I was seriously tired this morning and ended up staying in bed until almost noon. I would have been up sooner but the girls came down and jump on me in bed and hung out for a while.
Dominica set up in the kitchen with me and spent her day playing Tropico 4 with me. It is only a single player game but we are working our way through the campaigns in parallel. I am about one campaign ahead of her at this point. Everyone in the house has the theme song completely stuck in their heads by now.
The girls’ friends came by again today again which is so cute. It is awesome hearing them calling “Ciana…. Liesl….” through the streets. Today, though, probably because she was still upset about yesterday, Liesl decided not to go out and play with them but we felt that Ciana could not be punished for Liesl not wanting to go out and play so we let Ciana go out on her own. There was a new girl there today whose mother I have met and who is British and so there is extra communications so that Ciana can express herself to someone that will understand her in case of an emergency.
The new ice cream freezer was operational at the market today and the girls saw their friends out in the street with ice cream and so we made a family trip over to get some. We have been waiting for this. Very sad that this only just arrived now that we are nearing the end of our time here. That would have been awesome.
So we took a family outing to go and get some ice cream. This is going to be dangerous.
I ended up having a very busy evening at work and was not able to go out to the Meson with Shawn and Rachel. I had to work until quite late and they were back from the Meson before I was done working. They had shut it down but it was not a very busy evening. They got to see everyone that we had hung out with last night and they said that I was asked about.
Had a pretty stressful evening dealing with problems with the house in Texas. We’ve decided that we really have no choice but to sell it off and be done with it. In many ways we are very sad because we really liked that house and it is the house that we lived together in the most and the first house for Luciana and likely the first place that at least Liesl will remember a little when she is older. We really liked living there and had planned to keep the house for a long time. We did so much work on the house. At least we managed to live in it for several years. It was in the Carrollton house where we spent six months planning for our grand tour of Europe too. We have tons of fond memories there.
We talked a bit about what our options might be for moving back into the house and using it as our base of operations but the more that we thought about it the more we felt like the right decision was to be done with the house. Owning houses is stressful and a lot of work and just makes our lives so much harder and as much as the idea of owning property feels like it might be a good investment, it never really is. It is one thing to live in a house that you own and find better value than renting a place. But being landlords is a huge mental and financial drain that we just don’t need.
So we already reached out to a real estate agent tonight to get the ball rolling. Zillow lists the house as having gained a bit in value so we are hopeful that the market is good and that we will have a good chance of getting out of this house. We would so love to be done with the New York house but the chances of that happening in the next five to ten years is pretty much zero.
So it was about four in the morning when we finally got into bed. It was at least another hour before we managed to get to sleep. A very stressful day. But at least we have a plan of action. And we feel good about the idea of being done with the house and not having the ties any longer. Thankfully it has been long enough since we lived in the house that we really don’t feel the emotional attachment to it like we used to a year ago.