New year, new beginnings

It's always best to start at the beginning, I guess. However, to start at the beginning of this story would go back more years than I care to think about, so I'll start at the beginning of the end of the last chapter.

In October 2005 my husband Ray was laid off. Ray is a union carpenter. We thought he would fairly quickly get another job. Carpenters always come and go from one company to another so it was no big deal. The housing market was already starting it's downturn, though, so after 6 months on unemployment he still hadn't found another job. Then in July 2006 he finally was hired again. We thought our luck was turning upward again. Two hours into his new job, his legs went numb. He came to the clinic where I work looking absolutely terrible. I took him to Walk In Care where they immediately sent him by ambulance to the nearest ER. He ended up in ICU for several days, he had 100% blockage of one femoral artery and 95% in the other. Employers take a dim view of new employees working for 2 hours and then being off for 2 weeks, so he was again unemployed. The only other job he was able to get was a low paying night shift at a distribution warehouse. Certainly not enough to keep up with our house payments. We were able to sell the house in July 2007, just ahead of foreclosure. Because of the housing market we had to sell for far less than we liked, but still came out with enough to be able to look for property that would be paid for. We moved in with our daughter Shayna temporarily and started looking.

Ray's brother Jim lives in Southern Illinois. Jim had been after Ray for years to move down by him. We had Jim contact a realtor and set up a Saturday to look at properties. We made the 6 hour trip down the weekend after Thanksgiving. Jim mentioned that an aquaintance had a property he was trying to sell. Less land than we wanted, under an acre, but it had a 3 bedroom 2 bath mobile home and he only wanted $10,000 for it. We said sure, we'll look at it. When we got there, Jim told us the owner dropped his asking price to $8500. There was no way we could turn that down so we bought it. Easiest closing I've ever been through, the title company faxed me the paperwork, we signed it, and mailed it back to them with a cashier's check. The woman at the title company very apologetically said that after we cleaned and fixed up the place the property taxed would probably go up. No sweat, the taxes for 2007 were $2.31. It could increase by 1000% and it wouldn't be a problem.

Now we are ready to make our new beginnings