Daily Tender Mercies

We studied it out in our mind. We weighed our pros and cons. We made a decision. We prayed about it. We felt good about it. We moved forward. We got what I would consider a great deal on a nice home. We got almost $17,000 off the asking price about about $41,000 off the estimated appraisal price of the home. Plus the house is vacant so we should be able to move directly in from this house. Sometimes I think that God only is concerned about our needs. But I have learned over the years that he loves to bless us with our wants as long as we continue to give thanks to him. 

And he who receiveth all things with thankfulness shall be made glorious; and the things of this earth shall be added unto him, even an hundred fold, yea, more.

D&C 78:19

We went and looked at another house tonight. It was a house that we had seen on the market in the past, but had since expired on MLS. It is located in Alpine, which is where I really want to be. All of the homes are higher priced in that area though. It is right at the top of our budget. The home is nice, not nearly as nice as the one we put an offer on, but its in a better area and has a much bigger yard. All things considered, I think I like it better and I think it is a better fit for our family. As the night went on I think Rachel started to agree. As we were leaving Alpine she said, “I just don’t want to make the wrong decision!” I suggested that maybe there wasn’t a wrong decision - it was just a choice… do we want new home with no yard, or old home with bigger yard, more established neighborhood? She then said, “You’re right. Why does everything have to be right or wrong with me?” That just led me to ponder when I was on my mission, in my last few weeks I started wondering what I was going to do when I got home. I worried most about what I would choose as a career. I tried to pray and read scriptures to figure out what the Lord wanted me to do. For some reason I came to the conclusion that I was supposed to be a polition. I hated politics though and had no interest in any of it. In my final interview with my mission president, I don’t know if I brought it up, or if he sensed my concern, but he said, “your job is just a vehicle for your service in the church.” He basically went on to say that I should just choose whatever I enjoy doing and that will lead me to a career that I would enjoy and give me time to spend with family and fulfill church callings (yeah, sounds a lot like my patriarchal blessing). I don’t know that I was totally convinced of his advice at first because I remember going home and looking into political science majors at BYU. Luckily I did come to my senses and I am doing what I enjoy now.

So while choosing a home is a big decision, it is still just a decision. There may not be a right or wrong - just a choice. I must say that even though it would be nice sometimes for God to point his finger at the choice that will make us most happy for whatever reason, I’m still so glad he doesn’t do that and allows us to have our agency.

Gehrig has a new habit when saying family prayers now. When we write in our family gratitude journal at night, he remembers what everyone said they were thankful for, he he includes that in his prayer. It’s quite impressive really that he thought of it.

I remember one night I said I was thankful for peanut butter because at the time I couldn’t think of anything else. I think Gehrig mentioned he was grateful for peanut butter in each of his prayers for almost a week.

Tonight for family home evening we talked about faith. We had just eaten home made pizza where we put pinapple on it. The kids wanted more pinapple. They wanted more pinapple afterwards, so I got this idea in my head. I went downstairs and got another can of pinapple and tore the label off. They had no idea nor even attempted a guess at what it was. I wispered to Rachel what it was then allowed her to tell them. After that we talked about faith and read Alma 32:21. We talked about faith and related it to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Even though we have never seen Them, we know They are there. I asked Gracie how she know that the can had pinapple and not Olives? At first she looked at me like I was trying to trick her, then she just smiled and said, “Because I have faith.” I then confirmed their faith by opening the can and letting them eat all the pinapples. I’m sure that was their favorite part.

This morning while Rachel was getting ready, I watched some church videos with Gracie. One of them was about the Book of Mormon. It showed a clip of President Ezra Taft Benson in which he said the following: 

“If we would avoid adopting the evils of the world, we must pursue a course which will daily feed our minds with and call them back to the things of the Spirit. I know of no better way to do this than by reading the Book of Mormon.”

And then he concluded: “And so, I counsel you, my beloved brothers and sisters and friends everywhere, to make reading in the Book of Mormon a few minutes each day a lifelong practice. “I feel certain that if, in our homes, parents will read from the Book of Mormon prayerfully and regularly, both by themselves and with their children, the spirit of that great book will come to permeate our homes and all who dwell therein. The spirit of reverence will increase; mutual respect and consideration for each other will grow. The spirit of contention will depart. Parents will counsel their children in greater love and wisdom. Children will be more responsive and submissive to that counsel. Righteousness will increase. Faith, hope, and charity—the pure love of Christ—will abound in our homes and lives, bringing in their wake peace, joy, and happiness.” (Marion G. Romney, in Conference Report, Apr. 1960, pp. 110–13.)

