Yeah, this is a culpability dodge. It’s not meant seriously. But peer pressure ain’t got nuthin’ on parental pressure. No matter how old you get. And when I get home, I am retiring from eating for a while.

Dad: I have a coupon for the Jambone’s BBQ. Buy one get one free. I figured we would go there for lunch.

Trumwill: Sounds good, Dad, but I am still recovering from breakfast.

Dad: Well, there’s no particular time that we need to eat again.

Trumwill: I don’t expect to be hungry again before dinner, though. I mean, my body is still carrying all that food from the weekend in Genesis. Then I had that great breakfast that you made…

Dad: Well, you can’t wait until dinner to eat again.

Trumwill: I can make a snack if I get hungry.

Dad: You shouldn’t snack. You won’t be hungry for the next meal.

Trumwill: But in this case I don’t think I want a meal until dinner.

Dad: Well, I’ve got this coupon and Mom doesn’t like BBQ…

Trumwill: … so when do we eat?

Dad: I was thinking one-thirty.

My newest (well, only) nephew Roy Conor Truman was born early this morning, coming in at just a bit under 8 pounds.

In honor of my knocking around Colosse and Delosa for the past week or so…

My niece Sadie does not apparently like me very much. I got home from a walk in the park (a very bad idea on the gulf coast at 3 in the afternoon in July, by the way). She stumbled into the kitchen where I was and I scared the living crap out of her. I haven’t actually seen her since she was a baby, so it was no surprise that she didn’t really recognize me.

Nor was it surprising that her initial instinct was fear. I seem to have that effect on girls. On more than one occasion, female friends of Clint would confide in him that for reasons they could not quite articulate I creeped them out. These are girls that I never really talked to, but that didn’t seem to really matter. One of them thought, without much of any foundation, that I was probably a stalker serial killer. I am not often in contact with little girls, but whether babies or tots they don’t seem to cotton to me the same way that young boys do. The weekend that Clancy and I met a young little guy latched on to me as the coolest guy ever and that helped me garner attention from Clancy. Good thing that wasn’t a girl or she would have run the other way. My father, despite having never had any daughters of his own and never having had any younger sisters, for some reason bonds particularly well with young girls. Sadie darts for him every time they come over.

Anyhow, the rest of the family did what they could to salvage the situation. My father inadvertently made it worse when he tried a little too hard to get her to get close to me and see that I wasn’t going to bite her head off. It was downhill from there, though they never stopped trying. They kept showing her pictures of me with the rest of the family including her father and including her as a baby. They explained that I was Oliver (her dad’s) brother and her grandfather’s son. To no avail. My sister-in-law Kelsey says that little Sadie has been particularly temperamental lately.

Kelsey, my sister-in-law, is projected to give birth while I am down in Delosa to my first nephew. I’m hoping that things go better with that one.

I am leaving tonight for a return trip back to Delosa for a week or two and will only have intermittent web access during that time. Heading to Genesis to spend some time with my folks and the in-laws. After that, I’ll be in Colosse for a spell. No access in Genesis and I should be kept pretty busy in Colosse. I’ve got a backlog of posts and some time to write more on the plane, though, so there’ll be new content on a daily or bi-daily basis.

Read no further if the subject of bowel movements, toilets, and plungers puts you off.

As I’ve mentioned before, up until a couple years ago having a purely solid BM was a rarity for me. Since going on my fiber diet, it’s become pretty common. Also, toilets have moved in the direction of less powerful to conserve water to save on water bills and due to environmental concerns.

This has created a game of sorts.

If after your deposit, you flush the toilet and it all goes down without incident, the toilet wins and you lose.

If you have to flush twice with no or minimal toilet paper (using toilet paper on the first flush is cheating), you score a mild victory.

When you break out the plunger, you have won handily.

But… you know the game of Hearts? For those of you that don’t, in Hearts the goal is to avoid getting hearts (and the Queen of Spades) in your pile. You get a point for each heart and 13 points for the queen and the person with the fewest points wins. However, if you get all of the hearts and the queen, you get zero points and everyone else gets 26. It’s called Shooting the Moon or Running the Deck.

Well, there’s a scenario in the Toilet Game like that. If you flush and the toilet gets overwhelmed out of sight and the next time you flush you end up with (thankfully not brown, but still icky) water overflowing and flooding the bathroom and kitchen… you can call that a victory. In reality, though, the toilet just Ran the Deck and kicked your patootie.

Yeah, I had my patootie kicked. Fortunately, the deposit was far enough down that the water that overflowed was not obviously contaminated (with #2 and fortunately it was a very light #1 that instigated this) as long as you look at it as the “out of sight, out of mind” sort of way.

I’ve tried to convince myself that I defeated the toilet with mere urination, but it’s really hard to position this as any sort of victory.

Bakadesuyo points to a study I’d heard about a while back that fell into the “no duh” category:

In all three data sets people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports. We also find that the results differ importantly between women and men, with members of the former sex showing a greater range of responses to marriage quality than do men. A final set of results is that, when marriage quality is controlled for, the apparent marriage effects on other outcome variables, such as self reported health and trust, change significantly.

This is a great argument to those who say “Better to be in a miserable marriage than single!”

Except that I don’t really hear people saying that. The closest I hear is along the lines of The Case for Settling. Whether that qualifies as the same argument is dependent largely on what that statement means. It can mean anything from “Find someone! Anyone!” to “Don’t expect a partner to be absolutely perfect or meet every criteria.”

It’s worth pointing out a couple of things, though. The first is that this is sort of at odds with some studies I’ve read about the effects of divorce on happiness. Namely, those in unhappy marriages that get divorced are unlikely to be any happier than those in unhappy marriages that stick it out. I say it’s “at odds” but it’s a contradiction that can be explained. First, the reason that the divorce studies say what they do is that when it comes to divorce to have loved and lost is not better than to have loved at all. Divorce disrupts one’s life far more than never having married (whose life is, by definition, un-disrupted). Compounding this is that there are often kids involved and dealing with kids between two parents is stressful. The other factor is that marriages that are unhappy in one stage become happier later on. In this vein, it’s quite possible that some of the unhappy people in poor marriages will be happier people in better marriages down the line. Or not in many other cases.

Another factor is self-selection of single people and people in unhappy marriages. The general studies that find that married people are generally happier than unmarried people can be at least partially accounted for that married people are, in general, more likely to be more functional on the whole than unmarried people. People that are highly disfunctional are unlikely to get married. So that’s going to skew the data somewhat. But this also applies to people in poor marriages. They are, generally speaking, more likely to suffer from depression and be generally dysfinctional than people in happier marriages. You would think that they would be a better group than those that were never able to marry at all, but a lot of people these days choose not to marry for reasons other than not being able to find a mate. Really, though, even if you account for that there is simply no denying that being in an unhappy marriage is a very, very stressful thing.

