The man and I have an odd relationship with spontaneity. We seem to take turns which one of us wants to plan every single detail of our lives, down to the minute or down to the penny, and which one of us wants to be surprised, or at least not constricted by expectations. Some of the surprises these last few weeks have been of the unpleasant, expensive variety, like Murray knocking out one of his teeth on a holiday, or the window in the truck shattering at the moment we were loading the dogs in it to travel out of state on Christmas Eve. A couple of them might have very important long-range implications. We have been discussing very seriously what a move back to Colorado would entail, and we think we might have a lot of the doors flung open to be able to do it soon. But suddenly, there has been a resurgence of discussion about going the opposite direction from finding the forever house somewhere in Boulder County, and instead becoming straight-up nomads in a converted school bus home. Remember the talk about the bus conversion idea from last year? We have a day and a half of anxious waiting to see whether we--well, he, not I--have won an online auction for a decommissioned school bus. I don't know that we were actually ready to jump on a bus purchase this week, especially one that costs four times what Murray's aggregate costs were. Sure, this particular bus is the variety I wanted (flat front rather than truck nose that the man likes), but the timing is absolutely awful. We have no place to store a bus, nor a shop in which to convert it, and we are really not even sure we can get to where it is currently located, within the 10 day window we will have for pickup. The last time Mr S-P bid on a bus (over Christmas), several people swooped in during the last few hours, and ran the sale price up by 100% over his pain threshold. He has checked the auction site every few hours for days, and his bid is still sitting there at the top. Surely someone will come along at the last minute again, and save us from ourselves. We will know by Monday whether we accidentally bought a bus. Surprise!
Over the last seven or eight years, the man has periodically gotten stressed out at work, and started sending me links to jobs in his field at various locations around Colorado, where he thought maybe he'd rather be than where he was at the time. Most of them were contingency plans, just in case he got swept up in massive layoffs or something equally catastrophic. A few were fantasies, dream jobs in dream locations, where he could picture himself homesteading until he was of retirement age (and some of them even past that point, because they would have been low-stress or just plain old fun in hole-in-the-wall locations). Early this morning, when I first came downstairs for coffee, and learned that his name was still at the top of the bidding for the bus, I made some crack about having an RV in which to travel, but needing to find a job to pay for it all, a classic Catch-22. He said, "Well, there's this..." and proceeded to show me a fresh job posting that was not only exactly the job he had been looking for these last several years, it was located in the exact town where yesterday we said would be our best bet for being able to afford a house if we move back. Here it is, the dream job open at the perfect time, and what does he say now? "It was my dream job a few years ago. Now I'm not so sure." Just when I thought I had him figured out, understanding just how the mechanisms in his brain work, he throws that little nugget at me. A little spontaneity keeps the relationship fresh, right?
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