Six years ago today, the ex and I took possession of this lovely house in Winston-Salem.

In a lot of ways, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived as an adult that’s ever really quite felt like home. At the same time, it also sometimes feels like I’ve never really lived here at all. For the first few years, I was waiting for Mark to be here full time so we could really “start” living here together. Once he moved back (only for a few months, as it turned out) we pretty much immediately put the house on the market with an eye toward downsizing and moving to Greensboro, and it’s been on and off the market ever since–in a pretty much “staged” condition, devoid of any personality whatsoever. And then there was the mortgage nightmare earlier this year, where I took full possession even though I wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to do so. I feel like the poor house and I have both been in limbo for a good chunk of the past six years.

And now, strangely enough, I’m thinking about hanging on to the place for a while. I’d be hard pressed to find a rental that would compare at the same price point. I really do like the house even if it is too big and too much to maintain. I have a lot going on in my life for the next year and the thought of a move fills me with much dread. And to be brutally honest, I kind of like having thirty miles separating me and my parents right now; I think that maintaining that distance might be essential to my sanity.

So after six years, I’m thinking of actually moving in. On my own terms. With my own stuff on the walls, and new curtains in the somewhat grim bedroom, and maybe even a new refrigerator and some paint.

But when I ponder the yard and the roof and that big, dead tree out back, I waffle a bit.

To be continued, evidently…

We had a departmental retreat at work today, one of those daylong affairs at a cabin by a lake outside the city with intradepartmental brainstorming, strategic planning, etc. Actually, this one was much better than most and wasn’t really annoying at all. But at the inevitable introductory communication exercise, my question was, “What was the happiest day of your life?”

I had to pause and swallow before answering.

Eighteen or nineteen months ago, I would have had a very quick and easy answer to this question. That’s no longer the case. It’s not that I don’t have lots of happy days on file in my mind. I do. And new ones are still being added, albeit not always so often as I might like. But there’s no longer that one special day that trumps them all for me. And it made me kind of sad to realize that. It also made me ponder two important points, which I guess I’m now expressing as bits of advice:

1. Always accumulate as many happy days as you can. Not only is it a very good way to live your life, but it also comes in handy sometimes when you have to have a ready response to a question for a team-building exercise at work.
2. Never allow a significant part of your own personal happiness to be dependent on another human being. It’s a universally bad move that you will nearly always regret at some point in the future.

I’m now going to enjoy the fact that I actually got home early tonight.

I’m working on digitizing a video letter I wrote to a friend probably seventeen years ago so that he can have it on DVD. This means I am:

• Amazed that the VHS has held up as well as it has. There are dropouts but it looks pretty good considering it was done in six-hour mode and involves second and third generation video of variable quality.
• Even more amazed at how well I was able to do the analog editing way back in 1995 using two VCRs and a cheap boom box. It worked, strangely enough…
• Hoping I’ll uncover some of the assorted video I lost over the years, including such classics as “Greensboro 1994, Part 1″and “Three-way with the boy who had a pink mohawk.”
• Also hoping this will jumpstart some of the other video digitization I’ve sort of floundered on in the past year.

I’ll tell you how it comes out.