It’s almost official now. I saw my grades this morning for my last semester of college. That’s right, I passed the government accounting class with a C. I would have loved to have done better, but I’m 100% OK with that grade! I think the C in Strategic Management is a little off, but again, I’m just happy to be done.

When we were out house shopping on Saturday, I was wearing my gym shirt from BYU-Idaho. I don’t wear it all that often, but it was just the only shirt that looked good for the day. In any event, we ran into three groups of people who commented on the shirt. When we were walking into a Van Daele site in French Valley, a couple said something to the effect of great school. I wasn’t quite on my game (hadn’t realized what shirt I was wearing, I guess) and just responded “yeah” and left it at that. Later, at the last group of houses we saw, Ryland’s Jasmine Estates, we ran into a couple that went to school there who it seemed was purchasing one of the homes. We chatted for a while both on the in and the out trip through the sales office. After dinner at BJ’s, as we were walking out, this group of girls shouted “BYU” and cheered. I probably should have found out who they were, but I was so ready to go home at that point. Word to the wise… don’t spend an afternoon looking at houses.

I didn’t make it to Arizona this week. Alison ended up deciding to look for a job, which is probably a good thing, and I decided to wait to see what happens with the neighbor that might be interested in the house. I also figured it would give me some time to get through some of the other work I have to do with closing and collecting various accounts. I was also hoping to pick up some sales this week for CBC, but it has been fairly quiet.

I spent Monday doing odd jobs around the house mainly. After the family dinner, I headed out to the branch president’s land for the branch activity and FHE. He’s got some cool stuff going on out there with a lake/pool, outdoor amphitheater and other stuff. I wish I could have spent more time there, but I felt it was right to be home for dinner.

Nathaniel and I went and looked at some more houses Wednesday after work. What we ended up seeing was way too expensive and not very impressive. I was misled by some advertising. It turned out the one development I was really interested in was mainly townhomes, although it does have some detached townhome style houses too. They don’t have models built yet, so there really wasn’t anything to see. The other development they had there had one model in the 400s while the rest were mid 500s and higher!

This evening we may have found the house to beat. It’s at Morningstar Ranch, on the 79 at Pourroy Road, less than 10 minutes from the office. The homes are by Brookfield and this is the Veranda community. The house really had everything I was looking for. Separate living and dining rooms.

Good size kitchen with island and breakfast bar, which actually looks out the window instead of in at the kitchen like most.

One doesn’t have to walk through the laundry room to enter the house and it’s got a nice size laundry room to boot! It doesn’t have any bonus rooms or really cool amenities, but it has the necessities covered. The “standard” config has five bedrooms, one downstairs which can be turned into an office and one of the upstairs rooms which can be turned into a “loft.” The upstairs one just looses the closet and door, so I don’t see the point in it. It would be nice to have an office downstairs, but I think I would have it built as a bedroom too for more functionality. Either way, each room would have a full private bathroom which would be cool for renting the room out, which I would need to do if I was to afford this house! It is a bit over my pricerange, but might be do-able if I could guarantee one renter and find another. The house also has a double deep two car garage so there is lots of storage room with still ample parking. And the best part? We saw not only the fiber going to the houses, but signs from Verizon in the models advertising FIOS. Sounds like we might have a winner on our hands.

We still have a few more options to explore and a house in Tucson to sell, but we may be moving forward. The development has a few houses ready to go for 45 day move-in (i.e. they are built, just need to be finished with the desired options), but the development is only in phase 4 of 10, so they will still be building for a while. This is anther plus as many of the other places we looked at seemed to be selling their final phases.

So… anyone interested in renting a room to help me afford this house? It’s either that or I need to get married for another income!

I’m very happy to see that the Fallbrook Community Planning Group approved the meetinghouse the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been trying to build at Via Monserate and 76. It has been a lot of work for those involved and it seems like it has been going on for years upon years. I think Fallbrook could certainly use a second meetinghouse and I am very glad that one will be coming close to my house, even if I won’t be here for much longer.

This semester may have pulled down my GPA, but that really doesn’t matter to me… What matters is that I’M DONE!