It’s important to note, though, that the original points made by the general studies of marriage and happiness (that do not differentiate between happy and unhappy marriages) stand insofar as enough people fall outside of the “poor marriage” category that one is, statistically speaking, probably more likely to be happy in a marriage than not. If they end up in a poor marriage, they are likely to be unhappy, but this is a subset that few enough people fall into that it doesn’t affect the overall data.

The thing about marriage is that it is a personal and highly variable thing. One marriage is not like the other. Nor is one individual like others. Someone that is generally unhappy is unlikely to be made happy by marriage as they are more likely to end up in the “poor marriage” category. Similarly, someone temperamentally unsuited for marriage should not get married just cause because they too are more likely to end up in the “poor marriage category.”

I think the same general thing is true when it comes to parenthood. A lot of people cite studies that parents tend to be happier than non-parents and that, in the aggregate, having children decreases happiness. Unless there is some flaw with the methodology of which I am unaware, you go with the information you have. However, some people look at this the same way they might look at marriage data and assume that all parents are created equal, that a happy parent would be even happier without children and an unhappy childless person would be even unhappier with children.

This could be true, but we don’t know it to be. Tell a couple that tries and fails to conceive for years that they are really happier for it is not only a crummy thing to do but probably wrong. If you look at the subset of parents that really, really want children and have them, they are likely a happier lot than those that want them equally much and don’t have them. And then of course you have those with children that never particularly wanted them. Those are likely to be a pretty unhappy lot as well.

You could, in fact, look at the data and suggest that a number of people that have kids do so to fill a void in their life and the children do not do so. Really, though, I think this is something of a cop-out.

I do, however, think that the data is skewed by people that did not realize until it was too late that having children was not a bad idea for them. If you’re married and do not have them, you get badgered about it. There also comes a point where the social scene around you changes and suddenly you’re somewhat socially penalized for not being a part of the parenthood club. If, despite this, you are still adament about not wanting children, there is a really good chance that you are making the right decision. They made a more conscious choice. They have a better idea of what they want.

The thing about having children is that it is the social default. People that don’t have a firm idea of whether or not they really want to be parents are more than otherwise going to go with that default decision. People who don’t have strong ideas are particularly susceptible to social pressure. And when a husband and wife have different desires on whether or not to have children, it’s the partner that wants to do what everyone else is doing that is likely to wind. They have society on their side. That’s why, I think, more people make the mistake of becoming parents when they shouldn’t than make the mistake of not having children when they really should. And I think it’s people in the former category, across all sorts of social and economic lines, that drag the averages for parents down on the happiness scale.

So what does that mean? It means those that want to have children should not look at the statistics and think that their urges and desires are wrong and/or the path to unhappiness. But as importantly or more importantly, it means that when a couple talks about how they do not want children, their desires should be respected. The tendency of people to tell them that they are wrong or that they will change their minds are more likely to be wrong than right and are basically inviting people to drag down the happiness statistics on parents. And it means that the man or woman that really wants kids, when confronted with a partner that doesn’t, probably ought to be the ones to give in or move on.

It partially pains me to say all of this because my wife and I have a bunch of siblings that do not want children but who we are sure could make good parents. In the case of my brother Mitch, he does want children but married a woman that does not. Of course, we want her to change her mind. But when she says that she would not be happy being a parent, she’s probably right.

Several years ago, it seemed an annual ritual that Father’s Day was celebrated by some by denigrating bad fathers. Namely, fathers that left families or that never pay child support or whatnot. I am not sorry that tradition has passed. I really hope, though, that it is not replaced by a new tradition of questioning the necessity of fathers. This is being held up by, among other things, a study suggesting that lesbian parents are the best parents of all.

The problem with the lesbian study is that it is comparing apples to oranges. Lesbian parents are by necessity one of two kinds: artificial insemination or adoptive. They compared these parents to all straight couple and single parents. That would include those that never intended to be parents or that barely wanted to be parents. Meanwhile, Lesbian parents - by virtue of having more hoops to jump - are far more likely to have made a much more deliberate choice for parenthood and thus are more likely to be prepared for parenthood. They are also more likely to be educated and have enough money (or at least enough discipline on meager earnings) to be able to afford adoption or insemination. If being a natural parent cost between $500-2000 up front before the pregnancy even begins, you’d likely see better results for straight parents, too. The results would have been far more meaningful if they had compared adopted and inseminated children of straight households compared to Lesbian ones.

None of this is to denigrate the results of the study or suggest that they are meaningless. They do tell us that Lesbians make good parents and that we don’t have any real reason - excepting opposition to homosexuality itself - to prohibit Lesbian couples from being parents. But they don’t tell us much useful beyond that except for the rare bisexual who is making a decision to marry a man and have a child with him or to have a child with her Lesbian suitor. Most women aren’t Lesbians, though, and the results are not clear enough to suggest that they try really hard at Lesbianism for the betterment of their future children.

But the results do seem clear enough to some to question the necessity of fathers. Leaving aside huge social ramifications that would make almost nobody better off (which I will get to in a bit), the alternative to most straight women of having a father in their child’s life is… not having a father in their child’s life. The research on that is pretty clear (Pamela Paul’s provocatively entitled “Are Fathers Necessary” essay bends over backwards to avoid mentioning that while women single moms do better than single dads they do not do better than moms-and-dads, in the aggregate). There are many, many competent single mothers that do not need the help of a man to raise their children (and many fathering men from whom it is better to keep children away from), but there are enough that cannot manage it on their own for this solution to be without cause for concern on a wider scale. Though it seems not to matter a whole lot what the gender of the second parent is, two parents is better than one. There are some ideas about how we could go back to a society in which the two parents includes a mother and a grandmother or two women pooling their resources, but is this an idea that we want to risk society on?

No. Not the least of which because society benefits a great deal when men are involved in the family. Having a family gives men a stake in society. One of my favorite stories (perhaps one of those false-but-accurate stories) is an ad campaign to convince men to wear life vests. They tried a number of pitches to men, but far and away the most effective one showed a man drowned in water and two very scared children in a boat. The way to get men to behave responsibly was to show them what they were responsible for. My father-in-law describes the birth of my wife as the event that forced him to approach his career more seriously and work harder to provide for his near family.

