As is pretty normal in my life. As my life goes, so goes my golf game. It’s pretty weird having such a hard game parallel your actual life. But one of the things I really like about golf is that it is so much like real life.

We all aim for the fairways of life. We step up to the tee box of opportunity and we envision ourselves safely in the fairway. But because of our dumb choices or just plain having the ball bounce the wrong way on us… We end up in the rough. Snarled by sins and with trees hopelessly between where we are and where we need to go. We are creative. But sometimes creativity makes matters worse and we end up lost or in the bushes of life.

I spend a lot of my walk with the Lord like I do on the golf course. Hoping for the fairway while looking for my ball in the long grass. Sometimes everything works out according to plan and I get a few pars and birdies while at other times it seems like the best I can muster is a bogey or double bogey. Just like my golf game… I am messy. I’m always looking at the glass half full… Knowing that it’s half empty. I wish I could quit that… But I can’t. It’s part of me, like a hook or a slice… It goes along with the game.

One thing that is decidely the same and different at the same time is improvement. Unlike golf, which offers no grace and only occasional forgiveness, I can rely on Christ to fill me and forgive me. He has given me many mulligans! I’ve had a lifetime of favorable bounces from the Lord. But, just like golf, I can practice and I can get better… Much better! While you can never “win life” you can live a life in the Lord.

OK, now the golf news
So today I finally broke my “birdie free” streak. I sunk a 6 foot putt on the 7th hole of the South course to get back to +1. I finished the day there. 2 bogies on both par 3s and the single birdie. I had about 3 other putts for birdie that I just couldn’t convert… So I’m real pleased with that. The long drives have helped overcome my bad approach shots. Today, my longest approach shot was from 155 yards. All-in-all… I am looking forward to my last night of leagues before the NI trip next Monday.

House hunt update

We’re pretty frustrated. The West Road house still hasn’t closed the deal. We’ve sent our second offer for the house. I’ve conceded a lot and the seller hasn’t conceded much. I have a feeling that we may be putting this on hold until I can get back from Northern Ireland in August. Since the market is slow here… Maybe this house will still be around.

• Explain Your ways to someone who doubts You even exist?
• Tell someone that their pain is in Your will?
• Tell 4 girls that their dad’s MS will steal him away from them?
• That God can heal when I don’t know if He will?
• Explain the mysteries of life when someone demands to know “why?”
• Trust that you are in control when everything seems out of control?

How do I do that? How can I comfort others when I am not comforted? Why do You seem to put me in situations where I can’t explain You to those in such pain?

So we’ve been counter-offered. We haven’t seen the final document yet, but we understand that what we are going to see we won’t like.

Annoying!
The agent-to-agent talk is that the owner is going to counter-offer us by full asking price AND she has decided to add a weeks occupancy for her tenant/squatter. The first part doesn’t surprise me while the second part is just annoying and maybe illegal. We’re hoping that since there was universal displeasure about that part between me and my agent and her agent that she’ll come up with a better option. She could avoid this by simply moving the closing date to the day her tenant can move.

I’m annoyed because it seems very unusual that when negotiating that a party would not try to compromise and meet you half way but would instead up the ante. My guess is that this is a stall technique and she’s hoping I won’t accept the counter so she will be free to listen to other offers while we re-think our price.

Um… I’m no dummy
This is where a bit of reality sets in for us. We don’t need to buy this house as bad as she needs to sell it. She has her taxes due, she has a mortgage due… And she doesn’t live there. (And pays higher taxes for the privledge.) We also see that she bought the house only a year ago and paid a lot more than the market value for it… So we’re going to need to be extra careful about the inspection.

Long story short
She’s either going to negotiate with us or lose out on the opportunity to sell at this time. Our area is in a bigtime “buyers market” and the average house sits on the market for over 100 days. This one has now been on 14 days total. With my mission trip now 7 days away, I can’t afford to play too many games.

Last night some friends of ours took us out on their boat. We put-in in downtown St. Clair and moved north to Port Huron and even a little out into Lake Huron. [Picture above is the Blue Water bridge, one of the busiest connecting points in the country between Canada and the U.S.]

This was my first trip on the river or on Lake Huron, so obviously it was new to the kids as well. We had a blast as it was a perfect evening. The weather was gorgeous, the waves on the river weren’t bad, and the company was the best. Dick and Cathie are fantastic hosts, I had never seen them in this role before!

