Okay, so I've been busy. To find out why, read on....

This is a story of how we finally got a house.

Yep, we got tired of apartment living. There's nothing like the sound of your neighbor's upstairs arguing at 3:00 in the morning, especially after a rough night of partying. So, it was the motivation for my husband and I to maybe at least, um, try.

For the most part, we were comfortable (except for the neighbor, affectionately nicknamed Godzilla). There were no commitments (except to our cat, Oliver), especially if the dishwasher didn't work or the toilet got plugged (which is, in our universe, a bad, bad thing. More about that some other time). If we were truly disgusted, we could get up and move somewhere else.

Except, that got old.

Home ownership, anyone will tell you, is a serious commitment, taken not on a whim, but with a great deal of thought. I've bought two other homes with my husband, which is no easy task. Murphy's Law is one of the great mottos of his life. So, with that in mind, he convinced me that we could at least look. I agreed. There were the usual, requisite discussions about where (not the snow belt) and how much (not too much), so with that in mind, we found a real estate agent and went to work.

Now, I've heard stories of people looking endlessly through listings and on-line sites. I fully expected to do the same thing. So, it was surprising that on the first trip we took with Nancy, our agent, we found the house. Not too big. Not too small.

It was just right.

It was the place I had always dreamed of. A beautiful kitchen. A backyard (with a garden for me). An office to write in that looked out at the garden I would lovingly tend.

But most of all, it was quiet.

Throughout the whole negotiating process, I kept telling myself that it was just a house, a place to live in.  If we didn't get this one, there would be something else. Something better, I reasoned. It was a tense 24 hours, but on April 16, 2011, my birthday, I got the best present.

A house. All my own. To love and to tend, forever and ever. In sickness and in health. Till death, I pray, do us part. It didn't matter anymore that I still lived in an apartment with a neighbor upstairs named Godzilla or that gas prices were still going through the roof.

I had a house.....