Jared and I purchased a U.V. flashlight so we could see if the house was worse or better than we thought. It turned out to be worse. I am excited to have this new toy though. Just think how little sleep I could get in a hotel room I went over with a U.V. light.

We are also excited at the prospect of starting to clean the house and rip out the old carpets. Way gross, but it will be good to be doing something.

We are experiencing some glitches in our efforts to buy the house. Hopefully everything will work out. I find it suspicious that we finally decided with less than 2 weeks to go we should let certain people in our ward know and the next day we learned of these issues. If we don't succeed this time I am going to think Jared and I are meant to settle in a different state and not Idaho (where we would freeze to death), Utah (where we would be overwhelmed by Utahness), or California (where it is insanely expensive to live). I was thinking, much to Jared's dismay, a bit more midwestern.

One of the more delightful people in our ward gave Jared this response when he made the announcement, "We've heard that before." and not in a joking, kind way more like a believe it when I see it way. So how would you handle our desire to not leave people in a lurch and our desire to not give any false moving announcements? They seem to be conflicting desires.

Our bank wants to extend C.O.E., and the seller doesn't want to extend it as far. The innocuous issue is that the new carpet has to be installed and our bank wants to take pictures of the new carpet before C.O.E.. Our bank still hasn't ordered the appraisal. The 2 employees that we have direct contact with at the bank don't call us back in a timely manner (or ever) or email us back. We only found out about the issues because we insisted on a face to face meeting with them.

Now on to more catch-up stuff. So on 12/28 we went to Yuma - a town near the borders of Mexico and California that Jared and I had no desires to visit ever. Elijah wanted to go see the Yuma Territorial Prison
so off we went. It actually turned out to be an interesting place and it fit in with Jared's "Wild West" interest.

I freaked Elijah out because he was wearing a red jacket and there is a little girl ghost that likes to pinch and tickle guests wearing red in one of the cells. He didn't want to join us in the Dark Cell because of the ghost. He did join us in the end though. The funny part is that he picked the place as a place to visit knowing it is considered to be haunted.

We were really hungry because we had skipped lunch in order to make it to the prison before it closed. We had consumed cereal bars, pretzels, and water but it wasn't enough. After we were finished at the prison we decided to hurry to the Bridge to Nowhere(Maxwell's request) before we ran out of daylight. I also wanted to try to get to the junction between the Colorado and Gila Rivers, but we didn't have the right kind of map to find where it was. We just knew it was 3-5 miles away from the prison. Maxwell also wanted to see the Gila River during Winter Break. We made it to the Bridge to Nowhere, got out and took a ton of pictures, and drove back towards Yuma. There are a ton of cabbage and cauliflower farms out there.

Unfortunately on our way back to Yuma from the Bridge to Nowhere we got in the wrong lane and missed the whole of Yuma so we were all still starving.

Along the 8 there are a lot of stinky towns at night. They weren't so stinky during the day. One of the worst offenders had an A on the mountain by the freeway. There was a lot of laughter and tears during our drive through that nasty place. Xander said, "I feel like I'm going to barf." It was that bad. We were all huffing the air freshener and wishing we had 5 of them.

We were still starving and had no idea how long it would be before we reached a destination with food. We stopped at a Rest Area to raid the vending machines. The items were expensive so we were only able to purchase 4 items. I was getting shaky, sick at this point so I forked over all of our cash to have a little snack for each of us. Finally, at around 8 pm we reached Casa Grande, AZ and ended up eating at a Church's Chicken.

We safely made it home that night and had officially visited Casa Grande, AZ for the first time ever.