T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s 2008 or so, and I am enjoying an influx of good fortune. Unfortunately, every good turn is countered by a disaster. I get a lump of money from contract work, but then the car breaks. Heather gets some money from painting, but something goes wrong with the house. My website begins generating more money, but our bills go up even faster.

Cars and Windows

Heather and I are really hemorrhaging money now. Our aging Ford Taurus needs some expensive work. If the bill was any higher, I'd say get rid of it and replace it, but I'm willing to put down the cash if we can get another year or so out of it. I bite the bullet and pay for the repairs. Then four months later something else expensive breaks.

I agonize over this, but really I shouldn't. We don't have the money to repair or replace the car without borrowing, so we're stacking up debt either way. The only question is to figure out how to minimize our debt, which is just an exercise in delaying the inevitable.

I can see that this money loss problem isn't going to go away. I figure it's better to borrow now if it means we can get our spending under control later. It's time to make a command decision.

Making my best guess, we replace the twenty-year-old Taurus with a much newer Mitsubishi Gallant. It's smaller, newer, more fuel efficient, and hopefully it will cost less to keep it on the road. It’s tough to get all five of us into the car, but I’m willing to trade comfort if it means we can live within our means.

Looking back through the hundreds of pictures in our archives, this was the only shot I could find of the Gallant. Not to spoil anything, but we didn’t own it long and didn’t want to take pictures of it. Also: Dig that crazy early snow.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Twelve-Year Mistake Part 4: The Mistake”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s spring of 2001. We’ve moved into our new house. We’ve left behind a bunch of stress and we’re settling into a new routine. I’ve got a nice home office now. For the first time since I got married, I have a quiet space where I can be creative and relaxed. This does wonders for my productivity.

Baby

Heather is pregnant again. This is kind of amazing. This is the third time we’ve said, “Okay, it’s a good time to think about having a kid. We’ll just let nature do its thing and we’ll probably end up pregnant in the next six months or so.” And for the third time in a row, she was pregnant less than two months later. I’m led to understand that this process is supposed to take some time? I don’t know. Given the convoluted mechanics involved, the entire reproductive system seems horribly unreliable and capricious to me. I’m surprised it works at all.

Each pregnancy has been harder than the one before. With Rachel, Heather was just violently ill and weak for four months. With Esther, she was sick for five, and the vomiting was more serious. With this third pregnancy, she is in actual danger. She can’t keep food down. She’s a little malnourished and becoming dehydrated. Some medical care pulls her system back into line, and from this point on she needs intravenous fluids. All of this is caused by the mad soup of hormones that get pumped out when the human body is trying to create another human body inside it. See what I mean about the system being sort of capricious?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Twelve-Year Mistake Part 3: Twenty Sided Tale”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.