Category: Essays

Today started off pretty slow. While my wife was out for a workout this morning, I stayed home with the kids, and we watched The Mitchells vs. The Machines. Not bad! My son liked it a lot, but my daughter was a little scared by the robots at times. For lunch, we finished off some leftover tacos from last night’s dinner.

After lunch, I tackled decluttering our bedroom/office. One of my goals for 2025 was to get our house in order, and this was as good of a place as any to start. Both of us work part time from home and our desk tends to accumulate everything—papers, books, random notes and other stuff. It was covered in dust and completely overrun with cables and clutter.

I started by cleaning out my nightstand and organizing our books. I got rid of a bunch of unneeded work papers and other junk, like power cables and random guitar paraphernalia from my recent projects.

Unfortunately, while I was finishing up my cleaning I took a pretty big spill down the stairs. It really scared the hell out of me. I was running down the stairs with some trash and a bunch of other stuff in my hands when I slipped on the third or fourth stair from the bottom and landed right on my back between my shoulder blades. For a few minutes I was really worried I might’ve broken a rib or something, but I feel mostly better with just some slight pain. I’m hoping it’s gone over the next few days, but I really need to be more careful. 

Anyway, I’m hoping to tackle some other problem areas soon, like the fully stocked and disastrous craft cabinet, our unorganized filing cabinet, and the sometimes terrifying mail area. My goal is to have everything sorted and organized by the end of January. I’ve schedule some days in February to clean up the garage, too, which has slowly become light chaos in the aftermath of the holidays.

Lately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed, like I never take the lead on plans. I’ve noticed that the weekends just come and go, and I often haven’t thought about what I’d like to do with them. At the same time, I felt myself getting snippy and frustrated when I forgot about days being booked up with things I’d forgotten about or missed. I think my ADHD plays a role in this, as my executive functioning is not great and tends to take an even deeper nosedive in the winter. The short days make it hard to stay motivated, especially after 5 PM, and the post-holiday clutter in the house only adds to the mental load. So I decided to try and get a handle on it. 

My wife took the kids to the park this afternoon to hang out with her friend and their kids. While they were out, I took the opportunity to grab some groceries and stopped by Powell’s to pick up a new yearly planner. I spent a little time at a coffee shop looking over the year ahead and thinking about plans for vacations, time off, and trips—both for myself and with the family. After laying it all out, I’m feeling much more settled and positive about the year ahead now that I’ve got a rough idea about how the year might look.

In addition to life just being life, and busy as hell at that, my son now being in kindergarten has thrown all sorts of wrenches into our normal routine and we’re still adjusting. In particular, the kid has so many days off school now and we have to make arrangements for all of that. While not unexpected, it just adds a whole new layer of complexity to planning, PTO, vacations, everything. 

I’ve also been feeling off physically and wondering if something more than seasonal depression is at play. I’m planning to schedule an appointment with my doctor and get some lab work done, just to check if my medications or something with my metabolism might be contributing. Depending on the results, I may need to reassess my treatment plan.

For now, I’m trying to stay focused on what I can control. Cleaning up the house and creating a better environment is a good start. I know things will improve as the days get longer, and having a plan for the months ahead will help. Still, I’ve been thinking about how much I’d benefit from a weekend away on my own—a chance to recharge and clear my head.

One step at a time. Today was productive, and that’s a win.

