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Busy time of the year! The Red Cedar Choir concert was this past Sunday. I didn’t have to play much, and none of it was very hard. The concert went well.  The middle school concert was Monday. It also was non-remarkable, and went well.

Today is the first day of practice for the Roselawn program next Monday. Some of that music is rather difficult, but I think I know it well enough to go in and practice with them today. Some work on my part still required before Monday, though.

Tonight is the second practice with the Chetek Methodist choir for their program this coming Sunday morning. Some of that music is also a tad bit challenging, but I think I have it learned pretty well. We also have a dress rehearsal Saturday morning.

Saturday is also our senior citizens Christmas party. I still have to buy gift cards for that.

Next Tuesday I’ll start going into to HS choir, because I’ll miss the Friday rehearsal and their concert is that next Tuesday. John gave me a couple pieces in advance, because they are a bit of a challenge. I have them learned, but still need to get the rest of the music from him.

Of course, stuck right in the middle of this is our trip to Bristol next Friday. I’m super excited about finally getting to see the house in person. We are working on getting our new air mattress folded so it will fit inside a carry on, so we can sleep at the house the two nights we are there! We’ll have to run to Goodwill or Walmart and buy some sheets and blankets, but it will be cheaper than staying in a motel. We’ll pack a couple bowls and cups and silverware and be able to buy some food and keep it in the fridge, so we won’t have to eat out every meal.  We got the last of the money yesterday from refinancing one of our New Auburn houses, so we have that part all done – just need it put into a cashier’s check before we go. And we have signed some of the advance paperwork electronically. So there really shouldn’t be much to do once we get there. The main thing, of course, is seeing the house, then making it OURS!!  Through this whole process, I’ve come to realize that I really prefer older houses. I’m much more excited about this house than the one we built ourselves. Houses I really fall in love with always tend to be old ones. I suspect Dad doesn’t have that same feeling, though.

Hope you are all enjoying the holiday season so far!

Thanks for praying yesterday. The loan officer got back to me rather quickly – she actually tracked me down at work, probably because I’d mentioned that we were “on pins and needles waiting to hear.” There was good news and bad news that I think we can work with. All the paperwork looked fine and there doesn’t seem to be any problem with giving us a mortgage. But we do have to put down 25%, which is somewhere just under $30,000. But on the good side (again), she did say that taking a home equity line of credit on one of our other homes was a perfectly acceptable way to come up with the down  payment.  You just can’t use an “unsecured loan.” We don’t see any problem with getting the amount that we will need that way. Dad is going to see if he can get the process started today. So we will be borrowing against our equity on the home that we intend to sell to cover about half of the cost of this home, anyway. This is just a way we can use that equity even before it sells, so I think it is a good and safe solution.

Right now it looks like the plan is for us to go south the second week of January, and head right down to Toccoa and roof that house, as planned. Then we will head up to Bristol, where we will already have had people interested in renting contacting us via Craig’s List, so we will just have to do the interviews and make the decision. Then it gets a little hazy. I think I will probably stay the rest of the month, to make sure renters get moved in and settled okay, before we leave them on their own. So Dad will be back home the third week of  January, but I probably won’t head back north until the very end of January. I think I’m okay with all my accompanying and lessons if I miss the whole month. Then I’ll finish up all my commitments in February, March and April and we’ll head south in May. That is pretty much the timeline we had when we were just planning to find a place to rent.

As far as the job search, Dad did find an occupational health nurse opening in the area, and is in the process of applying for that. He is also going to send his very impressive resume to the occupational health department of the hospital there in Bristol and see what comes of that. So, if he ends up getting a job, he may move down earlier than me. It is pretty much up in the air, but we are solidifying our Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, etc.!

I contacted the pastor of a CMA church in the area and he seems really nice. He said they’d have men there when we arrive to help unload the truck, which I thought was pretty nice, seeing as we’ve never even met! I have a couple of contacts there that I’ll be keeping in touch with as time goes on (him and the h.s. choir director), so we kind of know someone other than the realtor when we arrive!

So that is that, for today!

What if it is actually God’s will that we move to TN? How does He let us know? The truth is that it takes a lot for a person to pick up and leave perfectly good jobs (well, okay jobs…) to move to a place where they don’t know a soul or even have a job. The weather may be a huge calling card, but it doesn’t pay the bills!

