What can I report to you? The packing continues. We are through the books and into the dishes and bar ware. We are making regular trips up to Anheuser Bush to raid their boxes. We have to use Jes’s mom’s pass and go through a security spindle into the bowels of the bottle capping plant. It’s kind of cool. Thus, all our boxes are the same size for ease of lifting etc.

Our landlady is trying to rent the place (if you want to live here, it is very cheap) and we have a couple coming by this morning – so I cleaned the kitchen last night to help the place show well (I mopped etc.). Time jump – they were here and have left. It looks like they are going to move in late July if we can be out – Kathy has offered to prorate our rent and give us her old gas dryer. That works. We’ll just need to be fully out before the Wisconsin trip.

Security/safety update: our new house has an integrated alarm system that will be active before we move. It has smoke, carbon monoxide, and fire detectors all directly linked to the fire department in addition to the usual police triggers. I’ve never had motion detectors before, how cool! It’s only twenty one dollars a month – cheap! My brother pays over a hundred dollars a month for the same service in California. Of course, I’ve been warned that those false alarms can get expensive. As far as theft goes, all the gadgets in the world don’t add up to my dog’s teeth. He keeps biting through Netflix disks as he tries to kill the mail lady. Luckily the mail slot at the new house feeds into the hall closet. I think that we are moving into a lower crime area from where we are now, but in this city property crime is something of a constant risk.

It looks like the FHA first time home buyer thing went through, so Missouri is picking up 4K of our closing as a grant (http://www.mhdc.com/homes/firstplaceloans/index.htm).

The concern was how much money I made at East Central teaching dual-enrollment classes in the spring. If you extrapolated that money out over the year it would have put our combined income above the ceiling for the grant. I had to write a letter and Jes had to field a phone call about me no longer working there. I also had to convince the HR person at East Central that I no longer worked there, despite still being listed as adjunct faculty. Reliable teachers don’t die (get terminated) they just fade away. Both Truman and Meramec still have me listed in their faculty directories. ITT does as well. The HR lady at ITT told me that they like to maintain the listings of potential employees to ease accreditation audits – I imagine that is true across the board. It just feels odd to prove reduced income as part of a home loan and to have to deny employment at places you no longer work.

On the other side, the hurdle was my student loan debt. I am still on a gradual course to complete my M.Ed. (Masters in Education) in 2008, so I needed my loans to be in academic deferment in order to have them not be considered as debt for the loan application. I got the email from Sallie Mae this morning confirming my deferment to August 2008; so, the ducks continue to line up. We are doing a rapid closing, so as we come into port I keep looking out for icebergs. We have our final pre-closing walk through of the house today at eleven and will actually get our first set of keys. The purpose is to confirm that they’ve fixed what they said they’d fix. When I drove by the other day they had “cleaned out the garage” by piling all the crap in the alley behind the house. Yeah, that doesn’t work for me.