If you look at cultures in which men are not involved in the family, you see cultures that have extreme difficulty progressing. When you look at the fatherless inner-city, you can either say that the women are having such a hard time of it because the men are so much more likely to desert them or you can say that the men are so rotten as to be unwelcome. Both of these point to the need for fatherhood. If not to provide for the women (we’ll even make the most charitable assumption that the women are providing for themselves), then to keep the men in line. But the charitable assumption is very often incorrect and they are very frequently needed to provide money for the children. If not in the form of child support than in the form of taxes. That brings me back to my father-in-laws comment about how productive men are without a stake in the family. Yes, some men are extremely productive regardless, but there is a difference between providing for children you’re going home to and providing tax funds to take care of kids you have no access to. And even if you are inclined to believe that women could take care of it on their own because they’re coming into their own financially, you still have a problem of worker-to-supported-child ratio of a society in which everyone invested in society can bear children of their own.

The speciousness of the argument that fathers don’t matter is more-or-less revealed by our approach to child support. At the very least they matter on a material level. And by participating on a material level, they have at least earned the right to participate in the child’s lives (until or unless demonstrated otherwise). To treat fatherhood as a courtesy to men because, as Pamela Paul put it, “we’ve gotten used to him,” is to confirm the most odious arguments made by skeptics of our child support system. And though in my younger years I might have gotten a kick out of having the ability to father children without any of the rights and responsibilities thereto, I simply would not want to live in a society in which that was the norm. There is a reason why societies, cultures, and subcultures in which parenthood is a joint effort succeed.

One of the nuisances of living in Colosse is that the “homeowners’ associations” have way too much goddamn power. Almost nowhere that one can buy a house, is there not an “association” and deed restrictions, unless one lives 2-3 hours outside of downtown. The services provided by said “associations” appear to be largely meaningless, as well - my locality, for instance, has a set of public park areas paid for by the City (not the HOA), and we have no pool nearby; in Fustle’s old HOA, there had been a community pool, but the hours it kept and the fact that it was only open between Memorial Day and Labor Day made it next-to-impossible to use effectively.

The problem, in Colosse at least, is that HOA’s don’t actually operate as an association of homeowners. Mine has yet, to my knowledge, to actually hold a damn meeting. Instead, what they do is contract out “inspectors” to drive various neighborhoods, and contract a scum-sucking shyster snake (aka “lawyer”) to send out threat letters telling people to mow their grass or edge their sidewalk.

Of course, these letters are sent out in bulk post, usually arrive 5 days after the date of “please get this done by X date… OR ELSE, FUCKING PEON” on the letter, and are generally as impersonal and insulting as possible. I got my first one yesterday. Ironically, I’d already edged my sidewalk earlier that week - it was just that with the daily rain happening during that week, the grass was growing like weeds.

On the other hand, these are lawyers, the scum-sucking snakes of the human world. So, just in case, I edged the damn driveway and sidewalk again to be sure it looked freshly done if they came by again.

The blog Mama Pundit has, unfortunately, become a lot more interesting over the last few months. I say “unfortunately” because the action revolves around her eldest son being assaulted in a drug deal gone sideways. This lead to the disclosure that her son has been struggling with addiction for years, the attempts at piecing together what happened, and the uncertainty as to how much “H” will or will not recover. This day and age you get used to assuming that people will recover. It’s hard to come to grips with a case where a series of bad events leads to an 18 year old kid with middle class bearings that never will. All in a time when the family should be happily preparing for their soon-to-be (God willing) fifth child into this world.

The author, Katie Allison Granju, is a self-declared non-expert who nonetheless has written a book on parenting. She comes from a pretty liberal mindset when it comes to parenting. One of the things haunting her right now is their failure to act more forcefully when the drug problem first started to develop. It was chalked up to experimentation when in hindsight it was obviously the onset to something much more serious. As one might expect, a lot of people are telling her that this is not her fault (it’s not) and many are backing this argument with claims about how much more counterproductive “tough love” can be in cases like this.

None of that stops Granju from knowing that if she had responded differently when the problem first surfaced that they might not be where they are now. Having responded how she did, of course, we know exactly how things turned out. So if the chances are less than 100% that the kid would not have ended up in a hospital unable to walk and speak coherently had she approached the initial indications with more vigor, then the odds are better with that route than the route that occurred. Hindsight is unmerciful that way.

When you hear a story like this, you think to yourself that as a parent (even if you are not yet one, but especially if you are) that you want to do absolutely everything in your power to prevent that from happening. You want to do whatever the opposite that Granju did that may have allowed this to happen. But then you hear about some awful result that occurred after a parent did something different, and you wonder what if anything you can do.

When Clancy and I have children, a common theme of our disagreements is that I will be the more permissive one and she will be the less permissive one. This story makes me want to be nothing more permissive than a jailhouse warden. Eventually, the thoughts of it will fade and my more natural inclinations will return and 15 years from now (God willing) I will be arguing the merits of childhood freedom and experimentation while Clancy argues the dangers of these things.

What is so immeasurably frustrating is that when it comes to the questions of giving kids room to make mistakes and tough love is that there is no right answer between the two. Or rather, there are cases where either will work and other cases where neither will work and some cases where one will backfire and others where the other will. And nobody knows which is going to be true of your kid.

Assuming that our future children share our genes, on the subject of substances I am likely to be more liberal than Clancy but more conservative than most parents (I was going to be the “fascist” parent when contemplating kids with the other three women I ever contemplated kids with). One of the main questions as to whether or not experimentation should be accepted or not is whether the Addiction Switch will be flipped or not. Our gene pool is stacked. We both have addictive personalities. We both have parents that have been borderline alcoholics on one point and family trees bearing ill fruit.

At the same time, though, a part of me will want to approach the issue the same way that I would approach other issues. Even if the statistics bear out that parental zero tolerance policies are generally more effective than looser policies, it’s nearly impossible to determine what that difference is because there are so many other factors to consider. And (spoken like a true non-parent, check back with me fifteen years from now) there are other things to consider than safety when no matter what you do safety is not insured in any event. Even leaving aside what happens when they go off to college, raising kids in a bubble means that they are raised in a bubble and that is a bad thing in itself. So the choice is not just more risk or less risk, but higher risk/reward and lower risk/reward.

It’s not clear which is superior. Different kids will thrive better in different environments. My life was thoroughly enriched by the fact that I was going to parties and getting drunk at 18. That my parents gave me the freedom, if not to drink, then at least to be far enough away that I could get away with it. Other kids, given the same freedom, end up in a hospital unable to speak and walk. Some kids go to military school and learn structure and others go to military school and gang up with all the other kids in military school. Would that you know at the beginning what you learn at the end.

… People end up agreeing to things they don’t want to do. And then, it ends up worse because they resent the person they feel railroaded them into the thing they didn’t want to agree to.

Ever had someone ask you for something that you felt the other person should just understand wasn’t appropriate? Rather than just say no, you try to get the other person to see why it is what they’re asking for isn’t a good idea. But they don’t see it. It’s awkward. Perhaps they mistakenly think your objections are due to concern for their well-being, rather than yours, so they assure you that they’re fine with the situation.