Spring 2007------------------------------------------------------------(Senior)

DEPT/NO   COURSE TITLE              UNITS GRD/PRV GRD PT  FOOTNOTE  S# SIZE/GPA

ACCT-403  Accounting Govern+Nonprof  3.00  C        6.00

ACCT-408  Problems In Taxation       3.00  A       12.00

HESC-342  Stress Management          3.00  A       12.00

HUSR-350  Leadership                 3.00  A       12.00

MGMT-449  Seminar In Strategic Mgt   3.00  C        6.00

Academic Status Not Yet Determined

Enrollment  Dates:   January 20, 2007 to May 25, 2007

ENROLD    EARNED    GPA UN    GRD PT    GPA    GRD PT BAL

Term         15.00     15.00     15.00     48.00    3.20       18.0

CSUF         84.00     84.00     84.00    277.20    3.30      109.2

Cumulative  165.00    165.00    185.00    633.20    3.42      263.2

I also think the C in Strategic Mgmt is bogus, but all I care about is that I passed!

I only recognized, or rather could think of the tune, of one of the songs on Larilyn’s Top 25 Most Played list. That was “Killing Me Softly,” which I don’t even have in my iTunes library! I assume you’ll be able to do better with mine:

The only real problem with iTunes counts is that all the older songs are going to dominate the list.

Surprisingly there aren’t really any songs I am too embarrassed to have on this list either, as long as you keep in mind that some of these songs have just been around for a while. Every one of these songs lists a date added of 2/12/05, which must have been the date of an update or a corrupted iTunes DB file, so no recent songs are anywhere near the list.

I wish Apple would incorporate a recent play count timer in iTunes so that you could get a list of your top 40 for the week/month. I do see they incorporated a “skip” count and a last skipped which is pretty cool! I’ve requested that a few times so that I could see what songs I was constantly skipping and remove them from playlists to eliminate the hassle of having to skip them.

I’d be interested to see if anyone else has some tastes as “old” as mine…

So as usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a public blog, so we’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do.

We held my mom’s memorial service about a month ago in Tucson. While I know she would not approve of us gathering and remembering her, it was good. I got to learn a few things I didn’t know and also got to meet a lot of the people that she got to know in Arizona. We drove her van back to sell it and also to bring back home a treadmill that will never get used in this house.

I managed to survive through the last few weeks of school. Even more exciting, I managed to survive without walking at my graduation! I was starting to feel some pressure, but it seemed like everyone forgot (or just gave up) when the time got closer. I am still waiting for the grades to come in, but I could very well be officially done with school for now. I certainly hope so anyway, because I would hate to have to take government accounting again.

I was called as Sunday School President about six weeks ago. I think I am finally figuring out what it is I am supposed to be doing, although I think I am still missing some of the pieces. We called a new teacher two weeks ago. Shawn taught his first class today and I think did a wonderful job. The class was very involved and I hope was able to take away some useful items from the lesson on being more child-like, forgiving and loving. We called a new teacher today. I am anxious to get him going and then maybe we can work on building the program.

I spent my first week out of school installing a domain controller at GT. Things went much better this time over last, but I still ran into a few kinks. Most things have been worked out, but I think I still have some tasks to accomplish.

I actually went to the branch activity this week for the first time. It was movie night, so I figured it was right up my alley. Of course, this happened to be on the one day that I wasn’t already in Murrieta, but I drove up there anyway. It was good to get out and spend some time with other members.

I was pleased to find out today that our branch is starting to host a Sunday evening branch prayer meeting at the home of one of the shepherds. That and the sweet swap that followed was one of those little things that just made me feel so much more at home when I was in Idaho. Of course, it was a lot easier in Idaho when we all lived within a two minute walk of each other, but I’m anxious to see how this works here. It is of course hard for me living in Fallbrook, but maybe I can solve that problem in the next few months.

I spent some time Friday morning, as well as all of Saturday afternoon house hunting in the Murrieta area. I really liked North Oaks townhouses, but my dad has talked me into buying a house as he believes it will appreciate more than a townhouse because the land will appreciate faster than the buildings. So, we re-evaulated the budget and I dragged Nathaniel along with me Saturday to go looking at houses. We came home exhausted after looking at probably 40 new model homes. It’s so hard to remember anything now, but we saw some things we liked, some things we didn’t and some really expensive houses – at least they were out of my budget!

I’m kind of leaning towards the Winchester/French Valley area, but there are two things that I have to figure out. First off, I would be limited mainly to 79/Winchester Rd as the way to get to a freeway. This could take 15 minutes on a good day, or much longer on a bad day. The good news is that I’d probably only be looking at a 10-15 minute drive to or from the office as it’s only about four miles. I might even be able to ride my bike to the office if I could find a way to avoid 79.

