Thanks....

to everyone who either commented on the blog or sent e-mails with your sweet encouraging words.  Heavenly Father has blessed us so much and things are really coming together.  We now have a house that could not have happened without some Divine intervention.  I wish I had the talent to write the whole story all eloquent, witty, and captiviting, but I'm afraid it would just be a jumbled mess of rambling thoughts.  I'll just give you the highlights....
~ we are renting because we still own a house, and we really don't know where we want to be long term in that area.  So we were looking at 4 different sites that had listings for rental homes.
~ Californians are not pet-loving people ( I guess? Maybe they just don't like other people's pets).  We would search and search before finding a house that would allow dogs.  If we checked the little box saying how many bedrooms we needed, and then checked the little box that said "dog", our search would narrow to about 2 houses.  In the entire area.  No kidding.  When we found a house that we were even a little interested in, we would e-mail the agent and ask if the owners would allow one small dog.
~ E-mail is convenient for a lot of things, but not for trying to rent a house.  We would wait days for anyone to e-mail us back, and the small percentage that did e-mail us back would either say the house was already rented or that the owners would not allow pets.
~ We learned the housing market is on fire in California (and other places, too, I've heard.  Crazy.) There were some houses that would let us set up a walk-through, but would inform us there were several applications already turned in for the same house.
~ From things we were reading about this one school district, it is great and everyone tries to get their kids in these particular schools even if they don't live within the boundaries.  We thought maybe that was the reason why houses were going so quickly.
~ Jeremy (remember from the last post he is in California alone, so I'm calling to set up appointments and Jeremy would walk through and tell me his opinion) walked through two that would have worked as a very last resort. Those were the two that we miraculously got someone to call back to even do a walk-through. 
~If we didn't get a house by the time he flew back Thursday night (this was his third trip to CA.), we were going to have to start our search over, extend our move date for the second time, and discuss our kids possibly starting school in Texas and moving later.
~I got a call from an owner saying that we could have a dog.  I had to look up which house she was talking about, because it wasn't one of our top choices.  We decided to set up a walk-through because our options were dwindling really fast, and Jeremy was flying back to Texas the next day. Jeremy did the walk-through and really liked the house.  It was in good shape and really clean (those of you who rented know how rare that is, right?), and seemed like a good location.  Since everything was being rented so fast, we decided to jump on this opportunity. 
~ We started seeing the tender mercies - walking distance to all 3 schools (elementary, middle, high school), in the highly sought-after school district, close to the church, extremely low crime rates (which we were checking because our trailer got broken into in front of our house this week! Ugh!), NO ONE else had looked at the house, so they had actually lowered the price of rent not too long before we called, and no one else had turned in an application, no one was on the schedule to do a walk through, and  there was also some mistakes on the flier that if the information was correct, it wouldn't have even come up on a couple of our searches.  Jeremy felt good when he walked through the house, and that was good enough for me.  He turned in our application, and what should have taken days, took only a matter of hours. We have a house.
~Lesson learned.  Trust in the Lord.  It will all work out.