And if there is more than one person involved in the permission-granting side, it can really be a mess, because they keep passing the buck to the other. Neither wishes to be the bad guy, so permission ends up being given for the thing neither person wanted to have happen. “I’ll check with Sheila,” puts Sheila in a very difficult position.

Wimpy objection: “Um, Dad… you know I’ll be working a lot. I’ll only be around on the weekends.”

Counterplay: “Ah’m fahn with that.”

Pause.

Wimpy objection: “Um, you know, Sheila is on maternity leave. So she’ll be home all day with the baby.”

Counterplay: “That’s fahn.”

Last stab: “She’ll be home all day nursing the baby.” Hint, hint.

Counterplay: “OK.”

So the plan is for a Katrina-victim-length father-in-law visit when there is a newborn baby in the house, and the son is out at the office all day, and the daughter-in-law is trapped in the house on maternity leave caring for the newborn baby, and so will have to be around the father-in-law 100 percent of her time. And she is trying to breast-feed. (And no, I don’t expect he’ll be helping out with the baby. He is half-deaf, so he can’t even hear the crying.)

Ah am not fahn with that.

Show of hands: When was the last time — after college — that anyone reading had anyone visit them for more than a week? How about those of you who are married? Those who have kids?

Does anyone in the Western world, besides Grandpa Leghorn, not get why it strains a family to have houseguests for long periods of time? There’s the loss of privacy, the inconvenience of shopping and cooking and otherwise providing for an extra person, not to mention having to be fully clothed, modestly posed, and ready to politely converse at all times one wishes to appear outside one’s bedroom. With a newborn around, that’s a lot to ask. I will be imprisoned in my bedroom for the duration of his visit. Plus, yes, I do have some issues with him, personally.

Would any one of you even want to come stay at a house for three weeks where there is a 5-week-old baby? Even if we begged you, much less if we hedged and stammered and said, “Gee, it’s going to be kind of difficult with the baby and all.” Much less if you knew basically nothing about babies, retaining nothing from your secondary role in rearing your one child four decades ago.

And probably even less, still, if you had previously had the Tones abruptly and heatedly terminate one of your visits three weeks early. Yes, when I was pregnant with Toddler Tone, he tried to pull off a one-month visit by slipping through extensions and showing up a few days early. After a week and a half, I snapped over a laundry incident. But it seems this left no lasting impression.

We need to solve this problem. It’s the only source of real conflict in our relationship, these too-long visits from Grandpa Leghorn that Mr. Tone doesn’t really want, but doesn’t know how to say no to.

And we need to solve it fast, because Grandpa Leghorn is arriving tomorrow. For what was supposed to be a two-week visit, but somehow became extended to three weeks.

Mr. Tone swears this is not what he agreed to. He appeared convincingly surprised last night when he called Grandpa Leghorn — at my urging — to find out when he was getting here, and he said today, rather than next week like we expected. Red Flag No. 1, because come on, who doesn’t know when their dad’s arriving?! But I believe it just got slipped by him. They probably agreed in concept to “the last two weeks of May,” and then when Leghorn said “May 12 to June 1,” Mr. Tone did not bother to check the calendar and calculate that was three weeks, not two. And I failed to nail down the dates, relying instead upon Mr. Tone’s representation that it would be exactly two weeks, with no extensions.

What we need to do is get him out a week early. Of course, the real problem is that I don’t even want two weeks, but we did agree to that. And it’s not all Grandpa Leghorn’s fault that when we reluctantly agreed, it was before the baby was actually born, and we had kind of forgotten quite what a miserable hell it was last time we had a newborn in the house.

And I don’t just want him to leave a week early. I want to somehow get him to understand why. I want him to stop asking Mr. Tone for multi-week visits, because he understands what an imposition it is. Is that too much to hope for?

I have been plagued with a cough for what seems like a week but has only actually been a few days. It started Friday and then got progressively worse really quickly. I am not generally big on medications, but I have taken everything my wife has thrown at me. At first it was just a throat discomfort. There were kind of rotating symptoms. I wasn’t hungry and then I couldn’t talk (but could eat) and then was coughing up a lung (wanting to eat and talk but being scared to). The coughing outlasted the rest and it’s been a persistent problem then.

There have been mild improvements. It’s extremely frustrating because I will be perfectly fine for hours and then suddenly I just can’t stop coughing. I’m not getting enough sleep because I start coughing most when I lay down and when my coughing muscles are too exhausted and I fall asleep I wake up after four hours coughing my brains out. Insult to injury, I can’t even yawn because it stretches my throat forcing me to, you guessed it, cough.

I typically wake up two or three times within the night for need to use the restroom or because Clancy needs to bring snoring to my attention (in which case, I typically need to use the bathroom anyway). Yesterday morning when I woke up, I saw out the window that there was this white stuff everywhere. Out of nowhere it had decided to snow. Not a little bit. A lot. Over six inches by the time I woke up for real.

The basketball hoop was literally filled with snow. Mother nature scored a three point from the upper troposphere. Not bad for a girl.

My neighbor, who is also my city councilman it would see, introduced himself. Turned out that he had connections to Delosa and so we talked about that for a bit. When I thanked him for shoveling the local sidewalks, he nicely informed me that there was a city ordinance about it. Coming from the south, that’s one of those things that you don’t really think about. I mean, you know you have to shovel your driveway if you want to get out or your walkway if you want to safely walk on it. But it makes sense, I guess, that they wouldn’t have plowing for the sidewalks the same way that they do for the streets.

By the time the snow had stopped, though, someone had already taken care of our sidewalk.

One of the things I remember from Deseret was that one of the best things you can have is a neighbor with new plowmobile. They’re often so excited that they will plow everything in sight. Makes sense, as I can’t imagine I would be any different. If we were going to be staying here long term, I would probably invest in one. We have a long driveway that goes from the street passed out house and then bends over to the garage on the other side behind the house. That’s a lot of work for a shovel. Clancy had intended to make a Safeway run for cooking ingredients, but I wasn’t sure whether or not we would be able to get out.

I decided to risk it that afternoon, after the snow had stopped and somebody, perhaps with a new plowmobile, had taken care of our sidewalk. I figured the worst that could happen was that the car would get stuck somewhere on our driveway. A car trapped in its parking spot and a car trapped anywhere else on the sidewalk doesn’t make much of a difference to us. I got out without incident. It did feel kind of unfortunate to ruin the nice blanket of snow with tracks. Beyond which, it seems to be the case that once you separate ice and drive over it, it starts melting really quickly. The area in between the tire tracks was gone by the time I got back.

One of the things that the snow blanket taught me is that apparently people transverse our yard. There were bike tracks, foot prints, and paw prints. It’s kind of odd because there is a street just a house or two over. On the upshot, the closed the gate behind them which I had accidentally left open.