1. Declutter my home. I’ve never been very good at this, but it’s proven to be so much more difficult with two young kids. Still, I know I can do a better job and keep a cleaner house in the process. To start, I might do a packing party.
2. Consistency in planning ahead for weekends away and other trips. ADHD makes this hard, but I’m always happiest when I have a well-conceived plan to execute. So many times I feel like I’m being led around by plans that are made for me, or feeling bummed out that a weekend was wasted due to poor planning. While rest is important, my goal this week is to look ahead six months and start marking down weekends for both family and personal getaways and then prepare a list of possibilities to discuss with my wife.
3. I’ve started to be more intentional about making friends instead of complaining that meeting people is hard. A couple months back, I began going to a meetup group for writers. I put my fears and imposter syndrome aside and said “fuck it”. I’ve really been enjoying it, and I plan to do more of this sort of thing in the year ahead.
4. Continue to work on my mental health. I don’t want to get into too much of this here, but I’ve been taking my mental health very seriously and making positive changes to support my growth, including reducing anxiety, improving my focus, setting healthy boundaries with people, thinking positive thoughts about myself, working on my emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity. In addition to continuing therapy, I plan to look into microdosing psychedelics and ketamine therapy, under supervision.
5. Consuming music more intentionally. For too long, I’ve let the algorithm guide my consumption, and that’s what it feels like as opposed to enjoyment. On Wednesday nights (or midweek), I’m going to make it a habit to find a new artist or album to listen to while folding laundry. This will hopefully help me do better at folding and putting away my clean laundry, which again, my ADHD makes seem like an almost insurmountable task at times.
6. Improve my photography. I’ve been inspired by others who post a photo every day, and I would like to try that this year. I got some new camera gear this year and I’ve learned a lot. I’d like to bring this to the next level.
7. Read more books. After grad school, I got out of the habit of reading consistently. It felt like a chore. This year I almost made my goal of 12 books, and even though I didn’t succeed in meeting the goal, I successfully started building it as a habit. My goal this year is 21 books, or roughly one every two weeks, with a little wiggle room for grace.
8. Put my phone down more when I default to doom scrolling because of exhaustion. No explanation needed.
9. Part two of the previous goal is to be more present with my kids. Again, no explanation needed.
10. Make more time for myself in healthier ways than retreating. Whether through physical activity, weekends away, community college classes, or just an hour at a coffee shop to write or read, my goal is to improve the ways in which I choose to relax, recreate, and/or create.

After several months of asking questions, trying to understand the coordination of benefits between my dental plan and my wife’s in preparation for some orthodontia, here’s the email I finally received from Delta Dental. 🦷

***

I have an employee under **Redacted** who wrote in asking how COB works when a married couple both have family coverage through separate employers under Delta and the family is about to initiate an Orthodontal claim. The spouse is an employee of **Redacted** hospital ($2K ortho limit is the plan they are considering). The husband read his policy documents and then called into Delta to confirm his understanding. He feels he has become more confused. Can you confirm:
 
· The primary (which plan will process the claim first when there is dual coverage) is determined by the birthday rule: the parent whose birthday falls first in the calendar year has the primary plan (note it’s not who is oldest but who celebrates first in any given calendar year). _This is correct._

· Orthodontia has its own limit and under your policy that limit is $1500 and separate from the overall deductible. _Correct, though I think you meant “and separate from the overall annual maximum”._

The $1500 is lifetime per insured. _True_ and they will check to see if there have been any orthodontia treatments under previous plans, Delta or otherwise. 

_We would only consider if the lifetime maximum has been used under the **Redacted** plan._ 

So dual coverage for Dental would only be beneficial for Orthodontia if the 2nd policy had higher limits. 

_The lifetime maximum is per plan. For example, if they use their lifetime maximum through **Redacted**, and move to another Delta Dental employer plan with ortho coverage, they will have a new lifetime maximum through that new plan._

· I’m not sure what Delta meant when they said “that they would not double cover” unless they were trying to make the point that a $1500 claim under policy one can’t be filed as a $1500 claim under policy two ($3000 of payment).  

_Some employer plans do not allow coordination of benefits. Without knowing any information on the other plan, I am unable to review this._ (note: they are the same provider and know the other plan number provided on day 1).

· If you are currently enrolled under both plans, perhaps the best plan of action would be to have the provider submit a letter of predetermination referencing coverage under both plans. 

_Correct, we always recommend a pre-determination._ (WTF so they think I’m doing now?)

· If you have dual coverage and file a claim you want the primary plan to have the poorer coverage. Whatever that plan doesn’t pay can be processed against the second richer coverage.  

_The **Redacted** plan has standard coordination of benefits rules, so if it is the primary coverage, it will pay according to the schedule of benefits. If the **Redacted** plan falls as the secondary insurance, it will pay up to the higher allowable amount (but will not exceed). Again, I don’t know the details of the spouse’s plan, so I can’t really provide any additional information._

_Here are two very high-level ortho examples. These are very general, as I do not know all the details of the other plan._

_With **Redacted** as primary, and the other plan as secondary (if both plans have standard COB)_

· _$6000 orthodontia claim_

· _$1500 à **Redacted** (as primary) will pay 50% up to $1500_

· _$4500 à remaining charges will be sent to secondary insurance_

· _Secondary insurance could pay, but will not exceed what the primary allowable is, in this case $1500. Even though they may have a $2000 lifetime maximum, secondary would pay up to $1500 (based on the primary allowable)._

_With Spouse’s plan as primary, and **Redacted** plan as secondary (if both plans have standard COB)_

· _$6000 orthodontia claim_

· _$2000 à likely 50% up to $2000_

· _$4000 à remaining charges will be sent to secondary insurance_

· _Secondary insurance could pay, but will not exceed what the primary allowable is, in this case $2000. But, the **Redacted** plan pays 50% up to $1500, so in this case, $1500 could be paid._
 
Also in the event the primary plan’s non-ortho limit is exhausted, does the secondary plan become primary for the remainder of the plan year with the full limits of that plan minus whatever it has paid out already as secondary?

