Wow, you guys! It's been forever! Life has been chugging along, we finally got around to having a garage sale last weekend, and we'll be having one this coming weekend, too, at my mom's house. We managed to somehow clear out an entire household worth of junk and are still drowning in it, so the status quo is protected.
Big happenings! Um . . . so Hooper (our huge dog) has been sick and barfed all over my master bedroom carpet. He's been grounded to his crate at night until I'm sure he's done being sick. The carpet necessitated a massive steam cleaning and enzyme treatment. I'm back to school this semester and taking two actual face-to-face classes which is a huge change for me. I'm back to being a Literature major which is awesome and more comfortable, but the whole actually GOING to class kind of sucks. The driving and parking and sitting in a room for three hours, then still having reading and homework and papers to do is just a lot. What else, what else . . . Oh.
We're not moving to Maine.
I KNOW!!!! I know. We're still working towards a goal, but that goal is to get into a cheaper, smaller house locally, and then buy a vacation home/cabin in Maine. That frees us up to not worry about schools or jobs and focus on just finding a place that we love.
Here's how it all broke down: I started doing a lot of research into the economy of Maine. It's pretty abysmal outside of the larger city areas of Portland and to a far lesser degree, Bangor. The coast is primarily high-priced vacation homes, while inland is mostly destitute. Their economy was pretty reliant on logging and paper, so when the factories shut down, so did the towns. The smaller towns don't have enough of a tax base to support a school system so they end up closing or merging with another town. There's a huge disparity in income, most people who live there are either struggling or are incredibly wealthy. The struggling part leads to the usual problems that come with poverty, a high instance of drug use, mostly heroin and opioids. There is also a bit of a tendency towards distrust of outsiders or anything new. Native Mainers tend to dislike those "from away" who show up with shiny new ideas about how to fix everything when the natives really just want their factory jobs back. The state can't keep their young people there, most college graduates move out of state. The aging community needs care. That's really one of the only viable job markets, hospitals and elder care.
I still want to be in Maine every chance I get, and am still working towards that goal, but as of now, the end result is going to look a little bit different than what I originally pictured.
