What goes up must come down

As much as Grant and I tried not to, we really were getting our hopes up about that house. Last Thursday, the day we were supposed to look at it one more time and possibly make an offer, our realtor called. It already had an offer. We were too late. Grant and I were both really disappointed. We told our realtor to let us know the moment anything falls through, but that's about all we could do.

This is what it looks like from the outside. Pretty cute, isn't it? Oh well. We had been praying about it, so the Lord must have something else in mind for us right now.

Here was the happiest part of my day that day: After I talked to Grant on the phone and received our bad news, I put Eleanor down for a nap and went to check the mail. There was a package in the mail addressed to me from some music company. I hadn't ordered anything. I couldn't imagine what it might be. When I opened it, I found Three Dog Night's greatest hits CD and nothing else. I immediately knew how it found me.

When I was younger, I would play video games in our basement, Atari, and some Nintendo or Sega. I mostly liked playing Joust on Atari. We had an old stereo system down there that had radio, a record player, and an 8-track player. I didn't like all the commercials that came with radio, and the only record we had that I liked was a single ("Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen). You can only listen to that song so many times before you get sick of it. I wasn't familiar with any of the bands we had on 8-track, except one: Three Dog Night. We had their greatest hits, and I listened to it over and over and over, singing along while playing Atari. If you're not familiar with the band name, just think, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog!" If that doesn't help you, you're on your own.

Years later, I bought the greatest hits CD for my dad, knowing the 8-track had been his. When we were in Utah, I asked him if I could copy the CD because I had heard one of the songs on a TV show, and it got me missing the music. My dad, being true to form, couldn't find it anywhere. I reminded him several times to look for it, and when I left, I told him I still expected him to find it for me. He offered to give me the money to download it on Napster or I-tunes, but I told him it was the principle of him actually having to find something he had misplaced. So, the copy I received in the mail wasn't the long-lost copy I gave my dad years ago, but I knew my dad had sent it. It was the perfect moment, when I was bummed out about the house, to know that he was thinking of me. I guess I'll have to burn him a copy.

We did go look at several houses that evening and took one last forlorn look at the house that slipped through our fingers. We weren't interested in any of the other houses. Our realtor took a look at our house to get an idea of what we might be able to ask for it. We had previously hoped to remodel to make it larger, but she said that if we were to make it bigger, we would never be able to find the comps we needed in our neighborhood to get out of it what we put into it. She also said that we weren't very likely to have a contingent offer on our house selling accepted unless our house was already on the market or already in escrow. Grant and I talked it over that evening, and we decided to put the house on the market. This could get interesting, considering we don't know where we'll live if it sells (if all else fails, my parents have a one-room apartment off of their house we can stay in for a while). Our house isn't actually on the market yet. We're waiting to hear back from our realtor and start taking steps in that direction. Anybody want to live in the seafoam? It has treated us well.