There are holes in my office wall.
They're large, although not large enough to insert even your smallest finger. The edges are sort of ragged. Taken together, they form a large square where a whiteboard used to hang.
I'm in a temporary office. The desk I'm sitting at is small and was not originally designed to bear a monitor and keyboard. I have no return, which means the drifts of paper and other crap on my desk are deeper than usual. There is a second chair next to the one I am sitting in; although upon walking into the office one might suspect it is for a visitor to sit in and collaborate with me, it is not. It is there for me to put my feet up. The awkward angle that I am forced to sit at as regards the desk prevents me from extending my legs. They become cramped, and thus I must sometimes prop them up on the "guest" chair as I work.
I've been in this temporary office since May.
We're living in a temporary house. We own it, at least we own the risk and whatever equity our current mortgage holders do not own. It's hard to keep track of them; the financial transaction between ourselves and Wachovia has been handed off at least once at this point. Now we pay someone else. There was no consultation. Sometimes modern banking is like sex without protection. In fact, it's like sex without protection and with a blindfold on. The consumer is just the person in the fiduciary barrel.
We've been here for four years now. We've owned our house for two. All of this is temporary. The plan is to move back to California as soon as possible.
Now we're having a kid.
Like most homeowners (I suspect - I have only anecdotal evidence for this) the first thing we did after opening enough boxes was to engage in remodeling. We completely stripped and refitted the library; new carpet, new drywall, a nine-by-twenty bookshelf that we build ourselves. There's a lot more that we'd like to do. In particular, we'd like to knock out the wall between the kitchen and the living room, and in the process relocate the stove and refrigerator.
We thought about doing that. It would make the house much more open, which would be nice in a house with small rooms such as ours. We checked that the wall in question was not structural, we collected names of contractors. But we've gone no farther.
Because it's a temporary house. No sense dropping five or ten grand on remodeling that we won't enjoy in a year, or maybe in a few years.
Or is there?
- Sun Ra