Blah blah blah. Home ownership and being a grownup.

Haven’t written in a while. There’s been too much (and too little) going on to report, in many ways. Also, some of what’s been happening has been too personal regarding family relationships. I like processing things via my journal, I like the relief of just saying things out loud because they need saying…but now that I know there are folks reading this that I see on a semi-regular basis, sometimes I find myself censoring what I write about. Interesting. Anonymity is so much safer, yet I crave acceptance among my friends and peers as much as anybody. So, let’s see. I'll start with something relatively inocuous… Pride of Homeownership issues. We had massive leaks in our patio roof that kept getting worse as it kept raining. We set off to have them repaired only to find out the whole structure needed replacing. Fine, great, that’s three times as much as I figured but it needs doing. Then in the course of events, rain leaked under the plastic they used to cover their work in progress, causing stains to our freshly painted living-room wall and ceiling. And the contractor informed us we have 3 layers of shingles on our roof, not just the two we knew about. 3 layers—that’s illegal and dangerous for the weight it places on your roof structure. Now we need a new roof, new gutters, and somebody to paint the new patio roof because that wasn’t included in the original job. And our refrigerator/freezer died over Thanksgiving, imperiling our mighty pesto stockpile. Several batches turned black from oxidation and we’re too scared to look at the rest for fear of the disappointment. That’s lots of work (and lots of Christmas presents), perhaps down the drain. All of this recalls one of the larger issues: do we stay in this 1962 little house and keep investing in trying to make it better? We only have one living area, no dining room, and a kitchen that is not very conducive to the cooking and entertaining we love to do. On the other hand, the location is great—I couldn’t stand living further out of the central part of Austin. My thought is, you might as well live in Dallas (and I hated that for the first 20 years of my life). We have an unusually large lot, which means room to expand down the road if we want to, even though that could mean we have the most expensive house on the block. Remodeling brings up its own fears – can we afford it, will we know what we’re doing, what happens if my business remains a bit slower than previous years (or if we have a kid and I can’t earn as much as I do now)? In the end, I suppose it’s the disillusionment of homeownership kicking in. There’s always something. I suspect those with newer houses still have issues to resolve. Owning a house means upkeep. If you’re a nesting type (as I am), it means that’s where most of your money goes. Less travel, less discretionary spending, etc. etc. It seems like there’s a magical time in life – right before and just after you get married, when you’re making plenty of money and still have the energy to go out all the time, you don’t have a house to suck up all your money (or haven’t realized that it will), and it seems like your standard of living is just going up and up and up. You’re Lady About Town, swelling around the clubs, eating fancy dinners out all the time and wearing sassy clothes from Anthropologie and buying new shoes and getting manicures on an hourly basis. Then something happens, and you gotta grow up. Somebody dies and you can’t shake off the sadness, so you don’t have as much energy as you used to. Your metabolism stops happily processing all that fancy food. Your house turns on you. You choose to invest in your future rather than Nonstop Fabulousness Right Now. Tell me, am I alone in this? Or is this just what happens when you finally become a grownup?