New House! And It's A House House!

Safe home, safe home in port!
Rent cordage, shattered deck,
Torn sails, provisions short,
And only not a wreck:
But, oh! the joy, upon the shore,
To tell our voyage perils o'er.
—"Safe Home, Safe Home in Port," Traditional (performed by ListenListen in the link)

It's only been a month since my last personal update post, but things have been moving quickly since then.

As I mentioned at the end of that post, immediately after the end of Match Day ceremonies, Anna and I set out for Muncie, Indiana, which we'd just discovered was going to be our home for the next three years. We ended up spending much of the weekend driving slowly around different neighborhoods, parking in odd spots, and getting out to go look at houses with "For Rent" signs in the front yard. It was fun bonding time!*

At one point, we passed a truly gorgeous little blue house with a sign in its yard but, alas, the sign was a "For Sale" sign and we were pretty bummed about it for a moment. We decided to get out and look at it anyway, and once we did we were completely smitten, which was a terrible feeling to have about a house that is for sale when you are only looking to rent.**

So good was this house, that we changed our minds and decided to consider the possibility of buying a place. How bad could it be? Other people in our situation were doing it, and with a mortgage the cost would be about the same as renting. We started to get excited about the possibilities; it was a giddy time.

Later that evening, though, after much discussion, Anna stated flatly: "James, I don't want to buy a house." And I was like, cool, cool.

So instead we contacted the realtor for pretty little blue house and asked if the owners would rent it to us. No, he said, they would not—they'd just sold it! He pointed us toward some renters who had several properties in the area, though. We contacted one, and arranged a viewing of one of their properties the following weekend. We couldn't actually be there ourselves, so we asked my uncle and aunt who live nearby to go see it in our place. 

Anyway, long story short: we're renting a house! And it's a house house, not like an apartment house or something.† This is what it looks like:

Google Maps

I haven't lived in a house since, I wanna say 2003? It'll be interesting not having downstairs neighbors, or people that we can hear/can hear us through walls/ceilings/floors. And having a garage. And a washing machine (eventually; we gotta go buy one first). And this kitchen:

I'll finally have an office space to work in. And my home will finally have a spare bedroom for guests. These are things I've looked forward to for a while, and it's weird that they're suddenly so close! Anna's moving in in less than a week, and I'm moving my stuff not long thereafter, though I'll technically be living in Chicago until the wedding at the end of May.

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*We also spent some time this weekend doing the thing where Anna took a nap in the car and I took a self-directed tour of the Ball Stat campus. I found but did not enter the orchid greenhouse, and attempted to go to but was turned away from a show at the planetarium (it was full). I spent the rest of Anna's nap browsing the library, where I discovered that my Ball State ID number will already allow me to log into the computers, even though I'm not enrolled in any classes.
**Real talk: word on the street is that, if you buy a house in Muncie, you are unlikely to be able to sell it in a timely manner.
†House house is an example of contrastive focus reduplication, the most common example of which is probably "Do you like him, or do you like like him?" Here are some other examples:

• I’ll make the tuna salad, and you make the salad salad.
• I’m up, I’m just not up up.
• My car isn’t mine mine; it’s my parents’.
• Oh, we’re not living together living together.