Falling into place

After having a rough week last week this week definitely seems to be shaping up nicely. We were afraid that if we were to buy a house that it would be hard to get the down payment money from where it's been so far, but NG found out from a guy he works with (whose money was stashed in the same place) that they only require a good faith estimate from the loan company before they let you get your down payment money. Hey, that works for me! I also found out that for the housing credit, basically they'll re-file this year's taxes if you close before the end of the tax year, and if you close after the end of this tax year then you just file it on your taxes in the spring. That works for me too. So basically if we close before the end of December (which is possible, being more of a private transaction type thing) we can go ahead with getting the credit. If not, we wait until the end of January when we typically file our taxes, so there would only be a few weeks' wait.
I really want out of the neighborhood we live in now. There's constant crime out here and I'm scared to death to walk outside at night beyond my carport. There's always burglaries and such here in town, especially in my neighborhood.
At least in the neighborhood the new house is in I know the crime rate. I know what to watch out for, who to watch out for, where to watch for them. I lived there growing up... I SHOULD know. Most of the people there now are the same people who were there when I was growing up.
I guess it's a really big perk for me that it's up the street from my parents. Sweet'ums is crazy about them and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. I know that, growing up, I would have loved to have lived closer to my biological grandparents (one was local, one lived two hours away but kept to himself, and the other two were 1200 miles away). At least, the ones who were interested in us--the one who was local really wasn't interested in me or my brother, instead preferring my cousins. Shoot, I would have loved to have just lived close to a grandparent-like figure. Even NG lived close to fairly involved grandparents growing up. That's something I want for Sweet'ums, and if his parents aren't going to make an effort to be involved, then it would be nice to be near the grandparents who do.
Besides, the two towns we'd live between total only about 20,000 people, and they're a whole lot cozier and more personal than this city of almost 100,000. Both value the small-town feel of their communities, and both towns are still occupied by many of the same families who have been there for generations. So much of my childhood was lived in these towns--the majority of it, in fact. I'd love for NG to live in the place where he grew up and share it with Sweet'ums but his family moved so much that there's a whole huge area that he considers home--there's no one place he feels most connected to, except the area his grandparents live and there's really just not anything for sale right around there.
So I'm actually letting myself get excited now. This might actually happen. I just keept waiting for things to fall apart around me, because that's always what happens when I hope for something, but maybe this time we're actually on the right path.