I love autumn weather

Early Sunday morning. Mark is out for his run. Jake and I are slowly waking up. We'll get all pretty in a few minutes here.

As much as I did not want summer to end, I'm loving the cool gray skies we've had lately. I even broke out the "harvest" scented candle yesterday.

A few announcements:

First, Jake has changed his name to JC. We weren't sure whether it would be a passing fancy, but he is sticking to it. He lets us all call him Jake, but he is correcting everyone not related to him like this, "Actually, it's JC." We can blame Jordan in an indirect way. ;) Jordan was complaining last year that he didn't have a middle initial that could make a cool nickname like JC or JD or JT. Jake thought about his initials and realized that he's JC. He said when he turned 7 he would switch to JC. He let it go for most of the summer, but now that school has started, as far as he is concerned, he is JC. FYI.

Second, as most of you know and many of you are doing/have done, with low prices and low interest rates, this is a great time to buy real estate. To that end, we made the leap to our first "investment property" and bought the sad abandoned house 3 doors down from us that has been vacant for months following a foreclosure. That poor house needs a good house blessing as it's just been infested by Weird it's whole life. The lifelong bachelor original owner was there for 40 yrs and when he died, it was discovered he had over 30 dedicated T1 phone lines running into the house, dozens of computers, etc. He drove around with a giant homemade aentenna in the back of his truck. The house flipped once quickly and was bought by what looked like a nice family who said they had heard about the Leave-It-to-Beaverishness of our street and wanted that atmosphere. Then they proceeded to live like hermits and endanger all the kids on the street with reckless backing out and peeling out, and the husband never appeared to actually work, but did occasionally water the dead weeds he thought would magically turn to grass with a good watering once a week or so, while complaining that the dead weeds were, in fact, not magically turning into grass. By the end, he was spinning lies and tales like a web, tried transferring the house out of his name and other financial shenanigans, and they ended up doing a midnight moveout where they backed the Uhaul straight up to the front door (literally, over the front lawn so the opening of the truck fit directly over the door) taking with them all the window blinds, some light fixtures, the oven racks, a window pane, etc. We're in the beginning of escrow so it could technically fall out for some unforeseen reason, but we feel like it's a pretty solid deal and should go through fairly easily. It needs some minor renovation and then we'll be dipping our toes into the world of being landlords, which scares the bejeebers out of me.

Lastly, Jordan has been AWOL because it took a month before ATT could finally get internet working in their apartment. They have the whole building hardwired and every other unit has internet, but with weird red tape and internal confusion, it took multiple escalations and some crazy phone calls from ATT before they could "verify their address" and just flip the switch that needed flipping. The complex has actually sent ATT a "default" letter on their service contract and are working to dump them entirely. But now that he's online again, he can join in himself again- hint, hint ;) - and update you all on his life directly. I try to avoid too much in the way of Jordan updates because he can give them himself so if you're feeling uninformed, you can 'nudge' him. :)