"Firefly"

On August 1st we stopped being nomads, and we have been celebrating ever since! We had some great help from our family who traveled from IL to help us load and unload our truck, and had a very successful moving day. That is, until Ben and Bud went to return the 24 ft. rental truck at 6pm. Just a half mile from our apartment is an overpass that is 12 ft. high. The truck we rented was about 13.5 ft. You can see where this is going...

"Like a sardine can" was how Bud described how the top of the truck was ripped off when Ben drove under the bridge. To my surprise, the hit felt to Ben like he was driving over a large pothole. He had no idea what had happened until Bud (who was driving in front of him) pulled over to see if Ben was okay. Thankfully no one was behind Ben when this happened, as the entire top of the now convertible truck flew off into the road. I felt so bad for him because he had done such a great job driving the truck the entire day, which is not an easy feat! While they waited for the police to arrive, passerby's stopped to talk to them and disclosed that this happens about 5 times a year and agreed the signage for the bridge should be more obvious to rookie truck drivers.

The next day played out differently than expected as we spent a good amount of time with our new State Farm agent and on the phone with the rental company. We are praying that we will only have to pay the deductible for our collision insurance. (We bought all of the "insurance" through the rental company, but this is the one thing they don't cover!) Hopefully we will find out soon. The whole event really put our value on finances into perspective: We could freak out that we suddenly had this large sum of money to pay and would have this much less saved up for a home, or be thankful that we have money saved for times like this. We were also reminded that when our value is in God, who is Lord over everything, we won't be shaken during times like this, because our money is not what our hope or value is in. Ben felt this particularly strongly those first 24 hours.

Now that we have been in Wauwatosa for almost two weeks, we can confidently say we love our new place. At first we could only say that about our apartment, but after exploring downtown and running on one of the many amazing parkways our county has, we are excited to be a part of this community. We have already made the 1.5 mile walk to the Farmer's Market, visited an art festival, and played a few games of tennis on some public courts we found. Alterra, Milwaukee's local coffee company, is just 4 buildings down from us, and it doesn't take us long to get to the lake. The town of some 44,000 people is named after the Potawatami word for "firefly."

Here are some pictures:

Of our place:

Love the built in cabinets!

The office: