House Hunting Trip

RJ told me on the phone before I got to Minnesota that he was given a sporty-ish car to get around in for a few weeks.

I didn't think much of it until I saw how popular he was everywhere we went. He got comments from every Tom, Dick, and Henry on this car. I didn't realize how much power a car could give you. My theory is that men who drive expensive cars must be lacking in some area in their lives. I think RJ is just as hot (if not hotter) standing in front of our 2002 minivan. It shows that he's a family man. He is committed and has priorities. He is not at the top of his own list.

We had extra time between most of our appointments. We decided to stop by the local park, eat our lunch and play for a minute. If Beth had seen us, she would have confronted us for being at a park without children. It was weird not pushing the kids on the swing or hearing them say "watch this mommy." I had fun with RJ but I missed the kids often too. We tried to utilize our "free" babysitting time. We went out to eat twice, enjoyed a clean comedy club impromptu show, a movie, a temple session and sitting around a quiet apartment.

I'll catch you dear! Wee!

3,2,1 blastoff!

On Saturday, we went to the St. Paul temple. It looks a lot like the Medford temple. It is small. You have to bring your own temple clothes and they only have a handful of sessions a day. We were asked to be the witness couple. It was special.

I was amazed at how "small" the church is out there with such a large population. I assumed that there would be at least one ward building in each city (if not more). I never saw one of our churches while driving around but there were tons of other denominations with huge cathedrals.

We took a long walk on Sunday and found a few of these churches in the area.

This is a picture looking back at the city as we started entering a more residential area.

We rested on a bench in the park after walking for more than an hour.

It's kind of ironic that I don't have any pictures of houses on my house hunting trip but I didn't have batteries in the camera for the first few days. We saw some pretty dumpy places as well as real contenders. The process was not near as smooth as I anticipated it would be. We waffled between choice A and B. Finally we committed to option B. We went to the temple, attended their church meetings and made a special trip to get the information we needed on the application. When we called to make sure we could meet with the management team first thing in the morning, they said that they had already received an application. Option A became our fall back incase we couldn't find anything else. We went back to the drawing board and came up with two other viable options. We couldn't see either of them while I was still in town since I was flying out Tues. morning. One of the places that we felt good about was all of a sudden no longer available the first of September. After one more let down in Inver Grove Heights, we decided to go to our fall back option. When we called him, he said he had another couple interested who would get back to him by noon the next day. We could not believe our luck (or lack thereof)! We were in a major time crunch with giving the movers the appropriate length of notice and arranging for Hunter to start school. Fortunately, "the other" couple didn't get back to Adnan by noon and he accepted our application! We sqeezed by on the criminal back ground check and now we have an address!