I know I’m among the guilty; in my defense, it has been a very eventful month, even by our normally chaotic standards:
b Since I’m in the accounting field, the first couple months of the year is one long string of reporting deadlines, which naturally translates into many hours working at the office & home.
b There was a train of birthdays: Sam, Jessica, my dad, niece, grandmother, both sisters, & two good friends, with the requisite parties & gatherings~ February is an expensive month around here.
b To my extreme dismay, I had to have a tooth pulled; a previously root-canalled molar fractured vertically under the crown, leading to a 14 mm gum pocket & severe infection. Everything went swimmingly & work on the bridge will start in a couple weeks, but I’m still mourning the loss~ I’m not vain about much, but I’ve always been proud of my teeth.
b I managed to slip away to the annual Stitches West conference at the end of February~ three days of technique classes, yarn fondling, & solitude. I even returned with $15.00 in my pocket & only six skeins of yarn!
b The first of March found me relocating my office again, back to the downtown branch after 2 years. The timing was fortuitous, since all the nearby parking around the other location was eliminated a month earlier & I was making a twice-daily quarter mile hike with all my bags & supplies.
b Two days into the move, I got called up for jury duty; usually I only have to check in every day for a week, but this time I actually had to appear at the courthouse & ended up in the jury pool for a civil case. Fortunately, the projected duration of the trail was 4 to 6 weeks, so the judge excused me, since it would be a severe financial hardship, & I won’t have to serve again for 2 years.
Whew~ that is even more exhausting in print! Oh, I forgot something….
We bought a house.
Seriously.
We got the keys an hour ago.
HALLELUJAH!!!!
I’ve shared with several of you that this has been the dearest wish of my heart for over 20 years, a dream that the logical side of me knew was almost impossible living in California. The crash in the real estate market stirred the embers, so to speak, but it took me months to scratch up to courage to even begin looking, & then once we started last summer, it has been a series of hopes & disappointments which had me strongly considering giving up the whole idea as not meant for us. The end of December, just a few days after my television interview about our experiences as first-time homebuyers, we finally had an offer accepted on a house we really liked~ but it was a short sale property, so we settled in for another wait on the lenders. Having been burned before, we continued looking at foreclosure properties as they came up; February 4th, I saw a house with our agent that was very promising, so we scheduled an appointment for Chris to see it on Saturday. We submitted a pretty aggressive offer (for us) that afternoon, just meeting the submission deadline; the bank began looking over the offers on Tuesday, & Wednesday morning, our agent called that they had countered only our offer & wanted a 30-day close of escrow!
It’s been a whirlwind of activity ever since, with inspections, appraisals, form signing, telephone calls, repairs~ all the infinite details involved with buying a house~ culminating in today’s event: Chris & I receiving the keys to our own home.
God is good.
For the life of me, I could not get any traction in my hikers, and had to hold on to Chris' arm the whole way to avoid another fall~ now that my arm is finally bordering on the functional, I am not about to go thru all that nonsense again!
We continued up Highway 4 until we reached the road closure at Bear Valley Resort, right around 7000 ft; it was approaching sunset, so we took a little stroll to the Hell's Kitchen overlook to watch for the full moon rising thru the clouds (only glimpses and no decent photos), before heading back to our valley home. 
