Another Round of Holidays...

The kids are about to celebrate their second Thanksgiving in America. I think we have a lot to be thankful for this year. Last year, the four of us were living in a fairly-cramped, one bedroom apartment. This year, we're in a two-bedroom apartment, and I believe by next Thanksgiving we will finally be in a house of our own. We're still looking at houses in a wide variety of price ranges. There are several houses that are just under 100k here in Austin that look really nice when you see the picture online. Then we you actually go to the house, it's not quite what you were expecting. Our main goal is to to try to keep our monthly mortgage payment low. The lower the mortgage payment, the less stress I will feel about buying a house.

We're thankful that both my wife and I have jobs right now when so many people don't. My (ex) brother-in-law has a page on Facebook where he writes that he has applied for around 150 jobs. My friend Jerry hasn't found a job yet, nor has my ex-wife, who lost her job about a year ago. It's still tough out there. Even though the economy is slowly improving, the jobs still aren't there yet.

We're also thankful that the kids are both healthy (and that they survived the freakin' swine flu!)

I'm thankful that I don't have to work this Christmas, like I did last year. Last year I worked both Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. This year, although I'm still working on Thanksgiving, I'll have 4 days off for Christmas.

Because of my rather poor relationship with my brother (and also because we need as much money as possible for a down payment on the house), I won't be going back to California for Christmas. Just the flight alone would have cost us $2,000 to go back this time of year. $2,000 was the entire amount we spent on our last trip there in May, and that included the rental car, hotels, and entertainment.

I tend to think about my relationship with my brother a bit more during the holidays. Now that we're buying our own house, I think about how sneaky he was to get my mom to buy him a house, and then give me and my sister $10,000 dollars a piece, as if to placate us. He's got a $400,000 home. Me and my sister have ten thousand dollars. What I think about now is, if the money was shared equally between all three of us, we could all have bought our own house with it. Sure, it wouldn't have been enough to buy a big fancy house with a pool (like my brother has), but it would have been enough to get something decent (especially here in Texas). I just saw a great house here in Austin for $176,000.

Still, Christy tells me I just need to let it go, and she's right. As the song goes: "If you keep carrying that anger, it will eat you up inside." It's true, and this should be a time to be thankful for what we do have, and not what we don't.