Home ownership (and to an extent, rental living) is a Sisyphean task. You push the boulder uphill: fix broken things, clean, make improvements. But it is always sliding back down. Sometimes you push faster; sometimes you lose ground ( Read more... )

Answering a knock at my door, I met a local politician collecting signatures to get on the ballot for office. I'll sign for pretty much anybody who cares enough to go door-to-door in the cold. We got to talking briefly, and he mentioned (hopefully) that a local political group was always looking for engaged, active folks who were interested in ( Read more... )

This probably is not very exciting, but after much effort, we signed the papers to refinance our mortgage today. I will miss by a couple of years, but Jen could co-own a paid-off house before she is fifty now, if all goes well. Silver lining to economic collapse, I guess. I want to enjoy what's left of my youth while I have it; but I also expect to ( Read more... )

After crawling around under our house (we have a crawlspace, not a basement) and seeing no leak, further investigation determined that our hot water tank is leaking and must be replaced. That's going to set us back $400 or so all told, but the silver lining is we'll get a more efficient one (everything in our house was the cheapest possible). And ( Read more... )