So, remember how I talked on Day One about getting an apartment?  And how it was scary and what if I can’t do it?  Well, there’s more story on the housing front.

So, I found an apartment.  It was all the things I wanted it to be: close to work, cheap, possessing a fireplace, allowing of dogs…  It was perfect.  I applied, they gave me a move-in date of two weeks from the day I applied.  A week later (a week before I was supposed to move in), they called to tell me that the people in the apartment had decided not to move out and I could have a tiny one-room apartment instead.  Needless to say, with a dog and a cat who DO NOT get along, I turned them down.

Then, my church decided to rent the house they own to someone new because the current tenants were taking such bad care of it.  Choose me!  Choose me!  I will take care of the house!  I will make it pretty again!  The youth want to help me paint it!  The family at the church want to give me furniture and throw me house-warming parties!  It’s more expensive than the apartment, but it’s a house with a yard and multiple rooms and I am in love with this tiny place.  We tour it, and I see that, indeed, it does need some work.  But the house I live in house needed a LOT of work when we moved in and look where we are now!  (Friends of the family who are deeply nerdy, like us, call it The Last Homely House.) And the priest at our church said that I could do anything I wanted with it, so long as it looked nice, because they’re going to tear it down eventually!  It was perfect, friends.  Until it got looked over by a friend of ours who goes to our church and works in construction.  He found colonies of rats living in the walls and black mold in the drywall of the bathroom.  It would’ve cost twice as much to repair as it will to tear it down.  Of course, everyone made the logical choice, I didn’t move in, they’re tearing it down.

I don’t need to tell you that this is discouraging, friends.  Very discouraging.  So discouraging, in fact, that I had given up on moving at all.  I’d wait til the summer or until God saw fit to drop something right into my lap.  (He does that sometimes, I’ve found.)  I did one of those prayers that Christians do.  You know the one.  “Look, Man, if this is how it’s gonna be, then YOU handle it!  …not like I cared anyway…”

And handle it He did.

I’ve been dating The Bear for a while, driving back and forth to his apartment in Coppell for some time.  Then, one Tuesday, I was too tired for life, and I decided to just stay the night.  How bad could the drive really be?  I’d get up early the next morning.  No, really.  I could make it work.  And if I was late for one day, who cared?  I wasn’t late.  The drive wasn’t bad.  And the next time I was out there The Treecko (The Bear’s roommate) suggested offhandedly that I should move out there, to their complex.  Hahaha, wouldn’t that be funny?!

But the thought festered.  And I looked at websites.  And I suggested it to Marmee.  And she said, “Well, you should make sure the good drive wasn’t just a fluke that day.  Spend a week making the drive.”  So, the Brute Squad (The Bear and The Treecko’s apartment) hosted me for a week.  And the drive was great.  And on Friday, I surprised the Bear by walking up to an apartment in his complex and telling him, “I signed the paperwork for that apartment today.  I move in in June.”

I’m a grownup.  And it’s the best.