That made me think. Recently it seems we’ve had an abundance of contention as our kids don’t seem to care what we say. They just ignore us. We do our best to read in the Book of Mormon each night. Just before church as we were all ready to go, but still had 20 minutes before it was time to leave, the kids were bing especially rowdy and not listening to us. Finally, Rachel left the house to get in the car for peace and quiet. I told the kids to get in the car. Once I got in and was ready to drive to church, Rachel mentioned that we were still quite early. I remembered the quote above and suggested that we read in the Book of Mormon. We finished off the chapter we were currently in. After that, I think the whole day went a lot smoother. I can’t really remember a point of contention we had the rest of the day after that! I put the Lord’s prophets’ words to the Lord, and He fulfilled His promises.

We spent the day looking at houses. We left the kids with Rachel’s mom. After looking at all the houses I think we determined that we prefer newer houses over older ones. That sounds like a given, but the trade-off is that you get bigger yards, more mature trees and neighborhoods with older houses. The new homes were built on smaller lots so you don’t have much yard and houses are so close together. We did decide to put an offer on one home. It was in Cedar HIlls. We like it because it is newer (built in 2007) and has nice upgrades. It’s 3 bedrooms 3 bathrooms with an unfinished basement. It borders a golf course so we don’t have to worry about backyard neighbors (just flying golf balls). The only concern we have is parking space. There is a 2 car garage, but we worry that my truck may not fit in the garage. Also, what happens when our kids get old enough to drive (assuming we are in that house that long)? There is no additional room for parking really. the side yard is not big enough to even try to add more parking. But the pros outweigh the cons. It’s a short sale so the price is good, but it may take a while to see if the bank will approve our offer.

After we got home tonight Rachel and I unwound by playing Mario cart for about an hour.

Rachel and I just gone done going through the budget together. I always enjoy doing it together because generally it is just me and then I give her a printout of where we are at and she says “OK”. It’s been helpful to get on the same page and set some goals as well be purchasing a new home and our mortgage payment could go up as much as $500/month. I didn’t know how we could do it, but we’ve found a number of ways we can scale back to make things work.

Tomorrow Emily is coming down and we’ll be looking at about 20 houses and hopefully making an offer on one of them. I’m a little nervous, but excited.

As we have been looking for houses we started tracking them in an Excel spreadsheet. It became problematic though. Here are the reasons why:

• Rachel just couldn’t figure out URLs and hyperlinks
• Sometimes we looked at houses on the computer, sometimes on the laptop. Transferring the spreadsheet back and forth became problematic.
• Sometimes I looked on the computer and Rachel looked on the laptop. Keeping the spreadsheet in sync was again, problematic.
• Sometimes Rachel would email the list to her mom or sisters. If they made notes or wanted to add some more to it for us to check out - we were again out of sync.

So I was thinking it would be to have some sort of online spreadsheet to track it in. I first looked at some online spreadsheets like Google Docs, but there were not much better. I looked around for a tool that I could use and didn’t find anything.

I’ve been trying to stay focused on Autovine and not jump from project to project. So I posted a project on GetAFreelancer.com and ended up hiring a kid back east to write a tool for me. It only took him a week and it was not really what I had invisioned, plus it was in Ruby on Rails, which I don’t really know so I didn’t want to maintain it. So I talked myself into writing a tool myself. Withing a few hours I had something workable that was better than the Excel spreedsheet.

It has been fun to work on and I’ve found it quite useful in our quest for our next home. I’ve published the tool at housesheet.com. I keep getting lots of ideas. When I first told Emily (Rachel’s sister - our real estate agent) about it, she thought it was pretty cool, so she showed it to a co-worker. Her co-worker thought it would be a nice tool to have as an agent so she could use it with her clients. So I’ve had lots of ideas for improvements and I think I may be able to find a way to monetize it. So Autovine has once again been put on the backburner while I work on this project. I don’t know when I’ll get back to it, but if I can make this work then I think it will be OK.

We got an offer on our house this morning. The offer was $2000 less than our asking price and they wanted us to pay closing costs and they wanted all our appliances. We counter offered and raised the price and lowered what they wanted us to pay in closing. Essentially our counter offer gave us $10,000 more at closing. They accepted the counter offer and we are now officially under contract!

At around 2:30 today we got a call letting us know that someone wanted to come look at the house between 4:00 - 5:00. I was supposed to be on a support call with a client, so I just went in to work. Rachel packed up the kids and went to visit her grandparents.

Later as we were just finishing dinner, we got a knock at the door. It was the agent that had come by earlier. The person who came through wanted to see it again, but with her college kids that weren’t able to make it before - or something to that affect. So we packed the kids in the car and left - dirty kitchen at all. We weren’t sure were to go, then we remembered President Tindalls invitation to go to the temple before stake conference in two weeks. He said, “notice, I didn’t say anything about age” - specifically inviting all stake members to visit the temple. So we drove down to the Jordan River templer and just drove around it a few times. We didn’t bother getting out of the car, because we didn’t bring jackets. Tonight as we were writing in our gratitude journal, I was pleasantly surprised when both Gehrig and Gracie said they were thankful that they could see the temple tonight. I too am thankful that we live so close to it, and that just a short spontanious drive to it left an impression on the kids.