Does He make us uncomfortable? Does he hold out a really enticing carrot? Could what is happening be God telling us to move?

Let me explain. This week there was a picture in the paper of the people who are holding fund raisers to support the Christmas lights – the city council had decided we didn’t have enough money to run the lights this year. But the people are the exact same people who are suing the city. Coincidence? I doubt it. I think they are purposely setting themselves up as pro-city, so the fact that they are suing is because they actually have a case. At any rate, the fact that their faces were all there when I opened the paper threw me into an emotional tailspin. Again. I just wanted to leave that day.

Then, I’m checking out homes in the area of TN we are looking at and I come upon one that is, as I put it, intriguing. It is one block from the middle school to the east and two blocks from the high school to the west. It is actually in Bristol, TN, not Johnson City, but essentially the same distance from the main highways. So I asked for a video. If there was a perfect house for us, this is it. I’d just decided that the safest (i.e. wisest) thing to do was rent for a year. Then God brings us this house that has three separate units – an upstairs and downstairs duplex in the main part (mind you, it wasn’t advertised as such, so I didn’t discover this until I asked for a video), and an apartment over a workshop in the back. Get this – we could bring in more in rent than the mortgage would cost, so we could essentially live payment free. No rent. No mortgage cost to us. We are talking $700 off the monthly budget here. We could actually make money if we put enough down. Rather than pay rent – live off someone else’s rent?

So, the question is – Is this God telling us to get on with it and move?  Is this how He does it?

Would you believe I have more boys than girls in lessons this year? I have 10 boys and 7 girls at this point. Amazing!

I can’t believe it is almost the middle of October already! It has been so warm that it seems like September still. But I guess we have some much colder temperatures on the way, so it will feel more like we would expect. We had to turn on the furnace today and the one in the back half, where we live, didn’t pump out any warm air – just cold. It felt like the temp was dropping rather than raising, so I just turned it off and waited for Dad to get home. Apparently that furnace still has a pilot light, and it had gone off somewhere in the course of the summer! So it is  nice and warm now, but has that funky smell of a furnace run for the first time of the season!

So, six weeks from tomorrow we head for Gary to see all of you! That is coming really soon! Are we doing the white elephant exchange again this year? Dad asked me that the other day, and I wasn’t exactly sure. I know I need to have all the Christmas shopping for the grandkids done by then – I’d better get going on that!

We were originally thinking that Dad would go south first and get a job, so I could keep working and we wouldn’t be without one of us with a job. But I ran the numbers, and we are actually better off if we both keep working here until May, then both quit at the same time and move, because then we will only have the living expenses in one house. Kind of obvious when I say it, but for some reason, our thinking was clouded on that issue. So right now the plan is to both move to TN the end of the second week of May. That is still around 7 months away, but we have a lot of organizing and getting rid of stuff to do before then. Still it is nice to be thinking that this is going to be our last winter in Wisconsin. Hope it is a mild one.

Day one we mostly drove, then stayed overnight just west of Gary, IN. After we checked in, about half of us got back on the bus and drove a few minutes to a Old Country Buffet for supper. Mine and the bus driver’s were free!

Day two we finished the trip to Goodlettsville, where our hotel was. It was a very long day. We stopped for supper about an hour before arriving at the hotel and enjoyed a very good buffet. Just about the time we arrived, Nathan, Amy and gang arrived at the hotel. We celebrated Audrey’s birthday together with huge, tasty cupcakes and the opening of a few presents.

Day three we went to the Belle Mead Mansion in Nashville. It had been a huge estate where race horses were bred back in the 1800’s. The horse that was the ancestor of most of the winners of the Kentucky Derby was born and raised there. It was very interesting. Nathan’s family met us and went through that tour with us, which I greatly enjoyed. I’ll include a picture of that at the end. It was raining, so we all got a bit damp!

From there we went on to shop a while, enjoyed supper at a RainForest Cafe, then went to a performance at The Grand Ol’ Opry.