The second question, deals with the future… What school district would the house fall in? One group of houses falls into Hemet, while ones just to it’s south are part of Temecula Unified. I guess I need to figure out if there are major differences in the educations in case I end up staying in this house for a while. Some of these houses certainly were big enough to stay in for a while. If I was able to find a renter or two to help share the cost, I might even be able to afford the house too!

I found it interesting as we were looking what became the items I was looking for. I couldn’t stand walking into a house and being in the dining room. That just seemed really weird to me, even though it is really that way in our Fallbrook house. You are presented with four choices from the entry in our house now, East hallway (morning room), Dining room, Living room or West hallway. Many of these houses, you were just in the dining room and I felt it should be the living room one walks into first. I really liked one house we looked at that had stain glass like clear windows between the living room (front) and formal dining room. It had nice access to the kitchen from the dining room as well, but it was really separated. Of course, I don’t remember which one of the houses this was at this point, but maybe I could find it again…

The other thing that turned out to be a major pet peeve, and I don’t have a clue why, was walking through the laundry room to get in from the garage. I realize this is the most common way of getting in, but it really seems to bother me. Some were better than others and some just put the laundry upstairs (where it seems to make more sense to me) to solve the problem all together. Of course, it also seemed that some put the garage door miles away from the kitchen which could be a pain when bringing in groceries.

One thing I found myself looking for, but had never thought of putting on a list before, was having a breakfast bar kind of area in the kitchen. Just being able to sit at the island and eat seems really nice to me. Now, that would mean there are three places one could eat without even considering an unofficial eating place, such as in front of the TV, but I think this all revolves around my love of food…

We looked at one house that had a sitting room in the master bedroom upstairs. (You got into it via double doors and then the room broke off to the bathroom and bedroom which could be separated with doors if wanted.) I had this vision of holding family home evenings or family prayers in this room and sending the kids off to bed. It was really kind of odd. Along the same line, we looked at some houses that had “retreats” or exercise rooms off the master bathroom, but I thought it was very odd to have a room that one could only get to through the bathroom. (I also don’t understand why everyone puts the alarm system control panel and house wiring in the master bedroom closet – wouldn’t the garage be a great place for these things?)

I also found a bathroom feature I fell in love with. Instead of the typical Jack & Jill bathroom, it has what I came to call the zig-zag bathroom. Each bedroom had it’s own sink which was then connected with with the toilet/shower between. I thought it was cool and helped give each person some more personal space, but it also keeps things more separated as opposed to the straight through approach.

Nathaniel seemed to really love the bonus rooms in some of the houses, but all I could think about was furnishing them! I like the idea, but it also seems like a hassle to have another room. We already have a family room and a living room, why do we need a third room to never use? A lot of the houses we modeled with pool tables and such in there, so I guess it could be more of a game or theme room, but I would feel inclined just to have another bedroom. One can never have enough bedrooms or bathrooms in my opinion.

There is also the possibility of houses just off the 15 at Clinton Keith in Wildomar. I like the freeway access and that it appears this would make it about 15 minutes to most of the places I would be headed, but I don’t know that I would want my kinds going to Lake Elsinore HS. I don’t know why, I guess I just have a bad impression of it for some reason. I need to do some school research. I also could just not worry about that far down the road and assume that when I get married I’ll end up having to move because my leading lady won’t like the house I’ve picked out.

I also looked at some places in practically Menifee, but I really don’t think I want to live that far out there. But then I question if Winchester/French Valley isn’t just as far out there, or maybe even father. Nathaniel suggested figuring out where I wanted to live and find the best house available. i seem to be doing things the other way around. Find the best house and see if you can make it’s location work. We all knew there was more than one screw loose with me already, right?

Then there is the whole possibility of a “pre-owned” home. I have nothing against this route, it just seems impossible for me to find one I like. I’ve searched a few sites and it seems that either the seller hasn’t figured out prices have gone down in the last year or that they just don’t appeal to me. However, I could be a bit picker about location going that route and might have more options to choose from.

I guess I need to focus on getting the house in Arizona sold before I worry too much about buying a house out here, but that is actually this weeks task. I’m hoping to start getting things rolling on making the house look presentable and figuring out what needs to be done so that we can get it on the market in the next month if at all possible and get it sold quickly thereafter. I would love to have escrow closed before the end of August.

First problem… Anyone want some dogs? I’m thinking craigslist.