After a couple of weeks of cryptic remarks and references buried in blog posts, I was able to spill the story yesterday. (If we’re Facebook friends, you may have read the short version already. This is the just-slightly-longer one.) Tall Paul and I started down the road to home ownership back in the spring. It’s been a bumpy one, and we’ve been keeping our progress–and the frustrating lack of it, sometimes–quiet. But we’d just gone into a sale contract when we left for our family trip to New England in mid-June, and on the last day of July, we closed on the house next door to the one we’ve been renting since the fall of 2008. As my husband (accurately) put it in his own Facebook update,