Day four started with a backstage tour of the Grand Ol’ Opry, followed by some time shopping and sightseeing downtown. Then a tour guide took us all over Nashville, explaining the history, etc. She also took us to “The Upper Room,” where they publish a daily devotional by the same name. There are pictures included from there. We also visited The Parthenon as part of that tour. Supper that night was a dinner party with live entertainment, which was just superb!

The final day in Nashville started with some time at the Country Music Hall of Fame. We then went to the Opryland Hotel, which is about the biggest hotel anywhere.  We took the boat ride around the one section, then visited the other sections – there are three different gardens, all under a glass roof. We actually had a little time to go back to our hotel and rest, then we were off to a dinner theater, where we ate another buffet and enjoyed a show.

The first day on the trip home, we stopped at the Kentucky Derby museum, which is on the grounds of Churchill Downs where the race is run. We got to the hotel a little late, but about half of us decided to go to a Cracker Barrel for supper before bed. Then the final day, we just drove and got to Chetek around 4:00. Whew…

at Belle Mead Mansion

Grand Ol’ Opry house

Our group

Making turtles

Window at “Upper Room”

Parthenon

On the river in Opryland Hotel

We are home from our trip. It went great – it was so fun having Dad along. And he was super-helpful! I don’t know how I did it before without him!  Pictures and so forth tomorrow.

I’m packing and getting the house cleaned up because we are leaving tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. on our long-anticipated bus trip to Nashville. I’m excited about having Dad go along, because I know he will be a lot of help, plus great company, but I’m also nervous, because I don’t really need anyone telling me what I’m doing wrong when I’m in such a stressful situation anyway. Plus then I would start to think that I’d done a bad job on all the trips we’ve taken. Hopefully, though, he won’t find anything really wrong that I do as bus trip leader!  We’ll be staying overnight somewhere in the southern Chicago area tomorrow, then at a La Quinta in Goodlettsville , which is just a bit north of Nashville, for the four nights we are there. Dad and Nathan have arranged some times for us to get together with them.

Anyway, you can always get in touch with us through our cell phones, but don’t expect any posts or answers to emails until next Sunday!

I just finished America, the Beautiful by Dr. Ben Carson. I would highly recommend it. It covers a lot of the history of our country as well as a lot of his very common-sense philosophy. I don’t normally get too excited about politicians, but I was curious about him because he has come from out of nowhere and seems to resist the types of behaviors that everyone else seems drawn to. He is really very brilliant and has some good ideas of what our country could do to work its way out of the mess we are in. And a lot of it starts with Christians refusing to be bullied by the “politically correct.”

We also watched “God’s Not Dead” last night on Netflix. Another hearty recommendation from me on that one, too!

Yesterday was probably the most stressful day yet. I was already feeling harried since my computer had been at the repair shop since last Wednesday and I didn’t know if he was going to be able to fix it. And I have a conference coming up, starting Wednesday at noon, and have to get the whole newsletter written and sent in before that, but with no computer that was impossible. Plus my meeting for the trip to Nashville is tonight and the handouts were on the computer. Then I had a new class that I started yesterday, and I wasn’t sure if the handout was on the computer (turns out I had a hard copy.) Then I arrived to find messages from our attorney for the City saying opposing council was asking for a boatload of written materials, like all the emails that we sent regarding the issue from 2014 – the present, records of all the activities presented by or at the Community Center in 2014 and 2015, etc. They are going to be drowning it paperwork and I don’t see where any of it will advance their case. It is just an annoyance for us to have to comply with their requests.

At least there was also an email saying the computer was done – he didn’t find anything wrong with it, but it works fine again. It was hard to find time to squeeze in to go get it in Cameron, but I did. So I got started on the newsletter and have to finish that today. And I’m ready for tonight’s meeting. And the new class went great.

And I had a great run this a.m. so I’m ready to face a new day!

Also, we met with our tax person yesterday and figured out how to go about selling our rentals and buying new ones in TN without losing anything on taxes for the net gain. We just postpone it forever and when you guys inherit the houses, it is all erased and you start with a current net value, so if you just turn around and sell them, you don’t have any net gain to pay taxes on. Pretty cool arrangement, but it means we will always have properties. If we ever NEED the money, we can sell them knowing we will have to pay taxes. At least by then we will be in a very low tax bracket.