Sunday PM

Its a little bit of a chaotic day...and a little bit of a quiet one. I suppose, sufficiently dispersed, chaos can be subsumed in quiet, and sufficiently concentrated, quiet can tame chaos... but today seems to be both. Chaotic, and quiet.

Quiet because the house is virtually empty. My wife and daughter are off to a Girl Scout event -- the daughter is volunteering to be an assistant at that event, which is, from what I gather , pretty much of an open house, and she's been wanting to do that for a while. They'll be gone for several hours -- at least another three, possibly another five. And my mother is asleep. That leaves me, the guinea pig, and the new guinea pig that we just got yesterday, whose name is either Chocolate or Cocoa, depending on the moment. The daughter has wanted an additional one for a while, and so yesterday we went to the pet store to buy the cage and such. The plan was that we would check the local SPCA for guinea pigs before buying one.

You'd think that by now I'd have realized what would happen as soon as she saw them.

You'd think that by now I'd have realized what would happen when she gave me The Look.

So now we have two, and they're getting along pretty well in their separate but equal cages -- the occasional squeak, thats about it. And the neighborhood is quiet -- which is actually one of the things that I was thinking about this morning, and which is causing me a bit of angst.

Here's why. A few months ago, we were thinking quite intently about buying a smaller house in about fifteen years (we tend to plan in advance) - with what it would cost being one of the major factors. After kicking it around for a while, we came upon the idea of staying in the house we are in, but with some substantial changes -- most notably, adding a room over the garage, turning the existing master bedroom into a storage room, upgrading the master bath a bit, and installing an elevator for those years when the stairs will be too much for us on a routine basis. (Sometimes, they are now, for that matter.) We swagged that doing this would cost us about $80,000, which is a pretty hefty sum. But for that, we would get to stay in a house we like, in a location we like, with features we like -- most notably, the upgraded kitchen inside, and the landscaping outside. This sounded like a Good Plan.

Then I started reading newspaper articles about the price of houses. And two thoughts occurred to me. One was, if we spent $80,000 on this house, and didn't get any of it back, how would we feel? And the other was, if we had a new house built, we could have exactly what we want, but for a cost that might well exceed the value of this house-- even the value of this house plus $80,000. What would we think then?

So we're a bit up in the air. The good news is, we have time. We're going to get with an architect to see about generating some ballpark estimates on costs for renovation, and for building.

I also read in todays paper some more articles about retirement planning. Whenever I read these things, I have to take a deep breath, because I know that as a general statement we're in a significantly better financial situation than anyone there. We've been careful with money over the years, and we've both been paid well, so right now we have a seriously good amount of money in hand. It would be an exaggeration to say that we could live on just what we have -- unless we worked for about another ten years or so, which isn't the plan -- but so long as one and a half of the three basics holds true -- the three basics being 401K, pensions, and Social Security -- we'll be okay. That doesn't mean that we will be flush, but we'll have little to worry about. If, on the other hand, 401K values drop, private pensions get jettisoned (which I thought was impossible and illegal, but , vis. United Airlines, apparently not), and Social Security gets torpedoed -- well, its not quite 'you want fries with that?' time, but its a scary proposition.

And finally, to add to the chaos, I'm tangentially involved in a software project which is badly managed, and which just yesterday had some surprises of its own -- the kind you don't want when you are less than a month from a major implementation. Nothing I particularly have to worry about myself, but still -- a disturbing arrangement. In a nutshell, it appears that another contracting company has been less than forthcoming with the truth when it answered our questions about the transition. They didn't lie.... they just were careful in what they said. As one person on yesterday's teleconference put it, they treated it like an audit. And our people didn't catch it.

Oh, boy.

But heck, its a pretty day, which is something....