The coach took a video of L doing her dance at class yesterday, and I thought it was kind of fun.  It’s theoretically an individual sport, but I still thought the lack of synchronization with the other girls was interesting.  In the dance routines she’s done in past, she’s been much more in synch with the other girls.  Perhaps there is more emphasis on that in dance?

Isla is in the front on the left in the photo below.

Life is so busy these days – gymnastics, soccer, touring and applying to private schools for L (in case the house doesn’t work out), traveling every month for work, planning to trips to SF (to see my sister’s baby), northern Cal at Christmas (to see Jonathan’s family), Utah in February, and France in spring, looking at houses every weekend, S’s birthday this weekend, church on Sundays and church school for an hour afterwards plus a “saint’s parade” this weekend for which they have to dress up as their favorite saint (isn’t one dress-up at Halloween enough??), Halloween itself, birthday parties, and all the things I should be doing more of, like cleaning the house and working.  It just never stops.  I know one day the kids will move out, and I’ll be like my parents with way too much time on my hands.  Until then, we press on.

Also, if you think US democracy and government is dysfunctional (it is), there’s always a worse road than the one you’re traveling on.  NI makes the US look like a panacea of goodwill and cooperation.

This is just the type of headline I like to see:

Hidden in the article is the fact that prices are STILL 10% higher than they were a year ago.  And that last October, prices had already gone through an obscene run-up.

Nevertheless, the very worst of the price spike is over.  I would like to see a house that is current worth 1.3 come down to 1.1 or 1.15 before we buy, but we’ll see.  We had been hoping to be under contract by December for reasons relating to school registration timing, but the financial benefits of waiting are just too great.  So we hold.

We’ve reduced our budget by about $300,000 due to various factors.  In the meantime, despite that budget decrease I’ve seen two houses in the last few weeks come on the market that we’d be willing / happy to live in, one in Somerset and one in W. Bellevue.  In the previous four months of looking I didn’t see a single house in those areas on the market in our price range that met our square foot requirements and was “livable.”  We are unlikely to move to either Somerset or W Bellevue due to high prices and the fact there are other cheaper places we like that have excellent schools.   However, it just indicates that pricing is becoming more reasonable and we can get more for our investment, even accounting for interest rates.  I’m actually more concerned about decreases in the stock market.  We’re also sitting on a significant amount of cash from selling my first house a year ago, which is rather nerve-wracking.  However, if I’d invested that money a year ago after we sold the house, it’d be down 10% right now.  That’s more money than I’m likely to save in a year of work after taxes and childcare.

I am also so glad I sold my old house a year ago.  That house would be unsellable in today’s market due to my drug-consuming and car-stealing neighbors.  (Around the time I was selling the house I drove by and saw my neighbor passed out, half in and half out of a car which I will generously describe as dilapidated, but so hard to describe how awful it was, with trash everywhere, right in front of their house, immediately next to mine.)  I didn’t quite hit the peak in the housing market, but it was close enough.  And now I never have to worry about it again.

In my adult life, I’ve been incredibly fortunate not to have to spend a lot of time worrying about money.  But the prospect of spending 7 figures on a house has been keeping me awake at night.  It’s not fun.  I really want to be done with it.  Still, it definitely makes sense to continue to wait.  My sense is that February or March will be the right time to buy in terms of balancing housing prices with our desire to be done with this, but we’ll see.