After I wrote my last post "Why do you run?" I noticed that I wrote a post titled the same exact thing just over a year earlier. It's interesting how I can ask the same question and get different answers a year later.
There hasn't been much going on with me lately. My job has been promising me a pay raise, but it is waiting on a contract that was supposed to happen in December. I will eventually become a supervisor to 2 or 3 (maybe even 4) people when the contract goes through. Although the multiple people will mean that I have 2 new contracts. But until then, I am still doing my job.
We are also looking at buying a house. We have outgrown our current house with Damian still here and he has Asher (his son) every other week for a week. That means 5 people are living in this tiny house with 3 bedrooms. Housing prices are crazy expensive, but we need a bigger house. We were really hoping to move soon, but the pre-approval process has taken a little bit of time and the housing market (while expensive) has no houses to buy. I've heard that the federal tax rate is going to rise in March, and throught out the year, so the earlier the better.
The other snag is that we signed a lease in August for a year, so we have to beg our landlord to let us out of the lease. Personally I think she would, she has not raised our rent since we moved here in 2015 when prices were lower, and I know that the house across the street that is almost the same as this one (it might only have one bathroom where we have 1.75) is $500 more than our house.
We've also had several problems with our rental house lately. The faucet in the bathtub quit working right and was hard to turn off. Without thinking about it I turned it on to rinse out Asher's potty chair and then it wouldn't turn off so we had to get an emergency plumber out to the house to fix it on a weekend. Then the sprayer on the kitchen sink broke, and now our freezer isn't working. We also had some electric issues last summer that were fixed late fall, so the landlord has had to spend quite a bit of money to do repairs (none of which were our fault). I have been scared to ask her if we can get out of our lease early, but my sister thinks she would LOVE to get us out as I don't believe she thinks we are completely blameless. We have lived here almost 8 years and have never had repairs on anything before, so I feel like it's just time for things to start needed maintenance, or whatever.
Chris also needs a new car, but our realtor has advised that we wait on that, because that would affect his credit score (more debt) and we can't really afford to go down on our pre-approval because of what we need to fit into. He said it's easier to get a loan for a car than a loan for a house.
Anyway, I am still running. I run every day, as you know. Today will be 1210 days in a row of at least one mile. I've really struggled the last few months. I've felt pretty down lately and just like I didn't want to do anything at all. By the time Friday gets here I just feel like staying in bed all day. It dawned on me last week that this is normal for me. I have been getting seasonal depression for a lot of years now, it's usually very mild, but it always happens in January or February. I think this year it has affected me more than normal, but sometimes just naming it helps (for me). I think the years when I think about it coming and expect it are better than when I don't think about it. This year it didn't even dawn on me. Maybe because of my Dad's death and all that has been going on with my sisters and his house, but I wasn't thinking about it, and I've been worse than I have for a lot of years. This week I'm feeling better, but it is only Tuesday, so maybe not. Who knows?
Tuesdays are my worst work days, to be honest. I always feel drained, especially on this Tuesday. My job is with a therapeutic court program in two different cities and Tuesday is court day. They swap every other week, so this week is one city, and next week is the other. I get more frustrated with the court team in today's city than in the other. Well, I won't go into details, but I am not excited about Tuesdays very often.
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