Excitement?

A question I've been hearing a lot lately is "Are you excited about your new house?"

The answer, every time -- No. I'm not excited. Not even a little, and I'm not sure why.

It's a very nice house. It's in a gorgeous neighborhood. Our neighbors are friendly and generous with us. We're an easy walk or near-instant drive to everything we enjoy about Norfolk. There's very little it requires in the way of redecorating or repairs -- I painted a couple rooms and we're hanging curtain rods.

There's still plenty of boxes to empty and things to be organized and stored and hung on the walls, but when I'm not busy procrastinating, isn't all that part of the fun of a new place?

Yet, the only thing I've been even mildly excited about this week was our new refrigerator.

I definitely don't regret buying in the midst of the current financial climate. Before the real estate slowdown, this house would've easily sold for far more than we paid, so in that sense we got a "great deal." We have a solid, unspectacular loan with lots of money down from a local bank and my wife has an extremely secure, well-paid job in (sadly) a growth market. We also received some reminders during this move about the uncertainties and inconveniences of renting that left me happy we didn't go that route here.

Despite all our friends here, we did leave some friends and a comfortable routine behind in New England; I could just be missing our past lives, looking for something to replace them.

One possibility that has been sneaking into my head recently -- Ruth is weeks, or even just days, from getting on an airplane and heading to wherever her new ship will be meeting her. As we've learned from experience, approaching separations such as deployments cause all kinds of strange, almost random behavior when we know they're inevitable. This could be predeployment dread that I'm just directing at our new house.

Or, maybe I've finally truly internalized the nomadic lifestyle of the military family and it's left me hopelessly cynical about what should be a happy time. I know that if Ruth's plans come together then this house, however beautiful, is going to pass out of our lives in 4-5 years or less.

So...yeah. This little vent has cleared up nothing in my mind. It is a very nice house. Theo, Guinness and Aslan have settled in like they've lived here forever. I guess that's enough for me.