monday, monday

Today didn't start so great. Let me back up a little.

Last week we showed the house, and there was one standout among the potential renters. She applied with Renters Warehouse, her background checked out nicely, and she put down a deposit. She also agreed to a two-year lease. We were thrilled. We were so happy to have found a renter and could hardly believe our good fortune. This morning our RW representative emailed Brett that the lady backed out. AAAHHH! He said there were eight other people who wanted to see our place, though.

We are supposed to head out of town tomorrow, and we were just going to leave Topher, our cat, with enough food and water for the days we would be gone. Well, the RW guy wants to show our house while we're gone (which is preferable to us anyway), but we can't have our cat roaming about the house, so we were scrambling to find someone to take care of him. This is so ironic because we have been going back and forth about surrendering our cat to the Humane Society before we move. I even filled out the application last week, but then we just couldn't do the next step. Stella loves our cat, and we couldn't imagine giving him up after he has been a part of our lives for the past six or so years. And here it would've been a lot easier if he wasn't around because we have to find someone to watch him now. Brett called around to see if we could board him somewhere while we were gone. While he was calling the boarding place, I called my aunt Sara. Thankfully my aunt is able to take care of him, which will save us a ton 'o money. Thanks, Aunt Sara!

Over the weekend, my car was acting funny - the engine was working extra hard to turn over, and it was laboriously trying to get up to 55 mph. Anything over that, it was just freaking out. This happened two years ago when Stella was a couple weeks old and I was driving to a baby shower. The car conked out on me. When we brought it in, it turned out to be a transmission problem. After paying a huge bill on that, our car seemed good to go. We are praying it's not the transmission again because we don't want to put any more money into it since it's a 1999, and we've spent enough on it as it is. We also don't have money for a car payment right now. I had a doctor appointment scheduled for this morning (which I had to cancel), and also needed to run errands for the trip, but Brett wasn't sure if I should drive it. He called AAMCO this morning, and the mechanic strongly recommended I not drive the car today until they look at it. We are going to drop the car off tonight.

So tonight Brett will be mowing the lawn; we'll be dropping my car off at the shop as well as dropping off our cat and all his accoutrements in Minnetonka, plus running errands for the trip and packing our stuff, oh, and cleaning the house to get it ready for showings. I am going to clean as much as I can while Stella is napping (I think she just fell asleep after goofing off for a while in her crib).

We had an insanely full weekend - fun and social, but we didn't have much downtime to recover at all (super essential to my personality type, so I am feeling extremely drained). Corinne and Jared had flown a crazy number of hours from Qatar to O'Hare to Mpls on Thursday (arrived Thursday night), so Stella and I got to spend time with them on Friday. Saturday Brett was over at the new house mowing the lawn and getting stuff at Home Depot to install the new washer and dryer. He didn't have enough time because we had a party to go to, and we dropped Stella off at my parents' to spend the night so that we could stay out late. We went to a fun wine party at Jeff and Ashley's house (I had a really nice time even though I couldn't drink anything - haha). We got home around 11:30 p.m., and had to get up at 7:15 to drive over to my parents to get Stella and go to church. After church, we showed my parents and Jared and Corinne the progress on our new house, and then went to lunch. After lunch, we went back to my parents' for awhile because Luke and Naomi were arriving. We then went home to nap Stella. It was past her nap time and she was falling apart on the way home. After her nap we met up with Luke and Naomi and showed them the house. On the way home, my car was getting even worse. We prayed about the car last night. Now we are praying again for a good renter. Erik, the RW guy, said that there are two sisters who are interested in our place, and they love the location. I hope the fact that we have a bedroom and bathroom on each level will appeal to them because they'll have their own private living space.

I'm hoping we will be able to enjoy our trip up North with my family and not be worrying about renters or the cost to fix my car, etc...

Well, time to sign off and clean, clean, clean.

What are your Fourth of July plans?