New Year brings changes

It has been a while since I have been on here. A lot has gone on in the last few months that I need to bring you up to speed on.

December was spent in Iowa. My boss told me to go home for the month, work from home and use up the last of my vacation at the end of the year. Sounds good in theory, but I wasn't really thrilled with the idea. Working from home is hard to do, to many distractions, to many other things to get done. My time at home up until this point was for visiting or taking care of small issues. I also knew it was going to be hard on my family. Sounds weird right? Being apart for so long created a vacuum where I should have been, my wife was a "single" mother and therefore responsible for all aspects of raising our son. Our parenting style is "good cop, bad cop" and I am the bad cop. She wasn't used to being the hard nosed bad cop parent, therefore our son got away with far more than he should have. When I got home, I was summarily ignored. Not surprising, but it is what it is. I started noticing the talk balk, the bad attitude and the raised voices. This was going to stop. So, bad cop was home and back in charge. My son really resented this for weeks. By the time the month was over, we were back to "normal". Just in time for me to leave again.

January came in with a blast of arctic cold. -30 to -40 wind chill that night. Good ol' Iowa, less than 2 days earlier, it was 60 deg. With that, I headed back to Tulsa. My thoughts were stuck on selling the house and getting the family back together under one roof. Still no bites on the house, but honestly, once Thanksgiving was near, I knew the house wouldn't garner any interest until after Christmas. At this point, I was pretty low, my thoughts, hopes and even optimistic ideals had been drawn down. I spent my birthday alone, as I wanted to use my trip home to celebrate the wife's birthday. That week, we had a showing on the house and it seemed to go well. But no offer. We then had a 2nd showing to the same couple, and started to get our hopes up, maybe we we might get a birthday present after all. By the time I headed home, we had gone through offer and counter offers and accepted a deal on the house. What a relief.

With the offer on the table, we have to turn over possession of the house by Feb. 18th. Short notice for sure. My wife an son will be moving into her mom's house while we look for a place in Oklahoma. I was out with our realtor last week and looked at about 10 houses. But really only liked 2 or 3. The good news is that Tulsa is full of short sales, foreclosures and a market full of homes for sale. We just have to wade through the houses and find the right one.  My wife was supposed to come to Tulsa today to start house hunting, unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Tulsa is buried. At least 12" of snow fell yesterday on a city that shuts down at 4". No house hunting this week. She is supposed to come down next week, but not sure if the roads will be good enough by then.

Things are finally moving forward, but slowly. When I accepted this job back in July, I never thought that Febuary would come and I would not be with my family. It looks like it will be 2 or 3 more months before we are done and in a home here in Oklahoma. There is light, however faint, at the end of the tunnel.