Right now I feel like my body has been used as somebody’s punching bag. My diaphragm muscles are sore as hell from all the sneezing I did thanks to my last allergy attack. I gotta wonder how they can get so sore with the hundreds of ab crunches I do nearly every day! I also feel like a giant water balloon being a week away from my period.

Because it only cost a few bucks, Tom grabbed a new float for the cooler and is replacing the old one. So maybe the thing will stop leaking in the mornings like it has been. But this way he can let Jesse know when he pays the rent that he replaced it, along with the valve in back, and hopefully that’ll keep him from coming down here.

We went a record 4 weekends in a row with no barking, in case I haven’t already said so.

We were discussing the pros and cons of owning versus renting. I do miss being our own boss of the place and us being the ones to have the say in what happens when (unless it’s an emergency) and not having to ask permission like children to do this or to do that. I definitely miss that much. Tom loves to tinker with things and to build things too, so he kind of misses doing more of that.

But what we don’t miss is having to pay for whatever breaks. Especially if it costs more than just a few dollars like a hot water tank does.

I was surprised to see so many 3-bed, 2-bath houses in decent enough condition selling for just 85K with monthly payments between $450 - $650. But the problem is the down payment. One wanted 16K and that may take us another year or two of staying here to come up with, assuming he didn’t get laid off and nothing else came up to throw a curveball at us which, in the end, could end up causing us to stay here longer quite unnecessarily. We could end up wishing we’d gotten the hell out when we first had the chance and just rented a place in an adult community.

That’s another thing; these houses we looked at online are in the mainstream. It’s weird, but true that rentals in adult communities are cheaper while the houses sell for more there.

Tom just said that statement was wrong and that we couldn’t literally end up staying for nothing. If we stayed longer (though right now I highly doubt we will), we’d only have even more money to move with, and anything that could come up unexpectedly here vs. an adult community rental would be easier on us here because it’s cheaper here. Our rent is $825 and all we have to pay for is propane (about $800 a year). A rental in an adult community would probably be another $100 in rent, plus a couple hundred for electricity.

It’s something we’re going to have to investigate further and ask ourselves if being put out another year or two is worth the lower payments in the end and having a place that we’re the boss of.

I’d be worried as hell about the neighbors, though, if we were back in an anything-goes neighborhood. I’ve had too many bad neighbors for too many years not to know that God above would be sure to pick out the absolute worst neighbors possible for us. I would normally choose financial savings over noise, but if that noise is anything like it was in Phoenix, I would rather pay more for some peace. But we couldn’t possibly know how bad it may be till we got there, and it’s harder to sell and move from a house than from a rental. In an adult community, I may get barking dogs and I may have to listen to car door slamming from their daily company and I may have to listen to car stereos, but there’s the potential for twice as much trouble in the mainstream. Do I really want college kids to the left, welfare bums to the right and the Brady Bunch across the street while I listen to 6 barking dogs all within a 100-foot radius of our place? Having my peace disturbed so I can’t hear myself think when I’m awake is bad enough, but to be woken up constantly is really bad.

So even if someone handed us the money right now for a down payment, we couldn’t know what we were getting into for sure till we got there. The few times I did get the luxury of being able to say, “How nice it is to finally have a good, quiet neighbor,” they would up and move and in would come trouble. Yeah, I actually had a few quiet neighbors over the last 20 years. A black guy who lived below me in the 2nd Crystal Creek apartment, and a white guy below me in the 2nd Vista Ventana studio. But it was so hard to really enjoy the peace they gave me when everyone else around them was acting like a bunch of wild animals.

We wouldn’t want to sit back and just take it if we ever again had a neighbor who was a genuine, honest-to-God problem by most people’s standards, but what happens if we lodge a city complaint against someone who isn’t white and who has the wrong connections and no one who ever questions their credibility just like in Phoenix? Then whatever they decided to do to me on account of it would be considered “justifiable retaliation” and it would be my word against theirs simply because I’m white.

I wish that just like we have adult communities they would set up neighborhoods just for college kids and just for welfare folks. Having just a mainstream and an adult community isn’t enough. It’s too black and white. But unfortunately, the large Mormon families with their incredibly loud, always-home children, and the even louder college kids and those on welfare are allowed to go anywhere. Even if that means I’m the one that has to deal with them.

But I won’t completely scratch the idea of possibly owning sometime later on down the road in life. I just don’t want to make another dumb buy. We already did that twice. Yes, it was our fault that we lost the Maricopa place and the land in Oregon. In Maricopa, we bit off more than we could chew. In Oregon, we didn’t investigate the land thoroughly enough before purchasing the parcel we purchased. If we had we’d known the mountain it was on was volcanic and damn near impossible to dig septic tanks and other shit on being as rocky as it was. There were other unforeseen expenses that arose along the way, too.

So right now I’m leaning toward getting out of here this summer as planned and into a rental in an adult community. Now if they deny us for some reason, then that could change a lot of things. So could finding a place that wanted just 5K-10K down, though I would think it would have to be a total dump in that case.