Still renting.

The landlord called last night to complain about the noise. This happens most times someone besides me plays a jumpy or stompy video game with me at my house. I have practiced enough at DDR to develop a light touch with these games, though I think it was actually a jumpy WarioWare game that did it in this case.

She is very old and still doesn't understand voice mail, so when she leaves a message she often grows increasingly upset in the process of speaking. This is because she can hear someone knocking around downstairs, and figures they must be willfully ignoring her voice coming out of the answering machine. All I can do when I listen to the message later is grit my teeth and make a mental note to clamp down harder on the NO JUMPING law, like ol' Big Brother in the groundbreaking 1983 Atari coin-op I, Robot. Uh-huh.

She and I spoke on the phone the other day about whether or not I was leaving. Full of my usual inertia (and my low-money state), I said I'd like to stay another year. This led to her asking about all the strange men with keys who come in and out of my apartment all day long. I told her that it was just the Andys, who were working with me on a project, but they have both returned their keys and now the only one holding a copy is my girlfriend. She said "Oh girlfriend that is OK she is good!" in what sounded oddly like relief. classicaljunkie advances the theory that she may have been pleased to discover that I apparently wasn't being all gay on her property. I really don't know and I expect that I never will, because I don't like talking to my landlord.

While I haven't signed any leases yet (it's way too early), I already feel off-kilter about staying here more. It's nigh-inevitable that I have at least another year here, but I find myself distinctly not thrilled about it. For one thing, this will be my fifth year at this address, far and away the longest I've ever lived in one spot, and saying nothing about how I pay $1,200 / month for the privilege. That is actually a reasonable price for an apartment of this size in this area, but the thought of pouring it into the same sinkhole for an entire half-decade seems wrong. If I'm this geographically stable, shouldn't I own?

I'm thinking: probably. Not right now, because my net worth today is close enough to zero, since I spent all my savings on the startup last year, and then borrowed a lot when it took an extra-special long time for my new day job to remember that they hired me. (In fact, I spent this past weekend pulling together my personal finances, and can report that it's rather depressingly negative if you don't count my retirement accounts.) But I should start thinking about it anyway. Let this post mark when I started thinking about it.