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.