The last two days have seen a blizzard of paperwork around our second attempt to place a winning contract on a house. Since Amy is away at a conference in Seattle, dozens of pages had to faxed or scanned-to-PDF (2 & 3) to circulate between the buyers and agents of our old house and sellers and agents of our new house. For good measure, we were advised to write an illustrated soulful letter of appeal to the sellers (4) and a check for $10,000 "earnest money." The home buying market is so competitive now, I wouldn't have been surprised if the owners required us to dance naked in their front yard. The number of details to manage has been staggering. Though we ended up being the high bidder on the house, the escalation process pushed us $22,000 over the asking price. Spicing up the stress was today's brief Homeland Security Code Orange alert (7) and several URGENT (8) requests to put content on our web site during the hours it was locked down due to the re-launch. By evening, we were feeling confident that we will be owning a new house soon, AND at 8:43pm, our team successfully pushed our new web site out to the world! (9)

All this before our company's Day of Service tomorrow, where 99% of the organization will be out volunteering at a variety of offsite locations.

- mike lee - langley park, md