Just when I thought things couldn't get more complicated

Well,
I know it's been a long time (sorry Anne, I didn't post every day this month... oops) so I'll try to catch you (all, if more than one person still reads this thing..) up. Mark and I put an offer in on a house last week. It's great! I'm so excited, our first house!!! We were really excited because Iowa has this great first time home buyer's initiative, they give you a really good interest rate, and a grant to pay for your closing costs. How cool is that? So we are technically closing on Dec. 12th. That's great, not too complicated... But wait. There's more.

As you (all) know, I've been working on grad school (by the way, up is a modal verb for anyone who cares...) and going slightly crazy. Just to give you an idea... I have 3,000 word essay that I'm working on right now, but my last homework assignment was picking out morphemes in other languages. To put it simply, I was given some examples in random languages (Persian, Turkish, and a Native American language Isleta which I have never heard of before) and told to basically write some translations. At first I was a little freaked out, but after completing the homework, I feel really smart. Anyway, that was a long side note... the whole point being that I wanted to concentrate on grad school since it is so difficult and I'm not half as smart as I think I am and about 1/4th as smart as everyone else thinks I am... But I got a job offer I couldn't refuse. So I accepted a position at a university up here editing papers. I'm sure it will be as exciting as it sounds, but it pays well, is in my field and would look good on a resume when I get my MA and PhD and go into teaching... however, this is where it gets complicated...

The Iowa first home buyer's initiative is only good up to a certain income level. My salary puts us over that level... which means that our interest rate will go up .25% and we have to pay closing costs. And buy a car. And pay our bills. And purchase gas for a 45 min one way drive for me. And, as we all know, when one starts a new job, one does not get paid right away, so we are doing all of this on Mark's salary... and it is going to be squishy. Very squishy. And then we have Christmas. So I have 3 options: 1. ask if the new job will move my start date 3.5 weeks later (probably not feasible) 2. quit new job before I start (also probably not feasible, or nice, or good work ethics, or good for my rep, or good for our finances....) 3. suck it up and hope we make it though Dec. I'm thinking 3 is the best option. Although, I suppose there are worse things that could have happened (i.e. no job for me OR Mark, no house, etc.) Being an adult is complicated. Ah well, we do have a house, we do both have jobs and, it will be fine after Dec....