BoldUlysses.com

Sitting here at work putting off eating my turkey and cheese sandwich. Dave is out sick today, Charlie’s off to get his allergy shots, and thunderstorms are popping up here and there. The brunt of them is supposed to arrive tonight. It’ll be nice to have the rain. I love a good downpour.

Luke’s home sick, and Penelope amused herself this morning by getting into the (gas, thankfully) fireplace downstairs and emptying every last bit of dirt and soot out onto the white carpet. Diane called me in exasperation this morning and told me about it. Amazing how she chooses to ignore the dozens, nay, hundreds of toys downstairs and decides to mess with the fireplace. Unbelievable.

But we’re all well. Our latest home improvements are as follows:

1. Painted the outside shutters black to match the front door. They look awesome.
2. Spent all day Friday and Saturday putting up beadboard on the kitchen walls. Nearly cursed at my utterly useless stud finder.
3. Built a big, long work table for the garage. It fits between the cars and has storage on the bottom shelf.
4. Scored some free wood on Monday, courtesy of a crate the company was going to throw out. It’s good plywood and two-by-fours I’ll use for additional shelving in the garage.
5. Finished painting the hallway and front room Seashell Gray. It looks wonderful, cool, calm and refreshing. Love the color.

I’ve been really itching to start on the Datsun restoration, even though I know

• It’s a multi-year project,
• It’ll be far more expensive than we can budget for now,
• Home improvements are the first priority, and
• I really should be focusing more of my time and attention on my family, given where they all are.

So that’ll definitely have to wait. I might just move it to our house, though, just to help Mom and Dad by freeing up some space in their garage. And there might be little things I can tackle without spending any money. Ahh…we’ll see.

The wind is really blowing outside now. I can see the pollen and leaves come off the trees. Storm’s coming.

I feel a weird sense of similarity between my emotions about our family’s financial state and my impression of the current political landscape.

The car purchase referenced a few posts down fell through—not because of any reluctance on the part of the seller; rather, what little sense I had in the whole affair prevailed upon me to get a local 6er enthusiast to do a pre-purchase inspection before committing to buy the car and flying out to Texas (yes, that Texas) to pick it up and drive it home. The car was a wreck. The paint job looked good in pictures but in person was terrible, the engine bay was a mess, the seats were okay but the rest of the interior was slipshod, the rims were trashed and the rear valence was missing from the bumper conversion. Needless to say, I passed. However, we’d already been approved for the loan and the money was just sitting in our account—something that can be a recipe for disaster if not checked.

My natural propensity toward researching and investigating potential car purchases has run wild for the past couple of days, but now I’m finally coming around. The loan money will be repaid and car projects relegated to a future time. It felt profoundly irresponsible of me to be consider burdening our family with more debt, considering:

1. Our first priority, financially, is a house purchase. We need to save all the money we can, and work on our credit. Extra debt may not derail those efforts, but it’ll make them more challenging.
2. I can’t afford to get distracted any farther from my family by a car. By the grace of God, with the E24 purchase a good balance has been struck between car hobby time and family time, and the process of another car purchase would threaten to upset that balance, if not do it outright.
3. It’s Christmas and birthday season. Car purchases always involve incidentals here and there, money we’ll need to help out in an already tight season.
4. And maybe the biggest reason: There’s an unrestored 1972 Datsun 240Z sitting in my parents’ garage. It’s mine; my dad bought it new in 1972 and gave me the keys when I graduated from college. I can’t sell it; it’s been in the family for almost 40 years. It needs restoration, and I can’t devote all my attention to some new car and let the Z languish. Just can’t happen. That project takes precedence. So while my daily driver can be fun and interesting, I have to look at the big picture.

The connection with my impression of the political scene is tenuous, I’ll admit. Congress and the administration, among many, many other faults and wrong ideas, have completely lost sight of the big picture with the health care nonsense. They’re making very foolish decisions with our money in a time when the financial position of the country is incredibly precarious. Our family financial situation isn’t bad, but it’s never the wrong time to make wise money choices, and at the moment, taking risks isn’t one of them.