In case you couldn’t tell, I tend to compile the snippets of Saturday Grab Bags over the course of the entire week, and then just upload the thing in a spare moment, and Sundays seem to be more or less optional. This past Friday’s post was something I’d been intending to write for a while but not necessarily of-the-moment – all of which means I haven’t exactly been cutting-edge topical since about Thursday or so.
So, hey, news flash! We’re buying a new house and moving! On the one hand it all happened kind of fast and on the other hand it’s been bogged down a bit, although hopefully that’s on the brink of being resolved. Briefly, we went looking at houses on November 1st (last Sunday) and found one we really liked, and by Tuesday our realtor had put together an offer contract which we could sign electronically (truly a marvel of the 21st century), and on Thursday we were e-signing a revised contract in response to the sellers’ counter-offer, which should have pretty much sealed the deal. Come to find out on Friday that the seller’s finance company wants the offer contract signed the old-fashioned way by hand and in ink, so we got that done over the weekend and our realtor is supposed to be picking it up this morning to get things moving again. There’s no reason to think that this is anything other than a technicality hiccup, but of course a slight amount of paranoia that the whole deal is going to unravel is almost unavoidable. Even once the paperwork is filed and the good faith deposit is cashed and everything there’s still the contingency home inspection and whatnot, but for all intents and purposes we’re assuming the home-buying is going to happen and closing should be in mid-December.
The move, once completed, should cut my wife’s commute from 40 minutes to 10, which was one of our biggest motivators in thinking about relocating. (The other one was getting a bit more breathing space, and we managed that as well.) My commute will probably stay about the same, as far as total door-to-door time, although I may very well switch from the Metro to the Virginia Rail Extension. It remains to be seen if VRE has tribulations akin to those inherent to the WMATA, or if it’s an apples and oranges kind of agony.
I was talking about that whole situation with a couple of former co-workers yesterday – we all worked together at my previous job and we try to have lunch once a quarter or so to keep in touch. I jumped ship in June of 2007, and at that point I was closing in on five years at that job. It really kind of put things in perspective for me in a way I hadn’t been especially conscious of before. I was at a Halloween party in 2002 when I bumped into a college buddy who asked me what I was doing those days. The truthful answer was that I was living with my mom in New Jersey, working a really crappy software instruction job. (I was visiting Northern Virginia just for the party.) My buddy said his company was looking to hire and he was under the impression from other mutual friends that I would be qualified for the programmer position. The technical term for my qualifications at that point was “marginal at best” but, as is the way of the world, who you know is more important than what you know how to do. At least I caught up quickly once I was hired and thrown in the deep end. But in order to take the job in Virginia (well, technically Maryland, one of the suburbs north of D.C. that is part of the overall sprawl of the capital region) I needed a place to live in Virginia, and the friends I was crashing with for the party weekend were thrilled at the idea of having me around permanently and rented me a room dirt cheap. So the new job and a new place to live all fell into my lap with almost zero effort, and I liked each of them quite a lot. They just happened to be situated 25 miles apart, including a lone bridge over a big old river (fine, technically not the only bridge across the Potomac but it feels that way during rush hour more often than not). All of the upside – better work environment, better salary, out of mom’s house, back in my social circle in VA – far, far outweighed the hour-plus commute. And by the time any of my enthusiasm for those life improvements began to wane, the hour-plus commute just seemed like a very unremarkable facet of life as usual. For the past seven years (and counting) it hasn’t much occurred to me that there’s anything wrong with my commute taking over an hour each way. I can find plenty of fault with the inefficient management of the Metro system or the petty indignities my fellow riders inflict on one another, but the overall timesink? I’m totally habituated to it.
Even when I stare it in the eyes like that, I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, and certainly feel no sense of spiritual outrage. I want to work where the money is; I want to live where that money goes far. If I ever find a way to live in the cheap western fringes of the area and also work in the same neck of the woods, I’ll probably strongly consider it. But at the moment it seems that long-haul commuting is the only way to connect the two, and I’ve apparently, unthinkingly made my peace with it.
Of course I say that now. In six months I’ll probably be grousing about how there’s not enough daylight after I get home from work to prune the hydrangeas or something.
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