Today the snow gave way to rain. Well, sort of rain. Well, not really rain at all. But to me, if it’s water falling from the sky, it’s rain. It was actually just melting ice. Where we live in Arapaho is high desert, so I’ll take rain in whatever form I can find it.

I remember when I was young, my family was watching the TV show “Cheers”. There was an episode in which bartender Woody Boyd, who married Kelly, the daughter of a wealthy family, was informed that her family was going to buy him a Ferrari (or something like it). Woody, who had earnestly expressed before how it was the thought that counted when it came to gifts, cringed. As we were watching this scene, Dad the logician said “It doesn’t really matter. He wouldn’t have been able to afford the insurance on it.”

Not being all that familiar with how auto insurance worked, I asked him to explain. He told me that how much insurance costs depends on the value of what you’re insuring. Insuring a Ferrari would therefore be extremely expensive. Woody was just a bartender. He may get the car free, but he would not be able to afford it. It was one of the first introductions I ever had to Total Cost of Ownership and how even once you own something, continuing to own it costs more.

I was reminded of the plight of Woody Boyd when I read this article about what happens when the folks at Extreme Makeover: Homeowner’s Edition pull away. For those of you not familiar with the show, what basically happens is that the producers get together with contractors in search of free publicity and fix up the home of some schlub family and make their more modest home into something much grander.

And, of course, much more expensive. While the fixup is free to those lucky enough to get on the show, they have the same problem that Woody would have had with his Ferrari. Expensive houses cost more to maintain. Property taxes skyrocket with the increased value of your property. Utility bills go up considerably. They can also get bitten by the same thing that bites lottery winners. When you get something you didn’t really earn, you take it for granted. Money earned is better guarded than money won. Or, in this case, the value of a home that was given to you (or that has increased value given to you) can be taken for granted. Families ended up borrowing against their new house and previously modest mortgages exploded until they were on the hook for the cost of the house had they paid for the improvements themselves.

Also coming to mind is the big thing where Oprah Winfrey gave her studio audience each a new car. It was a nice gesture, but to get the car they would have had to pay thousands in taxes.

If you can’t afford to buy a nigh-million dollar house or a new Pontiac G6 or most of what most people would buy with the lottery, there’s a really good chance that you can’t afford to have it. And if you’re the type of person that can afford it and know how to swing it so that you don’t get burned, you’re probably not the kind of person to put yourself on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Extreme Makeover, or to play the lottery. And you’re definitely too smart to marry Kelly Boyd.

The CDC released a report entitled Marriage and Cohabitation in the United States that takes a look at marriage and cohabitation in the US. This has been an area of interest to yours truly since I take a position relatively unpopular among those that I consort with: namely, that premarital cohabitation is generally not a good idea.

The report frustratingly stops just short of being useful by failing to take the information from Table A and Table B and putting it together. The statistics show that, generally speaking, married couples that did not cohabitate prior to marriage enjoy higher marriage success rates than those that don’t. The flaw with this data is that it fails to control for demographic differences between the two groups. This report obviously looked at demographic differences that would be relevant (namely race and education) and it looks at marriage success rates among those who cohabitated and those that did not, but it fails to combine the data into a more useful (for my purposes) picture.

I did a rough-and-dirty analysis to see if race or education level accounted for the difference. The answer is that it likely accounts for some but not all. Basically, if you look at what the cohab/nocohab marriage success rates should be based on the education/racial demographics, you get a difference less than half of the overall difference. I couldn’t control for income based on the information provided, so that could account for some of the difference, though (a) income correlates with education and race and (b) what appears to happen in regards to race and education is that blacks and lower-income folks are removed from the equation because while they’re more likely to cohabitate, they’re also less likely to marry at all and so are less likely to affect marriage success/failure rates. Even so, I will cop to the imperfection of the data.

That being said, I do consider flawed data to typically be more instructive than rank speculation as to what each of us thinks is the case. And on a subject as complicated as this, it is simply impossible to control for every data point that someone would consider relevant. Even if the data does not “prove” that premarital cohabitation diminishes the odds of a successful marriage, it does at least eat into the widely held belief among many of my peers that getting married without living together first is somehow risky or even reckless.

There are a number of ways to look at premarital cohabitation and marriage and the success and failure of it. In some ways, I am doubtful that it really matters. I certainly know people that lived together for long periods of time, got married, and live happily ever after. I don’t consider these people to be exceptionally lucky or bizarre exceptions.

To look at this most effectively, I think that we need to look at different situations. We’ll name them John and Jane. Looking at a specific John and a specific Jane under two scenarios, one in which they live together before marriage and one in which they do not, I would expect the likelihood of marital success to be nearly identical. I believe firmly that the success or failure of marriage depends most strongly on the preparedness, maturity, and compatibility of its participants. Circumstance also matters, but not the circumstances surrounding when the couple got that piece of paper (except insofar as a couple with that piece of paper are less likely to split up than a couple without that piece of paper, but that’s the answer to a different question).

Where premarital cohabitation makes a difference is not the success of failure between two specific mates, but rather in mate selection. Many supporters of premarital cohabitation consider it self-evident that cohabitation provides a useful filter because you have a better idea of marital compatibility if you live with them beforehand. Logically, this makes a fair amount of sense even if there is no real data to support it.

I would suggest, however, that the “weeding out” phenomenon and the advantages it provides is undone by a number of other phenomena.

Most particularly, it leads to circumstances in which a couple “backs into” marriage. The Sunk Cost Fallacy starts playing a role where John or Jane have accumulated significant opportunity costs by staying together in an arrangement that is harder to break free from than if you’re living separately. When staying together is the path of lease resistance and the difference in resistance-level is as great as it is between cohabitationing couples and couples that don’t have a lease and shared possessions to worry about if they split up, you can expect some sub-par couplings to stick together out of inertia and eventually marry for the wrong reasons.

Secondly, it “unbundles” decisions and makes each increased level of commitment easier to do even if you’re unsure of how committed you really are. Rather than taking one large step that includes both the piece of paper and the cohabitation and the grand contemplation that occurs on the eve of such commitment, it breaks down the commitment to provides an easier avenue for the uncommitted to take the next minor step without contemplating the severity of the move. Indeed, if a couple is already living together, marriage itself becomes less important in itself. Drawing the line at cohabitation instead of, say, premarital sex or spending the night or vacationing together can seem arbitrary. It is. But it’s also all that’s left. It might abstractly be worthwhile to revisit some of the other things we’ve unbundled from marriage, but that cat has left that bag, if it was ever really in the bag to begin with. Of course, it’s increasingly too late for cohabitation, too, which is why I would consider advising someone to surrender to a cohabitation ultimatum if their partner is worth it.

