So, just as I promise not to disappear again, I promptly do. It’s not really my fault this time, though. We’ve just finished moving, and had no internet at home for quite a long time. Thanks to Bonifacius for keeping things alive around here… hopefully now that I’m back at my computer I can help once more.

Is there anything more exhausting than moving? It’s a great allegory for Purgatory – anticipation of better things to come, but for the present, seemingly endless pain and toil. This was just a local move, and it still left me wanting to go into hibernation for the next five months. But the happy news is, the Doctor and I are now homeowners for the first time! Hooray for mortgages, property taxes and home improvement projects!

Anyway, just to get my fingers warmed up again, here are the things that I’ve learned over the course of this latest move.

1) Don’t have a realtor for a landlord if you can help it. Not nice people to work with in that capacity.

2) If you’re going to be without home internet for a long time, try if possible to be the owner of a smartphone. Makes things much more manageable. Smartphones are insidious, though; it’s the sort of thing that never for a second seemed necessary to me, but now the idea of living without one seems well-nigh intolerable.

3) IKEA rocks. Plan to eat a meal there whenever you go; like most things at IKEA, it’s very cheap.

4) When buying a house for the first time, look around for an informational class on buying/owning a home. The one we went to was called the “Home Stretch Workshop” but I imagine most places have something similar. This is useful, in the first place, because you’ll probably learn a bunch of practical things you didn’t know about buying a house, but also because you may (as in our case) learn about a rash of programs to give financial assistance to first-time (or not necessarily just first-time) homeowners. We were amazed at how many there were. Ended up saving us quite a bit of money.

5) If possible, buy a house when the government is, for no very good reason, handing out free money to first-time homebuyers. Hey, I don’t exactly approve of such programs, but as long as I’m going to be spending the rest of my life helping to pay off these massive deficits, I might as well take the check now. I doubt my remodeled kitchen is a less worthy cause than plenty of other things being sponsored in this so-called “bailout.”

So, okay, nothing in that list has much to do with our Holy Faith, but this is what happens when we’re forced to turn our attention to worldly concerns for awhile. I’ll get back to more important things in my next post.