Home

Today has been a good day.

The boys and I got up and took The Dude's truck to go back to town and swap it out to get my Traverse back from him after his road trip yesterday. I didn't expect him to be up and moving after driving for almost 24 hours straight, but he was - so we snatched him up to run some errands. Before we left his parking lot, his landlord - who was my property manager at the ghetto-esque house - caught me to finally give me the last of my security deposit back and so we chatted with him for a while. He took us to a vacant apartment to look at some furniture that I am most likely going to try to buy, and then he went back to his office and The Dude went with us to run errands.

We went to the bank and to the car wash to get rid of the skunk smell in the Traverse and then stopped for lunch and had some amazing Mediterranean food (shawarma, anyone?) and then took The Dude back home, and then the boys and I went to WalHell to get a few things before we came back home.

Home.

Once we got back, I started working on bikes. I worked on putting a new rack on the back of my bike so that I don't have to stick stuff in a backpack every time we go somewhere. But, I needed a bigger allen wrench for it, so we hopped on the bikes and rode over to the hardware store to get one. Then we came back home.

Home.

Once we got back here, I got the tube and tire changed on Alex's wheel, and we put it on my new rack on my bike and rode over to the convenience store to air it up before we came back home to put it on his bike.

Home.

I got the wheel put back on his bike, and tightened up the handlebars on the 'spare' bike that he had been using while his tire was flat and then we came inside for a while. I did a few things around the house and grabbed something to eat before I headed back outside to the firepit/shed area to do some work. Several hours later, I felt like I had made enough progress - and suffered enough mosquito bites - that I could quit and come inside.

While I was outside working, at least 90% of the traffic that went by was either combines, grain trucks, or other harvest equipment. The drivers were all up high enough that they could look over the fence where I was working and almost all of them smiled and waved - a normal occurrence around here. It made me so grateful that I live here now, instead of in the city where no one would even look someone else in the eye.

Home.

After I came inside and showered some of the filth off of me, I sat down and played around online and watched a movie for a bit. After a while, I got up to do a couple of little things and as I walked around the house, it kind of hit me again.

Home.

It's crazy. I still can't believe that somehow *I* managed to buy a house. Not just any house, but a really cool, really big, really awesome house. It's mine.

It's still surreal. Unbelievable.

In a way, I'm still waiting for the bank to call me and say "Oh, you thought you were buying that house? Hahahaha, joke's on you, sister! There's no way we're going to let that happen! Bring the keys back immediately!"

OK, I know that's not going to happen....but in a way it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I still wait for the proverbial shoe to drop, because that's what has always happened.

But it's not going to happen this time. It is what it is. It's mine. The house is mine.

It's our home.

At some point, it'll sink in and seem real, right?