There and Back Again

Listening to: Too Late For Goodbyes (The Wallflowers)
Pondering: A man’s house is his castle. (James Otis)

My sister and I went to our first round of house hunting yesterday. Our real estate broker drove us around town looking for houses in her cool Porsche Cayenne. (The car made me realize that I am indeed in the wrong profession.) The visits made for an interesting experience.

The apprehensions of buying a house, signing your life away to a loan that seems to cost more than your whole life’s salary is terribly upsetting. You see a house and you hesitate liking it for fear you will have to make a decision eventually. It should really be as fun as buying a new pair of shoes or deciding where to go for vacation but when you realized that this purchase could very well wipe out your future shoe and vacation fund altogether, you can’t really smile.

All throughout the visits I prayed the gods would smile at me and smack with good fortune along the way. If not in the form of a house under $400,000 – not a town house, nor a condo but a house - then perhaps in the form of a winning lottery ticket or a kick-ass promotion. But I never get lucky like that so I stopped wishing. Heck, if the gods intended to smile at me they’d have smiled at me last week when I was in Las Vegas.

I guess spending Christmas in a new house is not going to happen this year.