Jumping back, the question is, with regards to an incompatible John and Jane, are they more likely to discover their incompatibility through trial cohabitation or through contemplating marriage and cohabitation and marriage without having lived together first? I would argue the latter.

There is an interesting statistical nugget in the report that I believe supports this view. Roughly 61% of couples that live together before marriage have successful marriages ten years out. Let’s divide that into two categories In the first category, you have couples that are living together and engaged. In the second category, you have couples that are living together and not engaged (but become engaged and married later). The success rate in the first category, which already contemplated marriage and decided in the affirmative prior to moving in together, is nearly identical to those that contemplated marriage and waited to move in together until after they were married (65% to 66% for noncohabitators). The second category, which moved in on a more provisional or trial basis, reported considerably worse marriage success rates (55%).

This coincides with my belief that the potential threat that premarital cohabitation presents can be mitigated if the cohabitation is more logistical in nature rather than simply sticking the toe in the water. In other words, moving in together with someone that you are confident about because someone’s lease is up does not present the same sort of problems as does moving in with someone because you want to see how it will go.

Of course, this has caveats among caveats. The difference in marriage success and failure are relatively minor (5-6%), though as mentioned it increases if you look at non-engaged cohabitators. Also, my position on this is more defensive rather than moralizing. I don’t really condemn those that took a different path than Clancy and I did so much as I want to dispel the myth that getting married without a trial run is particular risky. What Clancy and I did worked out for us, but what my friend Dave and his now-wife did made absolute sense for them. While I believe that no cohabitation is the better solution for more people, I am nowhere near willing to make a universal statement on the matter. Merely to encourage exercising caution and not to move in under the false belief that it will improve your chances of determining whether your significant other is the right person for you.

And, of course, this all leads aside one of my bigger concerns with premarital cohabitation, which doesn’t show up in marriage success or failure rates because it includes couples that never get married. Nearly half of those living together for three years and over a third of those living together for five years still are not married. Now, it’s sometimes going to be the case that both partners simply don’t want to get married at all. I suspect, though, that a fair amount of time it’s one party or the other declining to make decisions that need to be made.

And on one last note, even if the statistics are skewed to some extent because those of education and means make one set of decisions and those that lack education and means make another set, if I were advising each group on what to do… I would not be advising the former to emulate the behavior of the latter.

We spent the last night before our arrival in Callie at a hotel on the state line about three hours from our new home. The idea was that we wanted to arrive in Callie during business hours so that we could pick up our keys with minimal inconvenience to Erick, our property manager.

When I called Erick, we got a rather unwelcome surprise. The house we’re renting has been sold. Our rental agreement remains in tact and the buyers knew that when they bought it, so it’s not as bad as it could be. Still, though, when we signed that contract we had a pretty good idea of where we stood: One year lease, possible extension for a couple months or at least until they sell the place.

Most importantly, if we really took to Callie we would have the option to buy it. That option is now gone. It’s likely, though not certain, that we’re out of here a year from now. To say that it dampered our enthusiasm was an understatement. We had been looking at this house previously in the short and long term. A lot of “if we buy it…” upgrades and modifications. That it was a house we could see raising a family in did not escape our attention.

Erick’s impression of the new owners is that they never had immediate plans to move in but something on the horizon like a job or retirement or something. Obviously, it’s not his place to ask specifics. I’m not sure what the protocol is to say that the specifics of their plans, if they have any specifics, matter a great deal to us.

If they want to move in after six months, it might be in everybody’s best interest if we start looking for an alternative and move out whenever we find one. If they plan on moving in the day after the lease expires, we’re going to need to start keeping an eye out months ahead of time. If they’re flexible, maybe we can get a three month extension and take advantage of housing opening up around the summer time as it often does.

Against our best efforts, we still like the house. Not quite as much as we liked the house we remembered, but lawrdy it’s a nice house. We’re kind of deciding what will go where and we’ve more-or-less found a place for everything. It’s not ideal (we’re going to have an ethernet line going from one room to the next), but it fits together.

What we really like about it, though, is the multitude of storage space. There are closets that a midget could live in. Part of it is frustrating because if they’d just designed it a little bit differently the room would be a third larger, but it makes for a bunch of pleasant surprises. Then, you open up what you think of going to be a small pantry and see a compartment almost the size of an elevator shaft.

Clancy gets her library. I get a spacious computer room and an intense TV viewing area in the basement. The living room itself is not quite as big as I would like and the layouts of some of the rooms are a bit odd. Those are really our only complaints, though.

Oh, and the mirrors. The house has these intentionally distorted mirrors built into the wall and the mirrors in the bathroom were not meant to be looking at someone as tall as myself.

As my mother-in-law is apt to say, things have a way of working out. The upshot to all of this is that we were going to face a tough decision a year from now as to whether or not to buy this house (and stay in Callie) or lose it. Now we won’t have to worry about that. We’re left, though, with larger questions about what we’re going to do after this house.

If I get pets, that could limit our renting options in a town without many to begin with. The negotiations over pets was the hardest part about getting this place and almost had us walking away from it (to a house that, in retrospect, may have been a better fit knowing what we know now). They’d put in new carpeting and we worried to death about what a puppy or two would do to it. I’m king of agitated to discover upon arrival that the carpeting is not constant, which means that for them to have to replace all of the carpeting, the puppy would have to pee in just about every room and that’s simply not going to happen because they’re not even going to have access to large swaths of the house. Until they’re trained, they’re mostly going to be in the basement.

Anyway, after all this, pets may not make sense as they have failed to make sense up until now. But I’ve literally been waiting years to get one. I’ve reached the point where being “sensible” is making me unhappy.

So we could yet be left where we buy a house in an area that we’re not sure we’re going to stay. The housing market out here is really pretty good if you’re buying. Sensibly, we’ve up to this point not to buy one. Sometimes sensibility, though, is less about keeping options and more about failing to make a firm decision that requires taking any sort of chance.

I am writing this post from a mostly empty room in a mostly empty house. We still have a lot of cleaning that we need to do, but the truck is finally packed. Clancy and I have collectively decided that this is the last time that we pack ourselves. I think I decided that last time, though the 18 months in between then and now I kinda sorta forgot why it was so important. When we moved out of Estacado, a bit part of the problem was a simple lack of preparation on our part. This time, both to avoid the problems of last time and because we had so much time, we were much more organized.

