The Plan

The best thing that my darling wife and I do is come up with a plan. While we have had our difficulties, lots of luck, and lots of help from others, we have still managed to get to this point through a recession richer, more secure as a couple, in love, and with greater opportunity than when we met. This is largely due to a process in which we talk to each other about what each of us wants, how we can combine these desires, what dreams we might have, and what practical steps we can take. At any time we will probably have a plan with various contingencies, and subject to change if some recognized criteria are met. In Houston we are getting to the point of making a future plan more concrete.

To start we are agreed that suburban Houston is not our ideal spot to live. We are not going to set up in the area and live out our next thirty years. Houston is a temporary spot, and is here to be milked for what it can give us. What Houston can give us is warmth and sunshine, a ridiculous house with a pool and palm trees, big cash money and titles on Christina's resume. The signs point towards Christina being able to be promoted perhaps a couple of times in the next 2-3 years to a position whereby her skills are so portable and valued that we can select a place to live pretty much anywhere in the country and she can get a job there. There's even a good chance as technology improves and becomes more familiar to managers that Christina could do her job remotely.

So the point of the plan is to acquire the maximum flexibility in location for the future. We believe we have yet to live in the place that would suit us best. Portland is an extraordinary town, but with one person in a relationship suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder for five months a year (improved with medication but not fixed) and the other with a random chance of being depressed at any given time, when they happen in combination it can get very brutal. Depressed people are not good at relationships, but they need support from relationships. In the long run we are looking for a place in the country with a nice climate (we are basing our perfect climate to look for on Tuscany, which apparently is the same as Chattanooga, Tennessee).

Another part of the plan is to acquire funds for the future. The more money you have available to you means the less money you need to live. The secret of our relative financial success has been to live below our means while the rest of the country was livng above there's. The more funds you have the more flexible it is possible to be. One of the goals for us as a couple is for Christina to live for an extended period (six months or more) somewhere other than the USA. This will probably mean living without income for a while, which requires funds (and more than people think unless you are my brother Peter.) The more liquid funds you have, the more free you are as a person.

But now we get to the downsides, because life is not just a bowl of cherries. We are still going to live in Houston, which is not a place we like very much. I've gone into this before, but basically the place has no sense of community, is decades behind the much of the rest of the world in terms of progressive thinking and actions. The place is packed full of red-neck hillbillies with medieval brains. I am more at home in a rastafarian-influenced, spanish-speaking village in Central America, or an atheist coffee house in Denmark than in suburban Houston. My darling wife feels similarly.
There is also the matter of Christina being at work for much of her life. Now, while Christina has the unfathomable (to me) quality of being interested in work and being OK with working hard on a regular basis, she can also be made miserable with an unpleasant work environment. The reason why a plan is being developed now is that her being unhappy in her job is simply a veto on any plan of sticking it out here. Recent developments look good in this regard from a shaky start in Houston, competence and civility look to triumph in the end, but this isn't certain to last.
We also both believe that while life is not necessarily short, it is finite, and that happiness matters more than being rich. So in order for our plan to work we must organize things in such a way that being in Houston can be pleasant enough that when combined with the goals I have mentioned above the overall result is an increase in happiness.

This means that I must have an interest shared with actual live humans. I have started a band in Houston, in the same manner that I did in Portland. By the way, we are both looking forward to seeing all of those from the band in Portland again at The Pogues in a couple of weeks. While the new band has a long way to go to even come close to being the wonderful experience that I had with those of Sam's Cross (what I miss most about Portland) there are some good signs.
It also means that our home environment has to be something extra-special because the public environment is not good if it exists at all (yesterday Christina and I went out in the area to keep ourselves occupied and after fifteen minutes I even seriously suggested the mall, it is that bad). As a result part of our plan is to put our money into a nice house with gardeners, pool boy and maids and live like aristocrats for only a little more money than we are paying for rent right now. We are talking something like this.

The key thing is to make sure we know when to quit, to not let the local culture, the expectations, the habits of ourselves and those around us tempt us into a life that doesn't work for us.

The Weather

I'm very impressed by the title of this one. A more foreboding subject in a blog it would be difficult to imagine. This is particularly true of the weather in question, that being today's weather in Houston, Texas.

Today was grey and overcast, substantially cooler than usual, with lots of rain and a mild breeze. I absolutely loved it. Until this week I believe the temperature in Houston had not dropped below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 21 degrees Celcius (pet peeve, both of those scales are centigrade scales, saying 20 degrees centigrade is a meaningless statement) since some time in May. Going outside meant shorts, sandals and a t-shirt and sweating. Today I got to put on trousers and a sweatshirt, socks and boots, and slosh off into the muck, lovely.

