friday five: love the one you’re with

I’m taking a dissertation break to do this week’s Friday Five:

Kathryn at RevGalBlogPals gives us this Friday Five as she heads to the beach: I ask you to please name five things you like about where you are living now… and as your bonus – 1 thing you don’t like.

This is a little bit of a tough one for me, though it would have been much harder a year ago when I was ready to get out, out, out. It’s amazing how much of a difference being a part of something makes.

1) Church. I love our church, our pastor (especially our pastor), our associate pastor, the people we’re beginning to know, the feeling of community it brings, what it works to bring to the community, the way computer guy likes it. I could kind of go on, but I think I’m beginning to bore people with this. It’s not a perfect church. It’s struggling to be relevant in a community that is very different from its make-up. It’s facing the same problems other mainline churches are facing. It is fairly “white-haired”–a quality especially noticeable in these summer months. But it’s not dying, the Spirit is moving, and there’s a lot to love.

2) The kitchen. We renovated this year and a kitchen that was barely tolerable has become a place I love. It also feels like it is truly “ours.” This is something we did together. Who knew how much of a difference a kitchen would make? (Note–the new kitchen counter is piled with stuff now too, but there IS more space.)

Old

New

3)Mortgage. I truly appreciate that Computerguy–with a lot of encouragement from his parents–had the foresight to buy a house while he was still a single guy in his twenties and that he bought a decent sized house. We have a very reasonable mortgage for our area and while the house value was artificially inflated for awhile, it is still worth more than CG paid for it. For a long time, I was not reconciled to this and chaffed at living in HIS house, but I’m getting over that. (See #2 and #1–they made all the difference.)

4) Proximity to mountains, beach, city, Disneyland, and family and friends. We don’t get to any of these as often as we should, but we know they’re there if we want them.

5) Colleges, colleges, and more colleges. If I don’t get a job in the next year and we stay where we are (something I am finally reconciled with–see #1 and #2), there are many colleges around. I*should* be able to at least find adjunct work, though in this economy it’s a little iffy, so I am also grateful for Computerguy’s job where we are.

Bonus–There are a lot of things that frustrate me about where we live, but I haven’t been dwelling on them lately, so I will give the #1 thing that frustrates me and that I would NOT have done had I had a say in the choice of house. We don’t live in walking distance of ANYTHING, the streets are not particularly walker friendly, and they are even less bike friendly.