I'm All Out of Titles

Yep. Just fresh out. Maybe something exciting will happen that will inspire a catchy title for next time. I hope it's something like, "THE HOUSE SOLD TODAY!!!!" ;-)

Yesterday James got up and headed into town to attend a Bob Ross painting class at Hobby Lobby. Makes me smile (and usually laugh, too) to think about it. I love it that he's found this nice, relaxing hobby to enjoy occasionally. He needs to be able to just get away from things for a while. Unfortunately, the class was cancelled and nobody called to let him know it. Bummer. Anyway, while he was gone...

Jason called and said some folks wanted to come look at the house in about an hour! WA-HOO!!!! We've been praying for that BIG TIME. It's only the third showing since we listed the house about six weeks ago. Crazy, hu?! When our house was on the market in Texas we had five to eight showings a week. It was pretty annoying, really! Now we're experiencing the other extreme. Anyway, God has really been helping us in our prayers over the whole sell-the-house/get-moved-to-Alabama thing and I've been feeling like my faith has really been strengthened. I feel like I EXPECT things to happen soon. I don't want to be one of those people who's always saying "God showed me that..." and then rattling off some prediction--that seldom actually comes to pass! But I told James a few days ago that something in me just sort of expects that we're going to get an offer on the house this week. I'm really hoping it's from the Lord, of course, but either way it feels good to have your faith stirred and to have high expectations of good things happening and God answering your prayers. He's so good to us. :-) Back to the showing... I hung up with Jason and got the kids hoppin', helping to get everything straightened up and looking purty. James got home from his cancelled class just as we were finishing, so he took the kids and left. Jason had told me that the lady coming to look is a realtor who's looking to buy for herself and she said it didn't matter if we were home or not. James and I both felt like maybe I should be here when they came. She and her husband seemed to really like it and had nothing but compliments for it. "I love your house and you've done a great job with presentation [That's the realtor speaking, of course. Ha!] Everything is in pristine condition and just looks fantastic. We'll definitely keep it on the list." So that's good news! The "keep it on the list" statement seems to imply that they plan to do some more looking and there's no telling how much time they'll spend doing it, but... who knows?! If they are the people that God has chosen to buy this place He can put it in their hearts to do it quickly. Right now they own a 3,400 square foot adobe house in Albuquerque that they're trying to sell for about half a million dollars. HA! Can you imagine somebody like that even LOOKING at my house?! Crazy. They are wanting to downsize, the husband said. She loved the log wallpaper (Ha!) and he loved the view. Walk-in closets in every room help, too. I wondered if they need to sell their house before they buy one... but perhaps they're rich enough they could just slap the cash on the table and sell their other house later on, right?! It's all in God's hands. I feel very relaxed about it and like I even sort of have a hard time praying about it anymore--almost like I've got the house thing prayed through and can't get inspired to really pour my heart out over it at this point! I'm not stopping, of course, but it's harder to really GET INTO prayer about it for some reason.

Once the people left and James brought the kids home we finished up on school, then loaded up and went to the library. Came home and James chopped up some of the roasted chili Erika had given us and made some queso with it--to go along with the tamales we had again for dinner. YUM. The rest of the evening escapes me.

Today was a good and productive day. The kids did good in school and enjoyed the experiment for science class. They were supposed to time themselves while walking one mile. Tomorrow they're supposed to use bikes or roller skates to do the mile, then the next day walk again and see how long it takes once more. I was ironing, so James took Katie and Joe (Sam was still at home, working on the dinner he was unhappy about having to eat) and dropped them off on the bike trail, then followed them for the mile. Ha! I told him to drive and measure out half a mile to see how far it is, then he could park and walk there and back WITH the kids. Nope, he's a driver not a walker. ;-) Another man saw the kids walking on the trail and our van following them and got concerned. He turned around and came and asked James if they were his children, just to make sure something bad wasn't going on. I'm sure a bad guy probably would've said they were his children too (right?!), but I appreciated that there are good folks out there who are concerned for other people. :-) James showed him the stopwatch and explained that the kids were doing an experiment and the reason he was there at all was because he won't allow them to go out alone without supervision! Anyway, they came home breathless and excited--and anxious to be able to ride the mile tomorrow. :-)

As for me, I did all of the laundry AND ironing (thank you, thank you), made homemade chicken pot pie for dinner (using up a pack of chicken from the freezer AND some chicken broth I had frozen AND some frozen veggies--Wa-Hoo!!! We're emptying that freezer out, just as planned!) and it turned out really good... despite what Sam (and maybe Joe) would say about it. I read library books to the kids for a while before family devotions, then afterwards I got to work on transcribing my session for the Assembly Minutes. I got half of it done tonight! That makes me VERY happy, most of all because it fills me with hope than I can complete the other half tomorrow night and be DONE with that responsibility. :-) We'll see if I can actually pull it off or not.