So by the time the truck rolled around, we were going to be good to go, right? Well, no. It turned into this weird sort of thing where every time we finished half of what need to be done, there was still half to go. We did half of what was needed and there was still half to go. Then we did half of what was left, which should have left only a quarter to go… but there was still half to go. Then we did the next half and instead of their being an eighth or a quarter left… there was still a half to go. For everything we accomplished, something new entered the calculation. Well, it wasn’t actually that because we had a list. Rather, it was that the stuff that we (or at least I) calculated as taking up a bulk of the time went by pretty quickly but that which we thought would be more quick ended up taking a lot longer. Invariably, it was the early stuff that fell into the first category and the late stuff in the second. Getting everything (or most of everything) on to the truck took no time flat. Getting it organized, on the other hand, took forever and a week. Twice as long as it has ever taken in the past, due to a number of factors including a moving truck not nearly as conducive to stacking stuff as the last moving truck and the fatigue that came with having already done so much. Adding 20% to the stuff we had to move ended up adding far more than 20% to the loading time.

The hope was that since we were giving ourselves more time that we could be more relaxed about it. The result was not only that we were not more relaxed, but we were stressed for that much longer.

It’s a funny thing about leaving a place. I was not thrilled about leaving Estacado because I really liked it there and though I was looking forward to Cascadia I could have spent the rest of my life in Santomas or Almeida, Estacado. So I wasn’t in a hurry. Until I was so tired of the moving process that I just wanted to be gone, gone, gone. The same applies doubly this time around. There are so many things that I love about the Zaulem Sound area and that I’m going to miss in Callie and Arapaho. I believe that I will find new treasures and delights in Arapaho, but what’s going to be missing is a little more apparent and I know that it may take me a while to find it. But I am so tired of packing and moving and this whole damn process that I cannot wait to see the “Welcome to Cascadia” sign in the rearview mirror and when I see the “Welcome to Arapaho” sign I will indeed feel welcome.

We put off the leave date for Saturday so that we can do a little recuperating while cleaning. We also want to visit an area attraction that we never got to go to while we were living here. The drive should take two days or so. Since it falls on a weekend, it shouldn’t affect Hit Coffee much except that I will be unplugging the Internet at some point later today and it will take a little bit of time to get it up and running in Callie. I have been relying on Sheila and Web to keep HC flowing and will continue to do so for at least another week.

One of the things that Clancy and I decided we wanted to do while we were here is pick up some furniture for the move. It’s kind of risky and not necessarily cheap because we’re having to get extra moving truck space, but there is a wealth of stuff available here on Craigslist where there is no counterpart in Arapaho. The two big things we wanted were a recliner and a sofa. We’ve been hobbling along on a single recliner throughout our time in Cascadia when we left my old one behind in Estacado (may it rest in peace) as it fell apart.

This was particularly inconvenient because our other piece of living room furniture, the futon, did not survive the trip. I mean, it didn’t break into a million pieces, but the wood panel on the bottom broke and so the futon sagged somethin’ fierce and was not easy to get in and out of with any real ease. Well, I guess gravity assisted with the “in”, but since you land on the injured would, you have to live with the guilt that each time you sit down, you’re making it more difficult to get back up. It’s a tough burden, man.

A couple months ago, a neighbor was getting rid of his loveseat and was asking a woman who lived across the alley if she wanted it. I volunteered to take it on the spot. I shifted the living room around a bit and we had the futon which had been transferred to stuff receptical duty and a coach one step away from the graveyard. Clancy says that there is a minor smell on Not-Futon, though I can’t smell it. There are a couple of minor tears. The idea was that we would take the couch cover from The Futon and put it on Not-Futon. Still, though, it was not something we were going to want to display prominently in our future living room. Still loads better than The Futon.

So we set out on Craigslist for some new furniture and ran across a La-Z-Boy recliner. Now, LZBs are not the most comfortable of chairs, but they’re still not bad. Clancy’s recliner is a La-Z-Boy and we like it fair enough. The big thing, though, for packing purposes is that the top comes off and that makes transfer easy. And what do you know? We’re transferring stuff in a few days. Someday I’m going to want the recliner of my dreams, but it’ll do for a while yet.

Searching for a sofa was a little bit harder. The hangup was that we found the perfect sofa/love-seat early on and couldn’t get our minds off of it. Nothing else came close. It was more than we wanted to spend and it came with a love seat, but the biggest issue is that we would have to pick it up from Western Shores, a rich-person community a couple of hours from here. Setting aside my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving for five hours a couple days before driving for a dozen, that made the vehicle rental situation much more difficult.

UHaul has those nice signs on their trucks that say $19.99 or somesuch, but in small print is “plus mileage.” In fact, with a 50-mile minimum and required insurance (unless you have a $10k credit line), there’s no way that you can get out of there paying less than $60. However, we were looking at far above and beyond the minimum mileage. And at 60c a mile, it was going to get really expensive, really quick. Budget was the same way except that they charged more for mileage. So we went with Enterprise.

Enterprise, it turns out, has a bizarre definition of the word “reservation” and “confirmation.” Whereas I interpret these words to mean “You are confirmed! You have a reservation for a truck with us!” what they mean is “Oh, we may or may not actually have the truck we confirmed with you. And if we don’t, well, that’s just tough luck” because they feel absolutely no obligation to live up to the reservation. They refused to upgrade us for the same price, which is what businesses typically do. They called around, but when they found one, it was too much trouble to have it transferred to their location. And it was more expensive than our reservation and they would not compensate the difference. So for the honor of using Enterprise (which was, prior to this week, my rental agency of choice) we would have to drive half an hour to pick it up and we would be paying $10 more a day than what we had reserved.

Sadly, this was still better than our alternatives. Enterprise charges a lot more by the day, but gives you unlimited in-state miles. Since we were going to be putting some serious miles on it, they could have charged us a lot more and still been cheaper than UHaul or Budget. That being said, getting an Enterprise through the website is a really bad idea. Apparently, they make reservations without regard to availability. This was a real sore point in the Paulsboro Enterprise, even though in this case they had what we wanted. It would have been a sore point at their Soundview Location, if they’d cared. I’ve noticed this before with Enterprise in that I will reserve one model and end up with another in the same class. As long as they have something, I don’t care about the particulars. This was different.

What Enterprise does not have is CD players in their vehicles. Clancy warned me about this, but it was still odd to see a car - any car - without CD players. I mean, how much could it possibly cost to have one installed and though most people won’t care, for some people it means spending hours in the car in between municipalities with no entertainment. Some people like me.

Last move, I kind of bugged my mother-in-law with my need to burn a bunch of audiobooks for the trip at the last minute. It was actually one of those things that was supposed to take only a few minutes but because of technical difficulties distracted me for a couple hours. This time she wasn’t around while I was scrambling to set up my audio entertainment. I took one of my old Pocket PCs and transferred the audio books to it and I’ll listen on bluetooth on the drive. I managed to mostly do this while resting in between taking boxes out, but man it would have been easier with a CD player.

So yesterday I picked up the recliner, which turned out to be closer than the one that we originally decided on. We had initially decided on one that was nearly the exact same as the one we had, but it was out in Enterprise City (no relation to the rental agency). Then one opened up at the next town over and that was more appealing. It was a different color, but I actually decided that I liked that because it wouldn’t look weird if they were two shades of faded.