_In the event that the annual maximum on the member’s primary plan is exhausted, then the member’s secondary will continue as secondary because we will still need the $0 payment EOB from Primary to process as secondary. But the secondary COB rules will still apply._

Please let us know if you have any additional questions!

All the best,

Home sick today and feeling a bit wistful. I get this way a lot when I’m lying around alone with too much time on my hands. I went down a 90s nostalgia rabbit hole and found a couple gems.

The first is from a podcast [episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-dont-wanna-grow-up/id1536309467?i=1000603869337) titled “What did the 90s smell like?” by We Don’t Wanna Grow Up.

The other is a YouTube (https://youtu.be/CGlNnJJLwDM?si=7L1Jge9ujYHbTfMb) of a guy flipping through a Seventeen School Zone Special magazine from 1996 that I remember purchasing on a grocery store run with my mom when I was 15. I used to love seeing how kids across the country dressed in the wake of the grunge era.

Isn’t the internet amazing?

The strangeness of putting yourself out there. The mere act of expressing that you indeed have social needs, that you crave the connection of others, is one that creates repulsion, in myself (and seemingly with others). The effort required almost makes the desired outcome somehow less desirable. 

Even in social situations of late, there is something different in the way we all speak to one another, something missing from the way things used to be. We are all tired, we are all distracted. Going through the motions. Feeding each other the requisite smalltalk. Single-serving “friends”.

Someone converted a dating app into one for making friendships. All you do is swipe right, how hard could it be? Except even if a connection is made, there isn’t enough time or energy to put in any effort in responding. Astonishing? Perhaps. Surprising? No. 

It’s easy to start to question what you have to offer the world, other people. That rabbit hole of self-analysis can engulf you too, if you’re not careful. To dilute all human interaction as transactional, conditional. To begin to see others as if through a small clerk’s window where someone on the other side is always expecting you to dance, or to make them laugh, or to provide them with some other entertainment or pleasure or connection. 

I start to question if I really even want what I think I want. The current assignment is to find shared activities and friendships will bloom naturally. I’m tired and retreat inward. Find comfort in others who might as well be fictional people on a screen. 

“Maybe I should sign up for a class,” I tell myself. Start writing more and care less about what others think. Maybe that’s what losers tell themselves, I think. 

Going through my memory of the people whose social lives you envied, the people who seemed to be a spiderweb of connection between everyone and everything. They all had something in common. They were the people who showed up to everything. Had dinner parties. Volunteered on boards and commissions. Went to happy hours. Played adult group sports. I remember one in particular falling asleep at the table while we ate dinner at her house. But everybody loved them. I still think fondly. 

This is certainly all my fault, the loneliness. Who else made the decisions that got me to where I am?  I’m not carving out enough “me time”. I retreat inward. Find comfort in others who might as well be fictional people on a screen. 

Wait, no. It’s our environment. The American built environment is killing us. The suburbs, it’s all their fault. It’s just middle age, this is normal. It’s the children, they take up too much of our time. It’s other men. All they want to do is talk about sports and play golf. Right? Female friends, wouldn’t that be great? Oh wait. We can’t form new, close relationships with women at this stage of life. They’ll think you’re a creep. Trying to pull something on them and sneak around behind your wife. What will be people think? 

Why do you need anything more than you already have? Isn’t that a sign of insecurity, of weakness? 

I retreat inward. 

We shipped our kids off to my mother-in-law’s for the night and drove out past the gorge to Dalles Mountain Ranch in Columbia Hills Historical State Park. The wildflowers were in bloom and the cloud cover kept us cool. It was very peaceful, and it felt good to burn some calories in preparation for a well-earned beer.

