Returning

The arrival of the holidays reminded me that I created this blog last summer. It's a classic WNFH time of year when my little family gets tugged back and forth between our extended families. This year has been especially frustrating. We originally planned to go to my sister's house, about an eight hour drive away. We haven't seen each other since last Thanksgiving, which means that my kids haven't seen their cousins for a year. My daughter, who recently turned five, was especially looking forward to getting to see her cousin Isa, who is now eight.

Well, it's not going to work out. My sister and her husband are both primary care physicians, and one of their partners has H1N1 and serious complications. This means that my brother-in-law will be on call all weekend, and my sister will probably have to go in to work as well. We could still go, but it would be very stressful for them to have guests while they're so busy. I can understand, but I'm very frustrated, and I'm bummed out for my kids who want to visit their cousins. Who knows when we'll be able to organize another trip to see them.

We'll be heading south, about a five hour drive away, to see my parents instead. My dad's health is not very good, so they haven't been able to do much traveling themselves lately. We see them semi-regularly, which is why we hadn't planned to see them at Thanksgiving, but at least we have a back-up plan. Of course, staying here at home wouldn't be so bad either, but that's not really an option when you're not from here and you have families pining to see you at every holiday opportunity. We've had my wife's family come here before for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that was great. I really enjoy hosting people in our house. It's not a huge house, but it's just big enough to handle visitors, and it's fun to have a lot of people around.

I also grew up in a WNFH family, and the strange thing is that we NEVER traveled on the holidays, and it never seemed strange. We always went back to see family for a couple of weeks in the summer, and that was that. I loved it. Our holidays were always very traditional and completely wonderful family experiences. I'm feeling a little unmoored trying to find my own way as an adult with a family. I think my parents both sort of ran away from their families and were happy to relegate the visits to very discrete summer trips. That's not the case for my wife and me. We want to see our families, but it's so hard to keep up with all of the visits when we're all so scattered.

Sherman's March

My wife was out of town this weekend, so I was home alone to tend to our two rambunctious kids and entertain myself in the evenings. I took the opportunity to watch a movie that she might not have cared to watch with me: Sherman's March. It's the consummate "we're not from here" movie, and I relate to its themes particularly well since I come from a family with a Southern heritage, just as the filmmaker/documentarian Ross McElwee does.

McElwee set out to film a documentary about the present-day (well, early 1980s) status of the parts of the South that were brutally conquered by William Tecumseh Sherman at the end of the Civil War, and what he ended up creating was a movie about his tortured love life. The whole thing was filmed in 1981, which was clearly not the beginning of what we now think of as "the 80s" but rather the end of the funky/bizarre/politically-charged 70s. At the very end of his film McElwee returns to his adopted home of Boston and begins to piece his life together again with the slightest tease in the last moments of the movie of a new love affair. This ending completes the theme that for McElwee the North represents possibilities and new beginnings whereas the South is nothing but old habits and memories.

The old saying "you can never go home again" is ever present in this movie. McElwee makes so clear the themes that I consider central to this blog. Those of us who live in places away from family, old friends, and historical connections are constantly forced to reinvent ourselves, and we always feel (maybe just the slightest bit) disconnected from our current surroundings and simultaneously cut off from our old stomping grounds.

Back from vacation

Wow, I haven't blogged in over a month. I'm sure that's pretty typical of new bloggers...I'm just not in the habit yet of blogging regularly. Oh yeah, and I don't really have any readers yet. Anyway the hiatus should mean that I'll be blogging more actively in the near term cuz I have come up with lots of ideas while I've been away.

So part of the reason that I haven't blogged in a while is that we were away making our regular summer trip back to Denver and western Nebraska where we have friends and family. I keep reading about people taking "stay-cations" this summer. That's kind of an impossibility for those of us who aren't from here. Pretty much all of our vacations are really trips to visit our families who live far away from us, so one could argue that they're not really vacations in the sense that we're not exactly getting it away from it ALL. But we do try to mix different kinds of stops, visits, and recreation in with our trips to visit family, and I'm sure we'll do more and more of this as our kids get older and can enjoy a larger variety of diversions.

Also, since our "here" doesn't happen to be a destination city for others (like Denver was), we constantly find ourselves going elsewhere to visit friends & family. My wife's family does visit us regularly, but my kin are kind of sticks in the mud about traveling.

So this is the point where if I had any readers I would call for comments on what others are doing for vacation this summer. Is anyone reveling in a stay-cation (is it possible to actually revel in a stay-cation?)? Do others visit family and call it vacation? Is anyone taking a real vacation where they rent a cottage or go to some exotic locale to relax and reload? I'm all ears!

