I only took what I needed, I guess.

Friends, I have good news: that house is ours.

And last night we slept in it. That means that many things went well yesterday:
1. The bank managed to remember I was their customer for a change, and happily issued me a cashiers check for the closing costs.
2. The seller's power of attorney, even though it looked questionable to the attorney at first, was accepted by the attorney's security office. WHEW!
3. Even though the seller did not hand over keys at the closing, he did meet us at the house as planned and gave us the key and the spare key there.
4. The seller moved the rest of his furniture out.
5. The gutter people came and looked at the gutter responsible for the porch rotting.
6. The gutter people came while the PP was already there, so it was not necessary for him to take additional time off work.
7. The mattress people delivered the new mattress, and even though one of the delivery guys dislocated his shoulder in the process of removing the plastic wrap, he and the other guy had it back in place in under 5 minutes.

But that does not mean it was easy. After all, the PP's last minute repairs to the porch happened during a real heat wave, and the seller got even wackier there at the end, and let's just say, we were real relieved.

Now it is strange to be back in the old house. We had originally planned to stay there tonight, too, amidst work removing the hideous kitchen wallpaper and repainting the guest room. We've set back the guest room to another time, but we made some headway removing old wallpaper today, all the time listening to the random function on the mp3 player. The first 4 tracks were all eighties but goodies--"Time After Time" (leftover from the Friday Random 10), "Egyptian Lover," "The Reflex." The made the PP wonder about the "random" function itself, and when the Spice Girls came up not too much later, he said, "Well, that shows you why not to play the odds."

But we made some progress: almost all of the offending wallpaper is gone. We discovered a layer of an older paper on some of the walls, which made clear which walls were added in the recent renovations and which were older. The older paper is frankly better--a cool simple single-color blue thistle pattern--but I hope we are going to be able to paint instead. This is going to require some significant wall repair in a couple of spots and some retexturing, but paint just seems to age better than paper in my not especially extensive experience.

So in anticipation of the retexturing and such, we stopped briefly at Lowe's for supplies, which of course turned into a not at all brief stop, and the Patient Formerly Known As Patient just about lost his mind. But now he is showered and beered and reclining in front of some drivel on TV, which is about all we can ask tonight. And that is where I am headed now.