The Move

To the great delight of everyone who knows us my darling wife got a new job a little over a year ago.  This meant escape from the fetid hellhole that is Ibedrola Renewables. She giggled for weeks.  The new job was about thirty miles away, and thirty miles on Houston freeways at rush hour(s) takes a long, arduous time.  Since we are not fans of the nice suburban neighborhood in which we have our house it all made sense to move.

So, we have rented a house while we prepare our house for sale.  This means that at present we are both renting a house, paying a mortgage, and also paying to fix the house we own, but don't live in.  Money is gushing down the gutters.  This means that when the house is ready we need it to sell pretty quickly.  In order to facilitate this I got a house inspection done so that we could fix up the problems that might be found in an inspection for a sale.

I was lucky enough to find an excellent inspector who proceeded to find quite a few more problems than expected.  Damp and rot, electrical problems, flashing, structural issues, heating/air conditioning.  Basically something like $10,000 worth of work.  This is pretty astonishing as we had already put in something like $15,000 into fixing problems.  Anyway, work starts today to get that fixed up and we should be able to put the house up for sale in April.  My darling wife informs me that the average time for a house in the area to be on the market is less than a month.  We may be free by my birthday in May.

My darling wife goes to work, and I am very appreciative of that.  I do the other stuff, and at times like this she is very appreciative of that.  My task was to find a house for rent, that took a giant dog, that was close to her work, that we could afford while also paying a mortgage, in a neighborhood where we wouldn't be killed and eaten (that neighborhood is about ten miles due east).  The internet is wonderful for such things and I found this house, in which I am sitting now.  I called in the first few hours of it being listed, the broker looked at a married, white couple who owned a house and the rental house was off the list.  That's what privilege means.

The next step was to get my darling wife into the new place with the leas disturbance possible, that is essentially my job.  She has done very well in telling me that it was great to leave one house in the morning and go home to a new house in the evening with all the necessary stuff already there and set up.  I still do a couple of trips a week up to the old house to get even more of the junk we own.  I still plan on giving away or trashing about a third of the things we own.  A great deal of stuff is still in the boxes used to transport them from Portland.

The new house is a bit strange in some ways.  The neighborhood must have been an aspirational middle-class place since it surrounds a golf course, but that was forty years ago.  The house is shabby, stained, aged, incompetently maintained. We live right on the edge of the residential portion, right up against a pretty big road.  Over the fence I can see a Whataburger, a thrift store, a pharmacy and a halal Mediterranean (sorry, I had to stop and drool for a moment) place.  I can walk to things!   Although I do have to cross four lanes of city traffic.

The yard is huge and fenced and also shaded by huge trees.  Once the constant traffic slips away from the forefront of your mind it is really very pleasant, and the pets already love it.  There is a sense of a retreat within the middle of everything.  There is intense busyness just a few steps away, but I can read a book in the sunshine by myself.

We have found two perfectly adequate English pubs, one of which we can reach on bikes and possibly survive the trip.  We have watched rugby in a packed pub full of genuine British and Irish people. We apparently live right by Chinatown and so I am starting the arduous task of working my way through all of the restaurants.  There is an enormous amount of things to do close by.  There's even a bus stop right by our house.

What is important?  What you feel.  The two of us have had a difficult time recently.  I think the worry over the move, money, cocking everything up had a knock-on effect with my bipolar and I had a more extreme case of what I call "the wobbles" with short, sharp shocks of depression with the accompanying feelings of being useless. For my lovely, darling, super-wonderful wife it is February.  Before February came November, December and January, and while being this far south is helpful that is still a bad situation for her.

This post was originally started in early February and I would say that the only things that have happened in the meantime is an increased cheerfulness as a result of things getting done on the house we own and the passing of the seasons, and still no real friends down here.  There's a lot of me that is putting off things until our house is sold, which isn't really sensible other than me rationing the amount of emotional energy I am putting into everything.

It's the most beautiful time of the year here in Texas, the blossoms are out, the temperatures are getting to the perfect setting as we are starting to get sunny days at 75 degrees.  I have a certain amount of monkish calm about the situation, things are moving in the right direction.  Sometime this summer we will be renting a house in an exciting neighborhood (the gunshots in the middle of the night seem to be recreational (seriously)) with enough money for us to feel easy, a strong marriage (how I love her) and the ability to leave Texas should we wish to.

I mayeven start posting on this blog again.