A Tale of Two Housing Transactions

In 2012, I sold my house at Georgetown, Kentucky. If you look far back enough in this blog, you’ll find posts and pictures from that little builder-grade “story and a half” house on a corner lot sitting within dynamite’s distance from an active limestone quarry, two houses away from a meth house.

Quite the neighborhood, that.

In any case, I sold that house via a realtor, and I never saw the people buying the house until we were at the closing table. Eight years on, I have no recollection of what the buyer looked like, his name, or his family situation. I know he bought the place on a 100%, no-down-payment VA loan. I also know that when I mistakenly had a package delivered to “my” old address, he refused to remit the package into my possession and strongly implied he had a firearm the other side of “his” door if I had a problem with that.

Traffic in Austin seems almost reasonable during Summer.

I live in Georgetown, Texas, and I work in The Domain, just off MoPac @ Burnett Rd.  For the uninitiated, that means I have a commute of about 25 miles down one of the worst highways in America.  It costs me about $2.50 in tolls to roundtrip to work, but often the toll section of MoPac is a parking lot between 8 and 10 am, and 5-7 pm.  A full work-month means I’m putting about $70 depreciation, $100 in gas, and $50 in tolls out of my pocket.  Call it $220 all-up.

I haven’t bought a car for myself since 2008, at which time I bought an eighteen year old car I never should have sold.

In the intervening ten years, I’ve had two cars, both welcome hand-me-downs from my wife:  The Camry-of-Doom and Sparky, my current 2010 Ford Fusion.

Having moved to Austin, paid-off my wife’s Sienna minivan, and begun to sock-away some funds for a new ride, it seems time to consider what’s next.

Some things are too long for a tweet, to short for a short-form essay.  I like to think of them like “macro-tweets.”   Some have taken to posting paragraphs or even whole positions on twitter in the form of:

1/7

2/7

And so on.  That’s an abuse of the platform.  Longer-form should be somewhere else.

End preamble.

* * *

So Maria and I have abandoned swimming for the moment.  I don’t know why exactly, aside from we don’t have an indoor pool membership and the outdoor pool we have is rather….variable…with regard to temperature.  I went to swim about 400m with an air temp of 48 degrees back in September, and part of my body just went:  “You’re nucking futs, dude.”

I’m homesick.

“Home” is hard to define:

• The place where your feet are.
• The place where your wife and kids are.
• The place where you feel at…well….home.

I don’t feel at home in Austin.  All the social and physical trappings of having roots here just aren’t here yet:

• We don’t have a real house.  We have an apartment with a yard.  It’s nice enough, but nothing about it feels like ‘home’ except for the occupants.
• We don’t have a church.  Realistically, we’re not even close.  Everywhere we’ve visited, coming up on 10 churches at this point has been some combination of too.  Too loud.  Too small.  Too doctrinally unsound.  Protestantism, as ever, remains a mixed bag once you go somewhere else.
• The water here is genuinely terrible.  For one thing, tap water is hot, not cool or cold.  There seems to be mix of limestone and sulfur in that’s just hard to take.  Everything reasonably potable is filtered or bottled.
• I don’t have the friends and colleagues I left behind.  I knew this was part of the deal.  I felt called to come to Texas, but I guess I didn’t appreciate having people who really knew me.

There are positives, of course.   My wife and daughters seem to be flourishing, amid the many homeschool groups and activities of Greater Austin (Cedar Park and Round Rock, in particular).  We’re able to save for the first time in our life,.  Work couldn’t be more stimulating.

“Hey, this traffic isn’t so bad!” I thought a month ago.  It was July and I was averaging 15-20 minutes to work down a 6 lane surface street with an effective 70mph speed limit (Yay, Texas?)

…then school started back.

That same street became one backup after another this morning, and it took me 30 minutes door-to-door, even though I live 9 miles away.   Between schools being back in session and UT classes restarting, something like 40,000 more Austinites are on the road each morning and afternoon.

Thus far the quote of the month has been:

We should’ve moved here 5 years ago.

So far Austin is amazing.  In true Freudian fashion, my fingers wrote that last sentence as ‘Austin is amazon."  :)  Amazon is amazing, too, but I can’t quite talk about that.

So, it’s August.   It’s 100 degrees every day, 81 degrees at 7 am, and it’s great.  Pollen counts are laughably low here, so everyone’s improving in their allergies.

A letter to myself in July 2015 from July 2016:

Dear sir,

This is your future self speaking.  Don’t question and go all ‘Dr Who’ on me, just listen.  

Your life is about to change.   You’ve worked at Lexmark for 16 years unofficially.  You’re looking forward to that congratulatory “15 years of service” email you’ll get on June 4th, 2016.  

You’ll never see it.  Let me explain a bit what’s going to transpire: