Have you been in that situation where you have such an overwhelming amount of things to do that you are just paralyzed by it? You don’t even know where to begin? It’s like a heavy fog has descended and you can’t see 5 feet in front of you for where to even take the next step. That’s how coming back from Costa Rica was for both Joe and me. We got back at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night and the gist of things is that the lack of sleep from long flights and the overwhelming amount of things to do drove us both over the edge last Saturday. Anxiety and stress got the best of us and at one point I ended up on my closet floor curled up in a ball, crying. Clearly, emotions were running high at the Westfall house. The lovely thing about these kind of breakdowns is that typically you don’t remember exactly how you got to that state of emotions in the first place, and so as I recall these events from a week ago I truthfully don’t remember much. But the essence of my meltdown was that Joe brought up the idea of trying to rent our house out by September 1st and that “it was more important to get renters” than whatever my agenda was, blah, blah, blah… And at that moment in time, I just wasn’t ready for that conversation. It was too soon, too fast, and too crazy! Our move-out date was supposed to be October 1st, not September!! I was SO tired I just couldn’t think straight, and I ended up being a wreck for the rest of the day. Hence, the Bad Day.
But things got much better, in a matter hours. Okay, it was 72 hours, but still, it’s amazing how quickly things can turn around. I had time to think about our “timeline” and Joe’s proposal and started realizing that Joe really was on to something. We had found a house in Costa Rica that, if we got, we’d start paying rent on October 1st. And we wanted to spend a good amount of time with both of our families before we left the country. And really, I was ready to start packing and it’s a whole lot easier to pack when you know you’re moving soon and don’t have to deal with empty walls or shelves for too long. So I came around and our compromise was that September 15th was ideal, but I could swing a September 5th move out date. That was the EARLIEST I was willing to do things, because it gave us an extra weekend.
So we posted our house on Craigslist and received a couple of emails showing interest within the first day. But one couple decided against it due to location and the other email was from “4 responsible adults” – that sounded too ambiguous to me. Craigslist can be so random, and I really wanted to narrow our search down. After a couple of technical glitches, I was finally able to post our ad on our church’s message board (Bethany Community Church), but I had little hope of anything coming out of that because it doesn’t seem to be widely used. Lo and behold, I received an email from a Bethany attender and SPU grad (that’s the local Christian college here) within a couple hours of posting. That was Monday. Long story short, she and her friends came over on Tuesday night, wrote us a check, and it was pretty much a done deal. You know how you just get a feeling with people? We obviously don’t ‘know’ them, but you can just tell they are AWESOME girls – cute, fun, responsible - and they go to our church. They are paying less than we were asking, but they will sign a two year lease, do all the yard work, and maybe even use some of our furniture so we don’t have to move or store it. We feel excited and blessed.
Then, a couple hours after that happened, we found out that we got the house in Costa Rica that we wanted to rent. For a pretty darn good price. So Bad turns to Glad, and we sure are glad to have both of those HUGE things off of our plate.
Time is going fast though: only two weeks until we move out! So our plate is still pretty full… but I know we can do it. Now we're off to pack...
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