Moving stuff again

It looks like we got the house! It's hard to find a rental from across the world (although we've mostly rented places sight-unseen, actually...). The place is big (2000 sf), with 70s wood paneling and a strange extra bedroom on the *other* side of a two-car garage. But with a living room, dining room, AND family room, I think we can use one of those extra rooms for a normal bedroom so that our kids don't have to trek through the garage at night to find a bathroom. Big yard, close to school and work. People say it's only a mile and a half to my husband's department offices, but that it's hard to bike or walk "due to the terrain." Okay, it's in the Ozarks, but it's not the Alps! We'll see how it is. It does look like there are some hills, but we've also been on foot for the past two years, and it's toughened us up some. There's a bus line nearby in any case. And the price is great. So it looks like I can live with the wood paneling, seeing as we're getting nearly everything else from our wish list. (No basement in tornado alley--most houses don't have them in Arkansas, I've noticed, but at least it's all brick outside.) There's also a fridge (not always a given in AR rentals, strangely), stove, and washer and dryer, as well as a fenced yard. Anyway, we'll have to think about how to work with the decorating inside. I don't remember much of what we actually still own and what furniture we got rid of, so it might depend on what random bits we end up with for this location.

The nice thing is that now we can enroll our kids in school (okay, THEY might not think that's a good thing!). It looks like we're in the school that takes in a lot of international students thanks to parental university involvement, which will be good for our kids. Not the best rated school, not the worst. As always, there's a direct tie with the amount of $$ the people in the zone have and with the whiteness levels. Since I want my kids to be citizens of the world and colorblind, I'm fine NOT living in the whitey white areas, thanks. Plus, they don't need to compare themselves to classmates who get driven the half mile to school every day in the family's Hummer 3 (I'm not kidding--we lived in a school district like that once.)

I hadn't realized how much the house was adding to my stress levels. It feels good to have that taken care of! There's just a bit more space in my lungs now.

It's also Saturday--no drills!! I HOPE I can get some writing time in. I feel like I need it today.