New Stomping Grounds

Since I accepted a job roughly 2 months ago at Penn State, we've been looking online every day for a place to live in State College. At first we were hoping to rent, but the rental market here has very limited options for families with pets and to rent a nice place costs about as much per month as it would cost for a mortgage payment.  So just last week we once again began entertaining the idea of buying a place.  Tara is 35 weeks pregnant, so she was in the no-fly period, so I had to fly out alone to find us a house (and attend a research conference).  Not an ideal situation for finding a home.

I flew out to State College and looked at a few places, but there was no one clear place that stood out.  The next day I got a call from Tara at 7am EST (i.e. 4am PST), which totally surprised me.  I asked her what she was doing up so early, and she responded that she couldn't sleep around 3am, so she'd gotten up and started looking online for houses and noticed that a new house had just come on the market.  She thought it was perfect, and that it would likely go fast. So I alerted our real estate agent, and he was able to get me in to see the house that day.  I had to miss the formal lunch for the research conference so that I could see the place, but it turned out to be worth it. We really liked the house and made an offer on it that same day and that evening the offer was accepted.  So after waiting months and months to find a place, when the right place came up, we were able to act quickly and lock in.  We feel very blessed.

Interestingly, the house appeared to be owned by an LDS couple, which is pretty uncommon for a place like Pennsylvania.  We figured this out because there were pictures of Christ and of the Salt Lake City temple on the walls. Prior to their ownership, the house was apparently owned by Jay Paterno (the son of former PSU football coach Joe Paterno).

In unrelated news, I also attended an accounting research conference at Penn State.  It was a great conference, and at the end, they had a nice activity where we went out to a nice range and got to shoot clay pigeons.  The weather was perfect, and we all had a good time.