Here, There, Everywhere

I feel like we’re juggling several balls in the air. Or that we’ve traveled through time zones. We began the week in Branson, which we left early on Monday to drive to Ft Leonard Wood to get our first shots (meningitis). Unfortunately they only had enough for one shot which Sandy accepted; that way when we go up next week for yellow fever, Tom gets two shots while Sandy only gets the one. We then proceeded on to St. Louis with the purpose of looking at houses. Our goal was owning 3 units before we left. We signed a contract on one while we were there and made offers on two others. We also offered on two properties that were rejected. So at this moment, we close on a single bedroom duplex (that means each ‘house’ has one bedroom) the first week of September. Peter showed us a great two story duplex that basically needs minimal work with an asking price of $18,000. It even had the utilities still one! That means none of the water pipes or electrical wires have been ‘removed’ for resale. Yes, we did make an offer on this one.

We have been looking into a self-directed Roth IRA where we could invest in real estate. The advantage is all the income is tax free. If we “flip” the property and sell it for a profit, that profit is also tax free. It’s got some tricky limitations, but the upside will work well for us since we are looking at investment property. So after deliberation, searching for a holding company, etc., we started this process.

Tuesday morning we met with an insurance agent in town and discussed insuring our projected properties. And as an attorney, he can also file our application for an LLC. It is times like this that I have trouble remembering that in about two months we plan to be on a mission. We had time to attend the temple for one session and then drive home, which we reached about midnight. Junk food helps keep me awake, although it doesn’t do anything for nutritious eating.

Back home, we entered the mission/prep mode. We managed to get the deck restained and cut the ice storm danglers and low branches in the east pasture. We also burned them. I drew an analogy with these danglers and the process of repentance. When the ice storm hit, many branches just cracked and fell or were left hanging by very little. Others seemed to bounce right back to normal after the ice melted; many of those over the past couple of months, though, have started to droop and need cutting. Sinning is similar; if we carry our burdens around without forsaking them, they will bend us low, even though we may appear okay to the outside world.

I have also been busy tying up the loose ends with the downstairs trim and molding, and patching the bottom end of the stairwell ‘impact’ area. Hopefully, that will be completed tomorrow. One more thing to cross off the list of many things to do.

We heard this week from the family we had invited to stay in the house while on our mission; the mom felt it was important for them to stay with her folks just south of here. So we called the back up—Beth Green-- and told her the house was hers if she was still interested. She is! The advantage to this single mom of an eight year old daughter is that she can live downstairs (now I know why we redid the kitchen down there) and the advantage for us is we can leave the upstairs alone: no moving of furniture. We also got the last of the information we needed so we could send off the material for our visas. They only need 30 days for Kenya, but we wanted to be early (at least this time).

Those pre deployment catastrophes that always happened just before and just after I deployed aren’t peculiar to only the military; they apply to leaving on missions as well. I have been concerned about our well this past week. We finally did some trouble shooting Friday evening and concluded that we may have a pump problem. The pressure drops every 20 minutes or so which triggers the pump to kick in and the cycle repeats itself. Our friendly plumber is out of town until Monday so we have just started to turn the pump off at night and during the day when we don’t need water. Hopefully we can get this problem resolved quickly; of course maybe this is just a precursor of things to come while in Africa!

The chickens are healthy and provide us about three eggs a day. The weather has cooled this past week such that we have actually opened the house up the past couple of nights. And it is almost 4 in the afternoon and we don’t have the A/C on yet!