosure.

We are ready to bounce back though. My dear mother-in-law has opened her home to us in order to pay off our loan and build up more savings for a down payment, and over the next year or so, we should have that finished. We are both so thankful for her support and generosity. We will have more freedom to travel and fulfill commitments we have already made without any stress, like going to see our grandparents in Oklahoma and Illinois, and be in my friend's wedding in Minnesota next summer, and perhaps even a couple more (wink wink). While having no income for now is not ideal, that will change, and my time has been freed up to pursue the things I want to do. I have developed a plan for this next phase of our lives: find a part-time job, build my Web site, do some freelance writing, network, build my pet business, and be able to stay home more with the fur-kids.

For now, I am still being stubborn and bitter about the circumstances that caused us to lose the house. Every time I picture what I thought our lives would have been like in that house I get very, very sad; but those feelings are gradually being replaced by lessons in patience, responsibility, gratefulness, and humility. Clearly, Cody and I aren't the best at listening to God for guidance, because look at the drastic measures He had to take to get our attention. All we can do now is thank Him for being so blatantly clear this time, and work at being better at seeking His wisdom from now on.

Dreams vs. Reality

I don't know what in the world this was about, but I had this bizarre dream last night that there were these people trying to kill Cody and I, and we were getting chased all around, and the front door to our apartment wouldn't latch shut no matter what we did. I woke up in the middle of the night because in my dream, I had been hit in the back with a shower of half-inch-thick, red, plastic arrows, and the dream was so vivid I actually felt it when it happened, which is probably why I was jolted awake. You know what they say- if you die in a dream, you die in real life. Guess it wasn't my time to go yet.

I had some serious issues falling asleep after that, and the muscles in the back of my neck were all tense and knotted up. In the past, this tension has been a sign of some pretty crazy spiritual stuff going on. This dream can be analyzed and interpreted a million different ways, so I'm not going to get into what I think it all means, but given recent events I'm not that surprised by it. Not to mention, I never, ever remember my dreams, but this one was as real as they come.

Every morning, Cody wakes up about an hour before I do. Before he left for work today, he told me that when he woke up and walked out to the kitchen, our front door was wide open.

Well if that's not the creepiest thing I've ever heard...