Later today I’m driving out to Western Shores to pick up the couch and love seat. I’ll be wishing and hoping and praying that it will all fit into the cargo van. I think it will. I packed up most of my clothes yesterday, so I’m sort of slumming it today. The impression I get from these people and where they live and their wonderful couch that they’re getting rid of that these people have money and lots of it. I’m oddly self-conscious about it. Like I’m not worthy of the couch that they are bestowing upon me. Okay, not really. But sort of. No, not really. A little. I never claimed to be entirely rational.

I’ve mentioned before that we’re a bit unsure about what to do about our moving truck outside. When we moved in, the truck got a warning about “commercial trucks in a residential zone” or something to that effect. Man, I wish I’d kept that warning. Our landlord thinks that our neighbor dropped the dime on us. They apparently have a history. We were warned pretty thoroughly not to park in front of her house. Legally, there’s nothing you can do to prevent people from parking in front of your house, but as a courtesy we avoided it. Unfortunately, she has not been extending us the same courtesy with one of her cars perpetually parked in front of our house. Ordinarily, this isn’t a big deal because we park around back. But it does kind of rankle a bit. And it’ll inconvenience both us and our neighbor if we can’t park in front of our own place.

We’ve been debating how much trouble to go through to find out what kind of liability we face. I’ve asked around and as far as anybody knows, there shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, people have got to be able to move in, right? And it’s possible that the warning before was a mistake. It was a “commercial” vehicle in the strict sense, but not in the sense that you think of commercial vehicles. Further, it didn’t have any exterior markings to let an industrious officer know that it was a moving vehicle. It looks to all the world like a regular truck. So maybe it was a misunderstanding that we could have cleared up if we’d talked to the officer in question (we had the truck moved the day after the citation - we were done packing. We’ve seen a lot of UHauls around.

Anyway, so nobody was of any help in finding out who we would even need to contact because nobody had ever had this particular problem. So I was leaning towards letting it slide and hoping for the best. The main concern is that since it’ll be parked here over the weekend, we won’t be able to “hurry up” and get it out of here. It’s here from Friday to Monday come what may. As I was eating dinner tonight, I scanned over the document from the company we’ll be using and it said to contact local traffic enforcement if we needed a permit. That made perfect sense. It was our first lead.

So tomorrow I am headed down to the local PD office and I’m going to come out and ask them. It’s a bit risky because if they say something like “Oh, we don’t expect people to have to park a truck overnight to be able to move. There is no permit. You’ll just have to find another way to move” well, I will no longer be able to say “gosh, officer, I didn’t know” and they’ll probably know exactly where to look for any illegally parked trucks. Ideally, they’ll say that there is an exemption for moving trucks and I won’t have to get any sort of permit and I can explain to any officer that wants to ticket the vehicle what is going on. Next best is if they can sell me a permit off right there. Middle-case is that I’ll end up having to go down to the county courthouse or DMV or something.

As long as I get the permit, I really don’t care. I was previously going to set out fliers to our neighbors letting them know the truck was going to be coming and to apologize for the inconvenience. Sometimes, if you are just open and straight with people, they’ll be more forgiving. Especially when they know the truck is going to be gone soon. But I’d rather not have to rely on the kindness of neighbors. If need be, I’d like to be able to politely tell our complaining neighbor who parks in front of our house where she can shove it.

Update: No permit required, apparently. I spoke to a volunteer at the substation as well as an officer there. He said that as long as it’s a moving truck, there shouldn’t be a problem. He is with me that the problem before was that it was not clearly marked. There is some concern of people parking trailers and containers on the street and people living out of them (!!) and that was probably why it got some attention before. If I have any problem, he says that I should just contact the substation and explain the situation.

Part of me wishes that I could have gotten a permit. That would have made me bulletproof. Though the people I talked to didn’t know of any ordinance, an industrious neighbor may know something they don’t. So while I’m feeling pretty good about it now (and can tell anyone upset that I have contacted the police), a part of me takes back my previous suggestion that this would be ideal. Now, if nobody complains, then it will turn out to have been ideal all along. I’m probably just being paranoid here because of my tendency to explore worst-case scenarios, which in this case could be pretty bad. But it seems rather unlikely. So we’ll see. At least on the Callie end of things, they’ll be able to park it on the driveway.

I was talking to my father-in-law the other day about Clancy’s youngest sister, Zoey. Zoey is presently abroad doing good deeds in a third-world part of the country. When she gets back, she’s probably going to graduate school. At no point does she plan on marrying or having children. Which is a shame, not only because she has the genes for it, but moreso than a lot of people she has an outstanding temperament for it.

When Clancy and her sisters were young, the Himmelreich parents decided that they would make sure that the education and preparation the girls got would be enough so that they would take care of themselves. Unlike with her cousins, they would not take the path of endlessly higher education and the debt that comes with it, nor would they need to marry a man to support him.

The drawback to this approach is, of course, that it makes one far less likely to become grandparents. Not that none of them couldn’t manage to have kids if that’s what they wanted, but the emphasis on self-sufficiency early on can make it harder later on in life to then turn around and surrender a portion of your fate to someone else.

In a sense, when you become a mother, that’s partly what you’re doing in the middle-to-upper classes. Some women stay at home and some continue to work, but even those that continue to work have to take patches of time off and usually end up putting their career second. When there are kids involved, it’s hard for their to be two careers. Even in two-income households, it’s usually one career and one job. Clancy and I don’t even have kids and I have had to make the sorts of sacrifices generally reserved for mothers. It’s fortunate for all involved that I am not remarkably career-oriented as the more career-oriented someone is (and the Himmelreich girls were certainly taught to be career-oriented), the less likely they’re going to make those sacrifices.

For all of the complaints about child support and alimony, they can serve the useful purpose of encouraging the sort of trust that people need to make in order to have and raise kids. It becomes much, much harder to convince the Himmelreich girls of the world to stay at home or make career sacrifices when it becomes “each person for him/herself” in the event of a divorce.

The scale can certainly tilt too far in the other direction, as some suggest it already has, but it’s important to recognize that there are competing values here. Helping the partner that sacrificed during the marriage in the event of a divorce encourages sacrifice. The biggest problem with alimony is that it is not very compatible with no-fault divorce. The guarantee of child support is not only important in support for the child, but also in this vein.

As for raising kids (and girls in particular), I’m not sure there is a solution to this dilemma. We will probably raise any daughters we have with similar aims than Clancy and her sisters were. They will be able to take care of themselves. It is my hope that our marriage and family life will be a better inspiration for the joys of family life than is the Himmelreich marriage and the problems that occurred earlier in it.