the clock is ticking

I did a somewhat unintelligent thing yesterday. I drove through the neighborhood where we very recently lived. We were renting a house, so we always knew that the arrangement would be short-term, but we didn’t figure that the term would be so, well, short. However, there’s this little housing market crisis thing going on…you might have heard about it.

So, now, we’re back in an apartment (soon to be a bigger apartment, but still an apartment) and I’m back to constantly daydreaming about owning my own home. I’m so cliché with that whole American dream of owning a house. (I’m not so into many other American dreams, including that whole get-rich-quick thing or that whole being famous thing, but the house, I want.) I could probably deal without the white picket fence and the dog (and I could definitely do without the 2.5 kids), but I want the house.

Recently, Cardo has been hinting around about us settling down. I don’t know how much of this has to do with his heart problem, but he does seem to be a bit more thoughtful lately. He even said to me, the other day, “It’d be nice if you could get your PhD somewhere else and then come back and work here. We could buy a house here.” I’m much too impressionable for him to be throwing these suggestions my way. Sounds great to me, sign me up. There’s just the issue of the next five years of our lives and how we will live them.

Will we live together, or not? If we don’t, how am I going to earn my PhD, raise a child who will grow from a pre-schooler to an almost-middle-schooler and maintain my mental health? (There is no question about who Pic would stay with.)

We’re kind of really dependent on the paycheck that Cardo pulls in from this job he’s been at for almost a decade now. In these incredibly uncertain times, we’re both nervous about both of us trying to find new sources of income (well…income for him, pocket change for me).

Anyhow, I’m feeling this pull for some sort of stable domesticity. Who knows how long before I reach this. Hmm.