Between Here and Gone
11:37 Friday, 27 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 39.36°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 52% Wind: 7.94mphWords: 597
Great song by Mary Chapin Carpenter, but also kind of a description of this winter landscape vis-à-vis snow.
It's payday, my favorite day of the month. Normally it's the first of the month, but when that falls on a weekend, it gets deposited on the preceding Friday. The bad news is that it extends the time before the next payday, especially with March having 31 days. Oh, well.
I'm doing my best to save money because the new house is going to require a lot of it. I may end up taking a small mortgage, but that won't be until we have a much better handle on the cost, which is largely unknown at the moment, except for some very rough estimates based on a "typical" per-square-foot estimate. So far, we only have two fairly firm numbers, the price of the plans and engineering, and the cost of a driveway extension and new turnaround area.
So it's probably time to start making a spreadsheet.
I'm also putting money aside for Mom, anticipating her resources becoming exhausted this summer sometime.
Looks like I picked a good time to boycott Amazon!
We have our first meeting with the design firm this Monday, and our contractor will be present with us. I'm pretty excited, but also somewhat anxious. This will be the first house where I've had any significant input into its design, even though I think Mitzi's input will likely be greater than my own. I don't want to do something that we'll regret later.
When we remodeled my condo, I had the majority input on the renovations, but few of them were genuinely structural. The biggest physical change was creating a large walk-in shower in place of a tub/shower arrangement. It required moving the toilet a few inches over to make room for a partial wall near the shower head/drain. My goal was to have no glass in the shower, so it was mostly open. We used tile, and it was beautiful when it was done, but kind of a pain in the ass to clean.
The Nocatee house was already specified by the developer as it was build as a "spec house." "Spec" meaning "speculation" that it would be a desirable design for a lot that hadn't sold yet. And as it turned out, it was exactly the model we were looking for. We only had input on finishes and some upgrades like taller door openings, six-inch baseboards and rounded drywall corners. Most of that was Mitzi's area of interest.
This house will be designed by us from the ground up, with the idea that it will be affordable, attractive, and built to age into. So we know we want all of the "activities of daily living" facilities on the main floor. It's going to be built over a walk-out basement, where the mechanical room will be located. So there will be a mobility requirement from the standpoint of maintenance of utility services. Of those, I think the breaker panel is one I'd prefer to have on the main floor, but I'm also planning to be able to use the space in the basement, so it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
Anyway, I'm spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos about home construction and design and so on, which is a welcome distraction from wanton vandalism of my country's government and democracy.
Anyway, it's a beautiful sunny day, and I have work to do to prepare for this meeting. So this is it for today, I think.
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11:31 Friday, 27 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 38.98°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 52% Wind: 7mph
Words: 10
Pretty sure Pope Leo never watched Battlestar Galactica.
Just sayin'.
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