My car is 13 years old and recently turned over 150,000 miles. I got it used in 2013 with 55k miles on it, so I’ve done fewer than 10k miles per year, including several cross-country trips. It’s been a great car with very few issues, but it’s showing its age and I’m debating if I should put the $4k in repairs it needs into it or get something else. I’ve loved not having a car payment the last 5 years, but I also don’t want to keep sinking money into it. Keeping it would cost $6k over two years, including gas. An electric would cost $10k after incentives over the same period.


For the last five years or so, I’ve used the space next to my driveway for raised beds. I’ve got a 3,100 gallon rain cistern in my backyard and I hand dug a trench to the front yard for my drip irrigation system.


It’s worked pretty well, but there are pros and cons. For starters, the beds are pretty close to the driveway, and my wife already ripped my bumper off once and tried to pass it off as if nothing ever happened (I caught it on camera). That was just a one-off incident, thankfully.

Another negative is that I’ve had kids cutting through my side yard on the way to the light rail or on their way home from school. They’ve trampled my pumpkins and zucchini squash a handful of times, and it’s pretty annoying to have put in so much work to grow a few healthy plants from seed only to have them trampled under foot by a careless teenagers.


I’ve also had little old ladies stop by and help themselves to some tomatoes, which isn’t a huge concern, but it does feel a little weird to know my neighbors regularly steal from my garden. I’d gladly give them the food if they’d just ask. In fact, I’ve put extra food out with a “take me” sign before.

But really, I’d like to use that space along my driveway for something else someday. I’ve had this crazy idea for a while now to make our house look a bit like an old craftsman by converting the garage into living space and a front porch.


If we do decide to go through with the renovation, I’d like to shift our driveway to the right to make room for a walkway to the entrance. Since our backyard is so shaded, that leaves my front lawn as a new location for our garden beds. This poses a couple of issues though.

First, I’d have to get the beds moved pretty soon; something I’m not really looking forward to doing in the dead of rainy season. Another issue is the situation with the rain cistern and having to figure out a new solution since the underground pipes can’t really traverse the underside of the driveway and would need to go around the other side — loads of work that could be done later, but a job I don’t want to do. Finally, there’s the issue of my lawn and the appropriate way to retire it without making my yard a complete mess and nuisance.


I’m not sure I have the time, energy, budget, or motivation to tackle all of this. It’s a hobby, and one I quite enjoy, but the food is merely supplemental and the cost-benefit ratio can get out of hand fairly quickly if one’s not careful. Yet I don’t want to give it up.

Maybe some interim solutions will present themselves in my brainstorming, but right now, I’m coming up short as to how best to approach the issue.

We had some wind last night and it knocked out our electricity at around 1 a.m. My son was already sleeping in our bed, but my daughter woke up screaming bloody murder and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I had to bring her into our bed as well.

The worst part about power outages is that I can’t sleep without my CPAP machine anymore. I have a battery for it to get me by, but I must not have charged it after camping last summer. I got another hour out of it before I was awakened again not being able to breathe.

I had to get creative because I needed sleep. I had an early morning meeting today and needed to get the kids to daycare/preschool earlier than normal since my wife is still in California and couldn’t help.

I started my car, plugged in an inverter into the cigarette lighter, and ran two extension cords connected together from my car and upstairs to my CPAP machine. I got a few more hours of sleep before I had to start getting ready for the day.

I got enough sleep to get by, but I’m charging my big back-up battery in case it happens again.

This morning, I accidentally bumped my HomePod while cleaning off the desk and some music started. Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes came on, from his 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. It’s making me nostalgic. That is about the time I stopped listening to Bright Eyes and stopped buying CDs altogether.

I was 24 that year. It was before smart phones became popular, and 2005 was about a year after I got my first iPod. I still actively managed my library for a few more years, but that slowly started to change as streaming became more popular.

My music listening habits are so much more random since streaming became a thing. I struggle to even answer when people ask “who’s your favorite band?” or “what kind of music do you listen to?” I miss the more intentional nature of it all when I’d manage an actual library, even if it wasn’t in the form of physical media.

I have tried to go back at times and explored the underground and alternative music that I didn’t have the privilege of knowing or experiencing in my younger years before the Internet, and in this way, I love the archeological digging and discovering. However, that takes a lot of work and patience because it’s really easy to find a shinier new object of my affection, however fleeting.

I don’t think breadth of content has improved anything about the experience for me. If anything, it’s too easy to push things aside without giving them a chance and I don’t listen to entire albums very often anymore.

