Trying to be Patient

I celebrated Halloween yesterday by waking up with Quasimodo Face. I had a terrible allergy attack late Saturday night and I decided to just take a pill and sleep it off. As it turns out, going to sleep when your left eye is all red and teary and puffed up is not a good idea. When I woke up in the morning I felt better, but it looked like someone had punched me in the face. My left eye had an enormous puffy fluid bag under it and it was still blood red. And of course I had to be at the tutoring company office at 9 AM to proctor a practice exam for half a dozen students. I have no idea what they were thinking when they saw my puffy face, but they were all polite enough not to say anything about it. It was only later that I realized I could totally have gotten away with wearing an eye patch and pretending it was all part of my pre-planned pirate Halloween costume. Not that I actually have a pirate-style eye patch just lying around the apartment. Oh well.

So, about the house. We're supposed to go to closing and get the keys on Friday, four days from now. Four days out and I STILL don't feel completely confident that we're actually going to get to buy this house. I feel like maybe if we're lucky we'll get to buy it eventually, but I have zero faith that it will actually happen on Friday. Much of our mutual funds and stocks have been sold and some of our relatives very generously gave us our wedding gift money early so that we could amass the money for the down payment (20% of the cost of a house is a frighteningly large amount of money. I can't even look at our savings account balance right now because it's giving me heart palpitations). The loan package has been sent to the underwriters for final approval. We had a scare last weekend when suddenly a required termite inspection spiraled into two days of phone calls about whether or not we would need a structural engineering report as well ($500) and a termite treatment ($800) despite the fact that the termite inspection turned up exactly one spot of termite damage that was obviously from a very long time ago and the home inspector says the house is clearly structurally sound. Luckily I think that issue has been taken care of and the current home owners are taking care of the (made-up, in my opinion) termite issue. We have a stack of documents three inches tall that we have e-mailed to the lender. Obviously they are just trying to cover all of the bases, but I sometimes feel like everyone is going above and beyond what is actually necessary.
We've jumped the inspection and assessment hurdles and tracked down all of the documents the lender needs to see, but I still feel like something could go wrong at the 11th hour. I think it's because every other day we get a phone call saying, "Oh, by the way, we also need you to fax us [fill in obscure financial document here]," so I have no faith that those phone calls will magically stop this week. Buying a house is definitely one of the most stressful things I have ever done. It's exciting, but the process could not possibly be more difficult. It is not streamlined AT ALL. Also, you have no choice but to be completely invested in the process financially, and it's almost impossible not to get invested emotionally. The stakes are so high, and even if you are very organized and you read every bit of fine print on every single piece of paper that crosses your path and even if your realtor is good at explaining things, you still feel like the process is out of your control. Honestly, I'm not sure I want to do this ever again. I think that ultimately having a house will be worth the trouble. Having that investment property--not to mention having a home to live in and enjoy--seems worth some initial frustration. But I think that I'm going to need at least a decade to recover before attempting to do this again. And if we don't actually get this house? Well, hell, if we have to go all the way back to square one right now I'll seriously reconsider the perks of being a renter.

Let's see, other things...last weekend our best friends from here got married in the bride's hometown in Texas so Penn and I flew out to the wedding. Watching them get married was wonderful because I like both the bride and groom so much, and the reception was so much fun. There were margaritas and a mariachi band at the cocktail hour and yummy food stations and of course there was plenty of dancing. At one point I looked over and the bride was drinking a Strongbow in a can and it really felt just like any other night out partying in the city, except that she was in a white wedding dress and he was in a tux. I'm really, really happy for them. I just love when my friends find someone they love enough to marry, and I particularly loved it in this case because Penn and I have been equally friendly with both the bride and the groom for a while now and they're both very funny, kind, good people. Being at their wedding was also exciting for a different reason, though, because they got engaged just three weeks before Penn and I did, and this whole year I've been using their wedding planning as sort of a measure of where we should be in terms of our planning. And now that they are married, the next wedding I go to will be my own! We only have 10 weeks left to finish planning!

It has turned out to be a hectic year, for sure. But I've realized recently that despite sometimes feeling stressed out I'm nowhere near my perceived breaking point, and that Penn and I are actually handling this year's changes together really well. He's a great partner for me, and although I'm excited about the wedding I'm most excited about the marriage and all that we'll face together once the wedding is over.