Thursday

I'm sure I'll do a post with some pictures later, but for now they're all stuck on my phone.

This morning we went to the temple and walked around a bit. Temple grounds are always so nicely manicured that I didn't have to worry about Alexander tripping on uneven pavement or brushing up against poison ivy so we could just let him bumble about. The Atlanta Temple grounds are no different. They are beautiful, but...and I don't know why, but...they included mustard in the flowerbeds.

Mustard!

After spending a summer yanking out wild mustard from canola crops (on my uncle's farm; he was raising seed canola and so we couldn't have any mustard in the crops because the bees would cross-pollinate the canola with the mustard, which would essentially genetically modify the seeds and they would thus not be "pure" anymore...or something), I can't see mustard as anything but weed-like.

To be honest, it probably was only a couple of weeks on the farm at best (and it was probably twenty years ago), but it was still long enough to develop an aversion to mustard plants. I see one and I just want to give it a good solid yank!

So the flower beds made me shudder a little bit because, to me, they seemed to have unsightly weeds taking over. But I honestly think they were planned and planted because our hotel has mustard growing in pots outside the lobby. For aesthetic reasons, I guess. I don't get it, but...I guess.

Maybe it just grows well here?

Watch me plant some one day, just so that I'll have to eat my words.


They do have nice yellow flowers...I guess. But nothing compared to a dandelion—now those are a beautiful weed!

Anyway, after visiting the temple grounds we went to explore our new neighbourhood while we waited for the sellers to sign the contract so that we could get a few other gears moving in the big, clunky machine of house-buying.

We went to Costco and found that it has the same floor layout to the Durham store (or at least a more similar floor plan than the Spanish Fork Costco, which is just about backwards and is disorienting). I texted our agent to see how things were going and while we were texting she got the signed contract from the seller's agent so w were officially under contract!

We then took Alexander to a cute playground that isn't so near our house (but near enough that we'll probably visit it again) and I called the inspection company to solidify our appointment for tomorrow (they were waiting for our contract) and Andrew tried to get ahold of our loan officer.

And then we headed over to our real estate agent's office to make good on our "earnest money," and just as we parked the loan officer called so we took that and asked a lot of questions and got a lot of answers. And then we delivered our check and if all goes well, we should have a beautiful home to move into in July.

After delivering the check we visited a couple of the library branches (we'll be about equidistant from two different branches) and asked about how to get a library card (pretty standard stuff).

So lots of errand running, exploration, and...exhaustion. This has been an exhausting process.

As we ate dinner (at Panda Express—so fancy), we watched a huge southern storm roll in (and then drove back to the hotel in the pouring rain). We've missed storms like this (thought it was a little scary to be driving our tiny compact car in such a torrential downpour—the car has a single wiper blade on the windshield and going full speed it had such trouble keeping things clear)!

Tomorrow we have the house inspection, so wish us luck!