History.

I realized today why I love historical fiction.  It's the never ending story!  No matter where you go, who the author is, what story they are telling, it all ties together, and your old friends are constantly popping up to say hello.

I just finished a book this morning by Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth, about a bunch of people in medieval England building cathedrals.  Obviously I had a general idea of the time frame, but I'm not very well learned when it comes to English history, so I couldn't quite put it into context.  Until I was almost done with it and a new King was rising, who was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine.  I said to myself "Ah ha!  I know that name!  This Henry will become father of King Richard and Prince John!"  It made me excited to feel like I knew him.  It's like reading a story about one of your friends' parents, without realizing until the end who they were.  And then, at the very end, who should come into the story but Reginald Fitzurse!  Later in life he was one of Prince John's buddies, which, of course, I only know from reading Ivanhoe.

And all that means I could go straight from reading this book to Ivanhoe, and feel like I never stopped, even though they were written by completely different people in totally different time periods.  It's fantastic!  History truly is the story that never ends.  Of course, I prefer historical fiction because it's much less dry than reading a history textbook.

In other news, this ranch house is soon to be a part of our history, because we found an apartment in town, and we're moving next weekend!  As of the 16th, our address will be

400 N. Parks St.
Apt. 5
Breckenridge, TX
76424

So much easier to remember than this one, which is all numbers.

It will be nice to be in town.  Jesse isn't too excited about apartment life, and I'm not too excited about an apartment sized kitchen, but it will save sooooo much in gas!  At least, that's the hope.  It's two bedroom, which is good, because if it wasn't, Cricket would end up sleeping on the couch for a couple months.  That would be no bueno.  I've done that, and it gets hard on the back after a while.  Especially if it's a corner couch.  However, we don't have a corner couch, we've actually managed to score two pretty nice leather couches for only $200!  I'm fairly excited about that.  I guess the company bought them on a super duper sale and no one is using them now, so they're selling them to us for about half of what they paid, so we're getting a super duper uper good deal, and who can turn that down?  People who live in the middle east and sit on pillow instead of couches, I suppose.  Thankfully, Texans use couches.

The biggest downside to the apartment is that our rent will double, but we knew that would happen, no matter where we went from here.  But I got hired on full-time at East Elementary as the first grade teachers' aide, so starting in September I will be getting regular paychecks and have my insurance paid for, and all of those things that will make our rent and two car payments much easier to swallow.  We just have to make it through the summer!  I see alot of beans and grass in our future...See, history has a way of coming back and being quite useful.  Thank you, Mother, for teaching me how to make food out of nothing!

My personal history has taught me many things; as long as we've got rice, we will survive; you can always stretch soup; homemade bread is cheap, and sometimes miracles happen with green beans.  God has never let me go hungry, and I don't believe that He intends to start doing so now.