rax | This was a particularly good Good Friday for me. (Reply)

There were a bunch of little reasons, like getting to bed early and having a light workday, but here are the two big ones:

I have an accepted offer on a house in Bloomington, IN. (It's the one with the green roof.)
I handed my MA thesis in. Early.

Yes, that's right. I finished my thesis late Thursday night after realizing I could make a push and get it done and not spend the whole weekend miserable. I handed it in early Friday morning --- they have the option of telling me to tweak it [0] and if they do I have a couple of weeks to fix it, and the final-final-final submission is actually May 15th but the extra month is for working on formatting and I'm already done with that because no one told me I shouldn't have the formatting perfect for this draft. *sigh* It's in the documentation, but the documentation contradicts itself, and I went with the earliest deadline since that's the sane thing to do... But it doesn't matter now, because it's done.
The house thing, oh my god. I worked with Zak Szymanski at Jeanne Walters real estate, and I would absolutely recommend him to any of you looking to buy a house in Bloomington --- he was amazing. We only had two days on the ground, and we looked at scads of houses, and I'm already working on the items on a closing checklist five days after touching down in Bloomington. It's a split-level house with an extra bonus basement under the theoretically single-level part; I've heard it called a quad-level. It's ginormous and gorgeous and in excellent condition and and and and. At some point I'm going to draw diagrams on graph paper and be like "My house! This is where I will put things!" Here's a brief list of the awesome features:

An induction stove, which I've heard good things about and want to give a try, but we can always install gas if it is terrible
Three extra rooms in the basement space, two of which would make excellent craft studios or something
Ample space for dinner parties
So much storage space, like oh my god.
Four bedrooms --- we're definitely going to have at least one guest bedroom (which will probably also be my home office, like now)
It takes longer to walk from the front door to the street than from the street to a bus stop, and it's a pleasant bike ride to the building I'll be spending much of my time in on campus

There's more, of course. I could go on and on and on about this house that I am very likely to soon own. And I do mean soon --- it looks like we're going to be taking possession, if all goes well, on May 17th. I don't know how long it will take to find housemates --- we'd like one or two other people, I really like cooperative living situations --- but I expect to get nice and settled in over the summer before school even starts, and that will make starting school much better, I think. So, cross your fingers for me that everything goes well with this, and expect me to be at least somewhat more present both online and at social events, starting soon.

[0] They could tell me they're failing me. But they won't.