Updates

The day started well. My alarm on my phone went off at 5:45, and when I rolled over to shut it off I saw that my old C trumpet had finally sold on eBay. It's probably been listed half a dozen times by now, and I lowered the auction price by over three hundred dollars over the course of the last month and a half. Someone was messaging me a month ago asking for everything I knew about model 5 mouthpipes. He said he was going to buy it, but never did. Someone else was messaging me last week trying to negotiate a private sale, and he offered me $925. I countered with $950 plus shipping, and never heard back from him. I checked the email to see how much it sold for, and someone had used the Buy It Now...$1300 dollars, and the money had already cleared. When trying to scrape together a down payment, that's some serious good news. I had it in the mail by 11:30 in the morning, and it's off to Arizona now. I hope that whoever bought it likes it. It was a good and faithful horn for me.

We looked at two new houses today, both up in the North Winton/Irondequoit neighborhood. When we left the first place we were talking seriously about putting in a bid. The second was better than any of the locations we'd looked at previously, but not as good as the first. I'm trying not to get too attached to the place we might bid on, so I won't say anything more about it, except that James loved it. (We brought him along today. That went about as well as you'd expect.)

I swing back and forth between the exhilaration of thinking "this is actually going to happen...we're going to be homeowners. We have the income and the credit to pull it off, and we're going to have a place of our own in a few months." Then I think about trying to add closing fees on top of our down payment money (definitely not 20%) and I remember the cover letter I wrote up trying to make excuses for the fact that "even though neither my wife or I have a full time job, you can see from the total sum of our 17 W-2s that we make a comfortable living." Then I think that it just isn't going to happen. No lender in their right mind would give us a loan worth accepting.

Ah, adulthood. I spent about two hours today reading a homebuyers guide from the library and punching in numbers to an amortization schedule. If we don't get the house, the next year or so will be an anxious struggle to stabilize our earning situations, save aggressively, and take auditions. If we do get a house, I'll still be taking auditions, and I'll be constantly checking the amortization schedule and running numbers about tax assessments and equity.

The thing is, this isn't some unique and tragic set of circumstances that demands general sympathy. I think this is just normal adult life. (Maybe this is why adults look so tired.) This process makes me appreciate the people who can find genuine joy in their own skin despite the constant weather of bills and loans and responsibilities battering at their door.

My parents come to mind. Today is their anniversary, and I still hope for nothing more out of my marriage than to resemble them in twenty-odd years. I know that they don't have a perfect marriage and that there must be a hundred undercurrents and troubles I'm never aware of. But just before I got married my Dad told me that he felt sorry for friends of his who dreaded going home to their wives at the end of a long day, and were always looking for an excuse to be out of the house. "And it's always been the other way for me," he said "and at the end of the day we want to be together"

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.

In some truly tragical news, James is enacting a small scale German opera whenever he gets up from his afternoon nap. He's almost always bright and bubbly first thing in the morning, but he must sleep heavier in the afternoon, and he is CRANKY lately. Here are some highlights:

"Oh NOOO my bike needs to be in'a kitchen!" <begins to cry>

"Uh-OH, my milk is gone an'I need WATER!" <begins to cry>

"Don't read that book in the yiying room, you must read it in'a kitchen."
"Why can't I read it in the living room?"
"Because...Daddy's gonna practice, and it's gonna be LOUD." <begins to cry>

"Nope, my book is not in the ottoman. I can't find it in the ottoman. Can't. No. No. <shakes head> It's not in there."

In the past we've also heard:

"Oh NOOO somebody cleaned up my mess!"

"I'm hungwy for my breakfast."
"But it's almost time for dinner, little bear. Do you think it's morning?"
"Uh-OH, I need my cereal!"