I’ve toyed around with having my own library again on a Plex server, but adding new music is not easy, and if we’re being honest, it can get expensive in a way that feels unnecessary. Also, I have so many other things going on in my life that I don’t have a lot of down time to manage it. But these are just excuses. If it were important enough for me, I’d make it happen.

It’s entirely likely that the shift in music medium has caused a psychological shift in me in such a way that I care much less about music now than I once did. If I sit with that feeling for any amount of time, I feel a little guilty about it.

All this to say, music feels very cheap to me these days. It’s everywhere in abundance and therefore it feels much less valuable. As a musician myself, this feels strange to admit, but it’s what I feel in my gut. I don’t have a solution, but I wish it were different.

I want that feeling of freedom again, driving around on the first warm day of the year with the windows down, listing to my favorite album. I want that feeling of finding an album and it becoming the soundtrack that defines a season, a year.

Recently I got into the world of management and I’ve noticed e-mails coming my way in the evenings and on the weekends from director types and such.

I am committed to my job and enjoy the work, but I’m not sorry to say that I’m not getting into a habit of responding to emails on Friday night, midday Saturday, etc.

What I did do yesterday was take my two young ones to a birthday party at Conestoga Recreation Center and ran around a gym for a couple hours while they had the time of their lives. We had a lot of fun and we all got some exercise playing soccer, basketball, etc.

My wife leaves for a trip to California today to visit her grandparents and I will be very busy with the kids by myself until Wednesday night. I’m happy she’s going but also a little bit jealous. We’ll be good, though.

I slept in until about 8 this morning and watched some Italian IPTV after I blogged a bit about our trip planned for later in the year. I’ve been trying to get into the mindset.

Our friend offered to watch our kids for a couple hours, so we took her up on it so that me and my wife could go to the gym. We went for a swim. I tried to talk her into doing laps outside, but we only made it one lap before she was too cold, so we went back inside and soaked in the salty indoor pool and then hot tub.

I made a single serving friend named John who was in his 70s and seemed lonely, so we talked a bit. He spoke of his nearly 30 years at Intel as a project manager of some sort, how he tried to retire many times but it just wasn’t the right time and his job kept offering him more flexibility and money. He’d take summers off with his wife and go sailing around Norway and Sweden, spent a lot of time in Mexico, etc.

He’d recently had heart surgery and was trying to get back into being a little more active, and his doctor told him that exercising in the pool was good, low-impact activity.

It’s hard for me not to envision myself at the end of my life speaking similarly, having similar experiences. Not that I felt sorry for him; he had lived a good life. But with every sentence I imagined myself near the last 10% of my life and looking back and I imagined myself missing the time I am in now.

My kids are still so young but I don’t want the time to move any quicker right now. They are the loves of my life and I don’t even like being away from them. I hope that I am able to provide them a life they can look back on with fondness, to see me as someone they are proud of.

I am in a bit of a winter funk right now, but they bring me joy. We are heading out the door for a birthday party for some of my wife’s friends’ kids, at a recreation center. They’ve rented out the gym. Hopefully chasing around some kids will help shake off the blues. If not, I’ve got a date with the treadmill later.

Before the holidays, I had my first phone conversation with a distant cousin I connected with on one of those genetic testing sites. I don’t make it a habit of reaching out to complete strangers with loose genetic ties, but I had been looking for Italian family on my father’s side in the United States and he had the same surname as my my paternal grandmother before she got married. I didn’t have a relationship with my father, so I didn’t have the benefit of having direct family introductions. So I sent him off a message and we’ve been connected for a few years now.

William lives down in the Berkley area, so it’s nice we’re in the same time zone. He’s in his 60s, has been married for many years, and has kids and grandkids. Our connection is that his grandfather was siblings with my great grandmother Louisa. My great grandmother’s parents moved to Iron, Wisconsin from Italy for a better life and there were a lot of mining jobs there and in Michigan’s upper peninsula in the early 1900s. That’s how one side of my Italian family got here.

Anyway, I spoke to William on the phone and we talked about his trips to Italy that I’d seen him posting about on Facebook. He’d posted some photos about his trips to the Dolomites (3 times per year!) where our Italian family is from. We exchanged a few messages and he decided to just call me up on Facebook Messenger instead of typing it all out. It was nice to have a real conversation with someone I’ve never met in real life but for whom I’ve grown to appreciate from afar.