Clearly there is some nostalgia for places past in this joy, and also the happy knowledge that this is a temporary situation. I would be far less happy in more northern climes with the knowledge that a day like today is just a precursor to months of grey, depressing, dark dampness. But today I can think of sweaters, a peat fire, a tankard of ale, the scratch of the bow upon a fiddle, conviviality and polished brass without being a complete numpty.

Amazing Incompetence

Through most of my life I have had a feeling that I'm not quite doing things as well as I should, and that I'm going to get in trouble as a result. This was particularly true in my last couple of jobs where the workload was not very large. My character is such that I dislike pointless working, busy work, or just doing stuff to look like you are working. Allied with my mood changes so that I sometimes I have loads of energy and other times very little my working style has been bursts of efficient activity interspersed with periods of loafing. Because I am lazy I like to get things done and out of the way, to remove the power of this guilt and because it requires the least amount of work to simply do things efficiently, right away.

So I often feel as though I am not particularly hard-working or competent in getting things done (in contrast I very rarely feel incompetent or ill-equipped in terms of thinking about or understanding things). This is close to my default position, and I have learned to identify how useful this can be. However, from time-to-time my default position is challenged by the activity in the world around me. The actual amount of stuff that gets done by apparently busy people is revealed, the person in the business suit with a brusque attitude and a go-getter vibe turns out to have no clue what they are supposed to be doing, and professionals simply cannot perform basic functions. My reaction then turns to bafflement at the number of people who simply cannot do things who remain employed.

The last few months have revealed a particularly heinous example of the pervasiveness of incompetence. This is our experience with our local post office. I have mentioned this before here but the depth of idiocy continues to the extent that I am beginning to suspect malice. I will try to keep this as short as possible.

When we first moved in we were receiving lots of mail from previous tenants. I went to the post office to make clear that we were the only residents in our house. Over the next couple of months the amount of mail we received dropped dramatically (while the previous residents' mail continued to arrive) and we started getting reports of mail being returned as undeliverable. I returned to the post office and explained the situation, but the situation continued to worsen until I returned a third time and was given a phone number of those who were in charge of forwarding mail. it turns out that when I said we were the only residents this was reported as us having moved with no forwarding address. I asked for this to be changed and waited. There was no change and I returned to the post office and met with Laura, a supervisor who promised to make the change herself and send out a letter from the post office to check that it had been successful. In the week following we received no letter from the post office and four times as much mail for previous tenants than for ourselves. I called Laura yesterday and she asked me to call today at 8:30am so that I could talk to her and the carrier simultaneously. I called today and Laura won't be in until 11am.

My point is that this is a level of incompetence of a mind-boggling level, the inability of a post office to deliver mail with my name on it to my address despite multiple complaints, and yet everyone there is still working. This is a government job, but I have seen excellent work by government employees and have had arguments with those working in big business who claim it would be impossible for government workers to be any more incompetent than big business.

When I compare my life to the general public I start with the knowledge that I have been luckier than the vast majority, but that I have also made far fewer deeply dumb decisions than many. That my present situation is easier and more pleasant than most, that I have an enviable life in many respects is not simply a case of me being lucky but also me being very competent at life. Today I need to go and be angry at strangers, which is some distance from my favorite thing to do, but pleasantness has not worked.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

My darling wife and I just spent a week in Britain, almost all of it on the Welsh/English border. The weather was spectacularly beautiful, 70 degree highs with skies of the purest and deepest blue I have ever seen. The place is simply gorgeous. All the beauty of the United States is wilderness, but the beauty of Wales is the beauty of a well-tended garden as far as the eye can see. My family were particularly gracious and my goal of showing my darling wife the beauty and pleasure of where I'm from was achieved. It was a true vacation.

There was one thing that I discovered while I was there, that is that I no longer have a home, a place that seems particularly natural for me, a place to return to. England is lovely, I feel confident in finding my way around and dealing with people. It isn't an alien place, and I enjoy being there, but it no longer has that feeling to me of being right. But nowhere else do I have a greater feeling of being right. I think I may have reached the point that regular travelers reach, in which they are supremely competent and confident in how to deal with hotels, can feel comfortable in almost any place, but have no sense of home.

A part of this is the globalization of the world, I can have a pint of english bitter in Houston, I watch english football teams and read an english paper. Part of this is the amount of time I have spent living in different environments, and part of it is that home is now a person, where my wife is.

However, the loveliness of spending time at my parents' place in Wales,


has led me to contemplating what a home for me would look like. A smallholding in the Smokey Mountains, shabby but comfortable, a small menagerie for effect, and a folk music bar in the barn seems just about ideal at the moment. A few years to milk the wealth of Houston and then off to bucolic paradise, I hope.