Home Energy Use

Just a quick blog posting today to say that my Father's Day gift arrived, belatedly, yesterday. I'm now the proud owner of the book "Home Energy Diet" along with a Kill A Watt device. Honestly, my wife read my mind. I had just noticed that we managed to keep our energy bill pretty low for the last month and wondered what we could do improve it further and lo & behold, look what arrived in the mail!

Angie's List

Not being from here, we don't know a thing about who to call to get things fixed. I'd say it takes at least five years of living somewhere to even begin to have a list of regular people who are trustworthy artisans of one kind or another: mechanics, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, you name it. Thank goodness for the internets! We have used Angie's List many, many times now both to research possible projects and to find the right person/company to take on these projects when we're ready to take the plunge.

No, I'm not getting paid to blog on this...I really do just happen to be a big fan of "the list". The thing I love about Angie's List is that you can sort of be a voyeur before you decide to hire someone to do a project for real. What I mean is that you can look through tons & tons of descriptions that people have posted regarding the work they've had done along with what people paid for it and what they thought of the company they hired to do the work. That's priceless information!! It's like getting tons of estimates before you have anyone even come to your house. I HATE waiting around for companies to show up to give estimates. Half the time they don't even bother to show up. But if I spend some time researching on Angie's List I can narrow the potential companies down to one or two (never more than three) and know immediately if the estimate I get falls within the range of what other people paid for similar work.

Here's an example of Angie's List at work. The house we bought in our lovely little village nestled in a corner of our crestfallen Midwestern city was built in 1932. It's a lovely Tudor style house, and we got a great deal on it primarily because no one had ever installed central air. I used the forums at doityourself.com to research what kind of A/C we could even consider having installed in this old house, which has no ductwork because it has hot water heat. Once I settled on a high velocity A/C system I went to, you guessed it, Angie's List to research companies that do this kind of work. I found several reviews of a particular company that has installed Spacepak systems along with price ranges. I brought them over for an estimate, and I didn't have to call anyone else. They were clearly the right company for the job, and their price made sense. It was not cheap, but this was major work. I wasn't looking to bring in umpteen companies so that I could choose who ever gave us the lowest bid for the work. Without Angie's List I honestly wouldn't have known where to start on this project.

So there's my paean to Angie's List. And just to keep things objective, I'll add a criticism of AL. They've started moving into reviews of medical providers in addition to reviews of home repair services. I'm VERY skeptical that this will work and that it's even appropriate. Getting good medical care is FAR more complicated than hiring a plumber, and I worry that AL is attempting to oversimplify the task of finding a doctor, dentist, etc. I simply don't trust what someone has to say about a doctor on AL because the average person has no clue how to rate a medical care provider. My sister & brother-in-law are both physicians, and my wife is an advanced practice nurse, so I know a few things about the medical world simply by virtue of osmosis. No sirree, Angie's List just does not belong in that business.

About this blog

I'm starting this blog as a place to write about where and how I live with my family. The phrase "we're not from here", or some variation of it, is one that I've uttered all my life to explain that we don't have family in town, or we don't know the way to get to some obscure neighborhood, or simply to say "I'm sorry, but I don't know what the hell you're talking about". I come from a long line of folks who have picked up and moved to find something better, so that phrase has been a subtext of my life. I've decided to make it the subtext of this blog.

We live in a Midwestern city that prides itself on having once been a much better place than it currently is, though currently it really isn't all that bad. My job brought us here a few years ago. We moved here from one of those beautiful mountain-bedecked Western cities that makes people say "you moved from there to be here???" with complete incredulity. All I can say is, "yep, we sure did". The irony is that the job that brought me here went away when the company was sold only a few months after our move, and now I work from a home office for the same company that I used to work for in that lovely Western city. But I work from home, and I make more, and we love our neighborhood, our house, and our cost of living. Somehow it still seems worth the move.

Our daughter is almost five, and our son is almost two. My wife works three days a week in an industry that is currently booming. Her job also gives her a lot of flexibility, which means that we get to share a lot of parenting duties. We're not exactly practicing ESP, but I do pull my weight around here, and I enjoy it.

I suppose I may reveal more about our identities, location, jobs, etc. as time goes on. I want this blog to be about parenting, about money, about the struggles of living far away from family in a place where it's unusual to NOT be from here (the story of my life). I love to read personal finance blogs, so I'm sure I'll reference my favorites from time to time and blog about my own PF observations & tips. We'll see about the parenting part. I love being a father, so I'm sure parenting & family topics will find their way into my blog as well.

Thanks for taking the time to read what I have to say. I hope you come back soon!