Commencement: Our New House

What a Great Way to start the week!

Last Saturday, the wife and I saw three homes with our realtor. A fourth had been scheduled, but with March Madness creeping into the Real Estate market, that property had been snatched. What a pity: that property was 1,070 square feet of renovated gold, with skylights pouring in bucketfuls of sun, granite countertops galore, and a heated bathroom floor.
Blast. Not the first home scooped from us, so onwards we marched.

Two of the homes left us....less than thrilled. One had been seriously damaged from water seepage. Perhaps the owners snatched victory from defeat with their obvious epoxy injection and steel beam reinforcement, but my Wife and I refused to chance fate.

The second backed up to a major highway. While within our budget and gloriously large, the noise prevented us from ever, EVER going outside: my Wife and I had to raise our voices to speak in the sunroom, and outside was worse. Also, replacing triple-pane windows? Expensive.

The final home, though....both the middle and the elementary schools were mere minutes away on foot, and the local Catholic church just on the other side of the street. Inside? Hardwood floors throughout the main, full 42" cabinets, a 15x13 master in an area where 13x11 is "oversized," and....

A pink toilet?

Huh?

We visited the In-Laws the next day, put an offer in by evening. Seller countered....we countered again....

And as of now, the contract is off to the attorney for review and we will tour our new home with the home inspector Saturday.

Brilliance!

Granted, work prevents me entirely from feeling anything but the most epheremeal joy. Something about supervising the work of incompetent, lazy, lying "accountants" worth less than a North Korean automobile drains the soul of all but the most-no, let me take that back, even my sunny colleague now lives under a permanent cumulonimbus of outsourced-induced depression.

Let's leave that aside.

This week marks the start of my modernized "Better" Beta life. The script is normal: young man marries young woman. Young man sacrficies personal luxuries and ambitions to produce economic surplus and future family unit. Young man becomes old man and says "what the hell happened to my life?"

I'm hoping to avoid that last part, or the frivorce part, or becoming a mere draft horse. I am confident this fate and I will never meet.

Youthful optimism still drives my soul forward, you see. This week does not mark my death, but the arrival of my American Dream. Perhaps the Better Beta script has infected my philosophy too deeply, but the ideal of raising my own family, with my own wife, on my piece of land, has appealed to me since a young age.

Even when my friends ruminated on jointly purchasing a condo downtown, my mind drifted towards Chicago's vast exurbs, where land was cheap, houses big, and opportunity plentiful. I longed for one girl, and then another, and dreamt of raising our babies under vaulted ceilings, windows high to the ceiling, and a strong scent of pancakes rising through the air while we watched the sunrise.

So for me this is really just the start, and my prior 28 years just a prelude. Reading Anna Karenina, I see Levin's drive to provide for his family, to maintain the farmstead for the benefit of him and the peasants, to assume his role as upperclassman in adjudicating disputes without complaint, and ultimately die and leave a legacy to his Son. I see that, and I admire it, for the simple fact that everyone else in the book disgusts me.

I admire him because despite this constant corruption destroying the very air he breathes, he comes out (relatively) unharmed, and goes to the work to provide for his family, and creating a future. Not just for him, not just his family, not just his son, but for all Russia.

It almost makes me want to defect to Russia, were it not for Putin's blatant aggressions and gangster politics.

The American Family has suffered. Greatly. Decades of economic disenfranchisement and relentless attack by all manner of ill-guided liberal policies coupled with treasonous social justice warriors have left the marriage rate rising and declining, many of our old families broken, and a generation of children broken beyond repair.

Yet, despite the burning wreck around us, the foundation remained strong enough for both my Wife and I to emerge from well-educated, well-meaning, well-funded two-parent homes. My siblings are married with children. My in-laws, not yet, but trying.

I cannot bring back a rose-colored America that never existed outside nostalgia, nor can I bring about a future that has drifted forever into twilight. But, I can, like my parents, and like my wife's parents, provide a tiny refuge for a tiny portion of America's brightest young minds, and cultivate a garden of reason, diligence, and love.

Happy Thursday All!