He knew that me and my wife were planning a trip to Italy in late spring, so he wanted to give me tips. I told him of our tentative plans and he guided us to some better decisions, even connecting us with a personal friend and mutual family in Cadore. Two sides of my family are from Vigo di Cadore, and he gave me the details of a great Air BnB the next town over.

I took a sneak peak of the town on Google Street View and the walls of mountains surrounding that area are both majestic and intimidating. The town is Lorenzago di Cadore and I think we’re going to book the apartment this week.

The way Italian citizenship works through the Jure Sanguinis (citizenship by descent) is that if you weren’t born there you have to register in the comune (town) of your last Italian ancestor, so I’m registered up in Vigo di Cadore, right next door. From family records, I have the address of the place where my great grandparents lived and the cemetery where they’re buried. Although they emigrated to the U.S., they ultimately didn’t end up liking it here and moved back!

I’m excited to finally get to visit the area. We are lucky to have my parents watching the kids for us while we’re away for 10 days, which will be strange for sure, but this will be our first vacation alone of any length in 5 years since having our son. We love to hike and are really looking forward to some mid-elevation hikes in the Dolomites for a few days before we head south. I hear the people are nice and welcoming, and the family I still have there sound excited to meet distant family who were descended from the Italian diaspora of the early 20th Century.

Things are feeling more real and I’m looking forward to my first international adventure since 2007. Hopefully many more to come.

I had my last cigarette 7 years ago yesterday. Since that time, I’ve saved something like $25,000 in direct costs and have hopefully added years to my life. I don’t write about this anniversary for praise or pats on the back, but instead to honor myself and explore my own feelings on the subject, which are complex.

(more…)

I’m just not feeling the holiday spirit this year. Both my kids are young and I am trying to show up for them. I even saved up quite a bit of cash to pay for toys and gifts and take some of that stress off us, but I just can’t get in the mood.

I think more than anything, I’m feeling tired of Oregon and feeling the pull to move back to Michigan. We’ve outgrown our house and feel trapped due to prices and interest rates. Looking at real estate back in the Midwest looks like a bargain. The pay isn’t even that different in my field, and we’d have a huge down payment if we sold our current house to buy there. It’s even more appealing to me also because my family lives there. But I can’t convince my wife.

Take for example this house:

It’s in an affluent suburb with good schools, in a major metro area with good jobs in my field. A house like this barely even exists in Oregon, and the ones that do would cost double what this one is listed for. Here in Oregon, we live in a tiny place in a less desirable location despite being in a higher income group. It’s crazy to me what is unavailable to us given our education and income levels. We worked so hard to get where we are and barely feel we can get ahead. Why people stay here is beyond me.

We had a very busy but fun weekend with the kids celebrating the holiday season.

We went and saw Santa Claus in North Plains on Saturday, and then went to Steeplejack Brewing for pizza. Then, on Sunday, we went to the SHARC for swimming and later went to Zoo Lights at the Oregon Zoo.

Lately, both of my kids have been learning so much and it’s intense seeing them grow before my eyes.

No. 1 is 4 and has known his ABCs and how to count for a while now, but he’s become so articulate, annunciating every letter perfectly (no elemenopee anymore). He’s also counting into the 40s and higher when reminded of the starting digit. Even more impressive are the questions he’s beginning to ask. Existential questions, and reflecting on complex topics, even accompanied by sadness and even anguish when speaking of loss. Wow.

No. 2 is 23 months and is saying short sentences and asserting her personhood by claiming ownership of things and not shying away from telling you what’s up, especially to “stop it” when something is bothering her. It won’t be long until she’s speaking in full sentences and becoming her own person, too. In addition to playing with the magnet tiles and more traditional “boy toys”, she’s dressing up and playing with dolls, unprompted or promoted by us, which is just so different from our son’s preferred toys, even though he had access to all the same things she does when he was her age.

Parenthood is a trip and I love it. Hard, yes, but awesome in all the best ways.

Real estate prices have been going down a little, but affordability is still a major issue. For example, a 984 sq. ft. house with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths in my area just sold for $400k.

To put this price into perspective at current interest rates, a buyer would need an annual household income of about $120,000 to qualify with 5% down.

The median income for a family of 4 in the Portland region is $114,400. Median income for all households was $81,149 in 2021, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

You would have to be in about the top 85th percentile of households in terms of income to afford this home in today’s market. The payment would be about $3,100 per month on a standard 30-year mortgage.