My Birthday

Today is my birthday (go, me!!) and I thought I'd post an update on where things stand currently.

The Housing obsession has now melded itself to some other themes of the past year or so in my life; namely, the search for sustainable community and our nerdy avocations. One of the reasons that I've given up haunting the local housing blogs (instead of several times a day, I now check in one or two times a week -- and some weeks, none) is that I'm not seeing much downward pricing in houses that I'm interested in. The houses in areas that no one in their right mind should ever have believed they could flip for a profit are dropping like rocks in price. But in safe, quiet, attractive areas the houses are not affordable to me.
And my demands have only gone up, which doesn't make it any easier to find one. My demands have gone up because the community that we have long sought and found so elusive, we have evidently found in the charming denizens of The Shire of Mountain's Gate. Since our first tentative shire meeting in November, we feel we have finally found our SCA home. We have gone from no involvement and lapsed memberships, to meetings several times a month and sometimes multiple times a week. My sewing machine has showed up again on the dining room table, and I'm still making atrociously poor tunics for family members, but I'm counting on some monthly sewing circles to help me improve. I've discovered beading, which I am not too bad at. I'm going to give embroidery another shot this weekend, while giving inspiration and moral support to the Sig as he embarks on his own journey to hone his medieval martial arts skills. The armor that we had sitting in boxes has been "rigged" with the help of our Shire Seneshal, Geoffrey of Clan Fergus. He has also fitted a very impressive helm for Sig. With the armor and the helm, Sig looks very scarey for his 5'6". We will be attempting to put up our period pavillion for the second time this weekend at the Cynagua Coronet. Sig is in the early fermentation stages of a strawberry mead, and I've got a kegged blackberry cream ale. The herbs have arrived from Wildweeds and all I'm lacking now is the juniper berries in order to make a pretty darned good stab at a very early period gruit ale.
Most of this stuff: armor, brewing equipment, archery gear, pavillion tent, garb; we've had for years gathering dust in our little storage barn. Now, it's out and working. Which is why the criteria for housing has significantly changed. Simply put, we now need room to work on our projects. It doesn't have to be fancy. But we need the usual 3 bedrooms/2 baths plus a larger kitchen, and some room that can be used as a project room (a formal dining room or den would be fine) and storage space. Oh, and a place for the small utility trailer.
The rental house is a very functional base of operations right now. It works well for most of our needs, but there are some problems that frankly, having our own house would solve. It's just that we can't find anything like the rental for sale at a price that would keep our mortgage payment at the same level as our rent. If we could, and if we could get the loan that we could easily have gotten back in 2006, we'd buy. If this were my house, instead of a rental, I'd feel free to get the ductwork permanently repaired, put in solar power and hot water, buy that damn hot tub that I so desperately need but refuse to buy until I have my own house. I'd get rid of the puzzling raised beds in the total shade, and put some raised beds where they could get some light. I'd have the dead chestnut tree removed, and some gentle pruning done on dead limbs on the magnificent old oak. But it's not my house, and the landlord seems to be ok with it just slowly deteriorating. The frustration with the slow deterioration of the house, coupled with the low-level anxiety of renting (you never know when they might sell, or raise the rent, or decide one of their kids needs the house) inclines me strongly towards trying to buy, but there are really no viable options out there and I'm not going to spend 100k to 200k more than I'd spend in another two to four years. At some point, this will balance out, but the scales are tipped too far in favor of renting currently, and I don't think that will change in the next 6 months. I'm hoping it will change in the next year, just as I was last year, and the year before that. But it's obvious that this is such a slow moving train wreck in housing that I don't really need to monitor the market even on a weekly basis, and it's just wasting my time to do so.

On the general economic front, as you can imagine, increased avocations and the SCA in addition to the increased cost of food and fuel have impacted my finances. We did have the basics purchased already, but we have honestly way overspent in the last few weeks on brewing gear, fabric, beads and tools. We've also had to have repairs done to the two older vehicles. My job has been notifying us of some pretty scarey budget problems, and they are not hiring any employees to replace those which have left. This is rather remarkable, as I work in healthcare. It has really brought home to me the realization that when the economy goes sour, no field is really safe from the effects of it. It's rather ironic. During the late bubble, I was a miser and we didn't really go anywhere or do much of anything, because we were waiting for it all to come crashing down. And now that it has, and costs are increasing and my job is flashing yellow and traveling is twice as expensive as it was -- well, of course, now we're going to resume our expensive medievalist hobby.
But hey, I'm not getting any younger!