Finding a House, Teaching, Selling a House

Life has been busy the last few weeks. Sandwiched between my (Jonathan's) two seminars, Kristy and I flew into Iowa and looked at houses for a week. After almost a week of looking from 9 in the morning till 5 at night, and driving all over the countryside, we made an offer for a wonderful home on several acres in the countryside with cornfields behind it, and a pond off in the back.

There is already a garden spot, a barn and basic fencing. We plan on adding an orchard and then looking into some animals. We'll start with a dog and work our way up to real farm animals.

Before the house hunting trip Jonathan was in downtown Chicago teaching his Actuarial Seminar at the DePaul Conference center to over 50 actuarial students. It was a grueling 4 days - set up at 7:00am, teach from 8 till 5, take down my gear till 6, eat dinner and study my notes for the next day till 9pm, then crash at 10pm and start at 6:00am the next day. But eating out was a nice change of pace, the students were a fun bunch, the facilities were excellent, and the feedback was extremely positive.

While we were gone, the kids were split up and sent to friend's houses. They had a great time playing with their friends and Emily even learned how to walk while we were gone. It was so cute to have her come toddling up to us when we got back. After the house hunting trip, I repeated the teaching regime, only this time in Hartford.

Meanwhile, as I am teaching all day, Kristy has been fielding house viewings because our Connecticut home went on the market the day we got back from Iowa. Due to the low price we put on the house, there were a lot of interested people scheduling viewings. Which meant Kristy had to vacate the house for large portions of the day with David and Emily. She made a lot of trips to the library and to various parks and school playgrounds around town.

We basically ate out every night of the week: McDonalds, Burger King, Boston Market, Pizza Hut. But after only one week on the market, on Saturday (yesterday), late at night we received a solid offer on the house! Hurray!

Yesterday was also my last day of Seminar teaching. Hurray!

In 1.5 weeks I'll fly to Iowa to start work, and a few weeks later I'll come back out to help drive the family over to our new house.