A good break

With all that is swirling around us for the next 24 hours, this was a welcome break. Yesterday was a whirlwind of a day with golf in the morning, looking at houses from 9:00-1:00 PM, making an offer on a house, and then this. Today I have normal church responsibilities. But, I also have to go out to lunch with a visiting missionary family and entertain, head down to my in-laws house to pick something up, [A 2 hour drive round trip!] and set up for tonight’s bonfire. Holy cow it is going to be a long day.

No news is _____ news

We don’t know yet whether or not our offer on the house has been reviewed. So at this point, we’re just waiting. We have until 10:00 PM to hear anything from the seller. Tick tick tick tick.

I just got back from our real estate agents office. We have tendered our very first offer on our very first home. (It’s picture is directly below this one.)

The details
It’s a 2 story Colonial originally built in 1810 according to the township records. It was apparent relocated to this location in the 1910s or earlier. Though I’m not 100% about this, the talk is that it was once a Toll House. We look at this as not only a great house for our family, but a great place to entertain people.

It features 4 good sized bedrooms, 1 and a half baths. I like that fact that downstairs is the half bath since it’s always a little weird to have guests in my shower space. All of the bedrooms are upstairs and I like that too. It keeps the living space more private.

We love the living room and dining room. They are huge! The formal dining room is 22×11 and the living room is 19×17 at least. The living room has a fireplace and under the carpet are hardwood floors. The whole house is flooded by the many windows… We dig that. The kitchen is nice, though not fantastic. We think it’s quite usable.

Another HUGE selling point is the very large backyard. This is perfect for having fun, fires, BBQ’s on and on. We think the kids will love to have a place of their own to play. I can definitely see a playhouse going up.

Some of the other things it has are a 2.5 car garage, wrap-around porch, a nice laundry room… And a few other things I’m forgetting.

The verdict
The offer is in the sellers hands. We should find out something by Sunday evening. Eeks! This is scary, but fun at the same time.

Oh yeah
We’re leaving for Northern Ireland in 9 days. Why not buy a house?

This is house #4 on our final 4 list. It’s the cheapest, has the most square footage, etc. But we worry a bit about this house since it was built in 1810. 

This is house #3 on our list. It’s worst feature is that it’s on a busy road. It’s the 2nd most expensive of the final 4. 

This is house #2 on our list. And it is also the most expensive. 

Stocks
I took advantage of yesterday’s early morning “terrorism sell-off” to make a quarterly adjustment in my stock portfolio. I dumped the sluggish Coca-Cola Company [KO] in favor of the best of breed Intel. [INTC] I did this based almost entirely on my new favorite TV show, Mad Money with Jim Cramer.

I held Coke for about a quarter and while it did go up about $4 I didn’t get around to cashing out. Just like the casino I didn’t follow my head and press the “cash out” button. All told, we held the stock for 90 days and made $.60 per share plus a dividend of $3.31 a share. Not terrible. I was able to buy Intel during the early morning slump near it’s 2 week low of $26.20. I just set a limit at $26.25 and waited for the market to hit my number. So… I’m pretty excited about that. It’s already gone up to $26.87 as of 9:51 AM today. This morning a big analyst upgraded Intel’s earnings expectation for the 3rd quarter, so the stock is on the move up, up, and away. As I look at my streaming ticker from E*Trade I see that most of the buys for Intel are massive! Holy cow… Maybe one day I’ll own thousands of shares of companies… Maybe.

Taxes
My heart sank the other day as I went to the mail and saw the return address of “Internal Revenue Service.” I don’t cheat on my taxes, but pastor taxes are a tricky business and I’m always afraid I’ve screwed it up. I could see through the envelope “amount you owe” and “penalty” and I was almost sick. With the house hunting at full throttle… This would put us out of the housing market. To my relief I learned that while I did mess up my taxes, it was only by $1.00 with a $.01 penalty. Phew!

House hunting
This afternoon we are looking at about 5 more houses. There are two here in the village of Romeo… So we are excited about that. There are still 2 from last time that I am interested in, so we’ll see. Two of the houses today are within 100 yards of each other. But both are also on a major street in our area. We are still thinking that if all goes well, we could do this in a week. More on that later.