Seeking God Knows What

I’m feeling a mish mash of emotions today.

We helped our friends move. They are moving back to our hometown, where we are planning to move whenever we get out of this house. I’ve got that stupid jealous feeling of wanting to be moved too, wanting to buy a house and not rent an apartment -I have yet to find a house or duplex that I would even consider renting. We know we can’t buy a house because we checked after we came across a house which would have the same P&I payment as renting will cost us in the neighborhood we want to live in (it is the neighborhood we left when we moved here). And I have to say that some of these feelings have to do with the fact that our friends moved into that neighborhood. It is kind of like I want to say “But that is where I want to live. It was my neighborhood first.” If we do end up moving there down the road, people are going to think we moved there to be close to them- my sisters both said it to me when I told them we saw a house we were interested in, as in “why do you want to move close to them?”

And I’m sad for a lot of reasons. It has been a complicated friendship over the years and after talking to #5, I said I still want to be friends with her despite all this but I know their move changes that. It won’t be quite as easy to say “Let’s have dinner together” because we won’t be 5-10 minutes away from each other, at least until we move. It sounds like they have a really social neighborhood and there are a couple families in it with kids similar ages to their daughter and Widget, plus they are having the new baby and so is one of their neighbors (one of the ones with a 2 year old). What if she makes connections with that mom because of that? It isn’t that I want to be her only friend, obviously I’m not and that would be weird-it is just I know how things go with her and new friends- that is one of the complicated things.

Plus I’m having some anxiety about whether our house IS going to sell. We’ve dropped the price to below what we paid for it. Most of our feedback is positive, they like it, majority of the people think it is listed close to market price but no one since the first group that came through back at the end of October wants to come through again. I’m not really sure what else we can do. We are going to do some yard and exterior touch-ups since we finally hitting spring. I’m sure the big detractor is that the listing the realtor gets states that sale is subject to short sale approval by our mortgage company and people don’t want to get stuck waiting for our mortgage company to say yes or no, so they find something else.

Despite this mish mash, I’m still feeling so much better overall. It is just amazing how different I feel. Even my boring job isn’t so bad. I still ought to look for something else that might challenge me a bit more but I have such flexibility there, I hesitate to lose that.

But now I’m tired. Moving is a lot of work and I did about 10% of the work the guys did today. This is the first time our friends have moved since they got married 8 years ago. I was unpacking some stuff and he said to me I have no idea how you guys move every couple of years or so (it has been 1 yr-1 yr-2 yrs-3 yrs-3 yrs if we move this summer). I laughed and said I’ve learned the art of purging and I will be doing so again before we move this time But my plan is to rent for 2-3 years and then buy a house where we want to live while our kids grow up by the summer before Widget goes to kindergarten. When we buy will, of course, depend on how quickly we pay off our astronomical debt but it is good incentive to stick to the plan we put together, which includes attempting to fix T’s truck and selling the car (anyone want to buy a fully loaded 2003 Focus Wagon?) he’s driving now-it is the one we can sell for what we owe or more, if fixing the truck doesn’t work, we’ll sell that, put that money down on something with a payment $175/mo or less -the lower the better- we don’t have any money to buy a car straight out, otherwise we would.

Okay I’m really going to bed now because I want to go to church tomorrow. I haven’t been there two weeks in a row and I have missed it!!