The high cost of living (in a house)

This week's life improvement project has been working with a mortgage broker to get a pre-approval letter so we can start house hunting in earnest.  We've finished the initial application process, and we're waiting for the great and powerful Underwriters to send word to us through the kind and benevolent Mortgage Broker.

It's been a fascinating experience, and I've learned a huge amount about the process. For instance, I always thought that the biggest obstacle to home ownership was down-payment funds, or possibly your credit score.  It turns out that I was wrong entirely.

Bad habbits

I started smoking cigars when I was 15 years old.

Mostly macanudos, but the occasional natural as well.  When I was 19 or so, I also started smoking pipe tobacco (apparently, at 5'5" and overweight I didn't look enough like a hobbit)  The funny part was that the first time I was ever carded I was 23 years old....

Yes, it is your fault.

I used to have a roommate who had just split with the woman he'd been shacking up with. (there's that term again)  At the time, I was just starting to pull myself up out of divorce.  

As you can imagine, we weren't exactly the dynamic duo.  The only time the townhouse got cleaned properly was when one of us had a date; and to be perfectly honest, that didn't happen much.

Get your butt to work.

People need to get their butts to work.

I'm not talking about job hunting here, although that's a great topic.  What I'm talking about is something a lot more basic.

When you have a job, go to your job.  Go there every day.  Go there on time or early.  Actually work while you're there.  You'd think that such a statement would be obvious; but you'd be wrong.

Make a plan, and make it loose.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "In preparing for battle i have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."


I've mentioned plans quite a bit lately.  My own plans, what makes a reasonable plan, and so on.  Today, I'd like to dig a little deeper into that subject.

It's okay to admit that you're not satisfied.

A couple of days after I started this blog, something completely unexpected happened. I'd just asked my wife to review a draft of a post, which I could tell she actually liked because she was still laughing when I left the room.  After I asked a few questions, and wheedled some more feedback out of her, she looked at me with her Serious Face™.  (if you're married, you know the one I'm talking about)  She looked at me, and she asked very quietly, "are you really that unhappy with your life?"

Fat will be trimmed, again.

So, I used to be really fat.

5'5" and 283 pounds.  (That's 165cm and 128kg for anyone living in any country in the world except this one)  Like a lot of less than wonderful things in our lives, it snuck up on me slowly.  I didn't wake up one morning, and suddenly find that I was enormous.  It took years.