From the Mind of Trevor Stone

The timing of the whole house buying process has worked out exquisitely.

For awhile we've been talking about buying a house this spring. Last year we let our landlord know that we'd like to go month-to-month when our lease was up. But since the purchase process was really smooth, we didn't need it. We're officially moved out of Lucky Gin, and it's approximately as clean as it was when we moved in.

We smartly gave ourselves a month to move, closing on the house on the first Monday of March. That provided a weekend for moving essentials and compactly stacking boxed media, a weekend for friends and family and several large vehicles, a weekend for professional movers to pick up the heavy and/or bulky, and a week and a Saturday for all the random things that have somehow escaped packing, discarding 3-year-old containers hiding in the fridge, and extensive cleaning.

Smooth timing was a theme in the house search process, too. The first two open house we tried to go to were closed. The first one we successfully visited was super fun and we got a good vibe from the seller's realtors. We met with those two at the beginning of the year and decided to "go out with them" for a while. And although I was prepared to spend months to a year looking for a house that met our needs, timing lucked out such that we bought a house that we saw on the second weekend of outings. Total time between purchasing Buying Your First Home and actually buying our first home: less than three months.

Another timing irony, or manifestation if you prefer: for several years I had a bunch of money in a money market account rather than a higher-interest CD because I was usually in a state of "Maybe next year will be the time to buy a house." In early 2017 I decided that pattern was clearly silly, so I poked around and found that I was eligible for a credit union with a 1% APR 1-year CD and figured one year would be a good time for a house purchase, relative to the lease schedule. Getting the account set up and money moved in took a week or two longer than I expected, so the maturity date was March 8th, a bit later in the year than I was hoping. But as luck would have it, the house cost a couple hundred thousand dollars less than I was expecting to pay, so I didn't have to use any of the money from the CD. The kicker, of course, is that a couple months after I opened the CD, the savings account's interest rate increased such that I would've made more money by keeping it totally liquid.

Fortunately, we now never^* need to move again.
Well, except moving all the stuff in the garage (there's a single-human-width path down the middle) into the house, unboxing it, and moving the items destined for a garage sale back into the garage.

Some people think it's a great idea to have a yard sale before you move. I disagree: when there's a deadline on the move, it takes much less time to pack items without evaluating them, and you save on the time and stress of having all the unwanted items identified by a Saturday that you could use schlepping boxes instead. It seems much less stressful to carefully consider an item fetched from the garage, figure out how it might fit into a new space, and not announce a sale until all of the unnecessary items have accumulated.

^* Well, until it's time to retire to Moloka'i or move into an ALF.

I really dislike the euphemism "adult" for "sexual."

When I hear a phrase like "adult activities," I think of things like doing taxes and shopping for bathroom fixtures at Home Depot. "Adult entertainment" brings to mind midwestern grayhairs watching Lawrence Welk. "Adult material" could mean paper from old trees bound in leather from old cows.

Part of the problem is that a lot of mainstream porn strikes me as adolescent in style. My image of adult relationships is one of caring for a partner who's had a rough day, going for a romantic walk and reminiscing about youthful exploits, and so on. Depictions of such acts aren't very good for selling magazines, low budget films, and monthly website subscriptions. What I call "adolescent sexuality" is very genital focused, high in kinetic energy, and with a sense of the forbidden. "Girls Gone Wild" brings to mind copious alcohol in red plastic cups and a bunch of sorority girls ready to hump anything that moves. "Women Gone Wild" brings to mind a retreat in the woods with middle-aged women excited to hear guest speaker Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

I don't mean to imply that adult relationships lack sex. On the contrary, intercourse is something 35-year-olds, in general do, but 5-year-olds, in general, don't. But sex isn't the only thing that distinguishes children from adults and it certainly doesn't distinguish between 17-year-olds and 27-year-olds.

"Adult" and "mature" are often used synonymously. If your boss says "We're having an adult conversation," it's not an invitation to share the kinky exploits of your weekend with the conference call. It's a reminder that name calling, whining, and sulking don't have a place in a business meeting and that coworkers are expected to behave maturely with each other. Yet "M for Mature" video games like Grand Theft Auto feature hours upon hours of immature actions like stealing cars and killing hookers. The Seventh Seal is a movie with mature themes. Barely Legal Teens 37 is not.

Further confounding the terminology is the word "family" (which is taken to imply children are present). "Family-friendly content" is saccharine Disney films where a one-frame erection beneath a robe gets people riled up about indecency. But while adult doesn't imply sex (monks, nuns, etc.), it's an odd family (implying children) that doesn't start with sex.

Taboo subjects oft beget linguistic acrobatics. America may have no greater taboo than sex and no end of euphemisms with two backs.