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And that absolutely does not jive with the corporate move, where they expect and want you to do absolutely as little as possible.  Don’t pack your things, let the packers do that, even if it means they’re going to pack an ashtray full of cigar butts (actually happened to a friend of my parents).  Don’t move your things, let the movers do it, even if it means they’re going to load a garbage can full of garbage onto the truck (which I caught them doing and told them to not do).  And let the relocation company handle finding you a temporary place to live, even if it means that they’ll hire someone else to find the place and set you up.

Milton Friedman talkes about the four ways to spend money.  The best is when you spend your money on yourself, because you maximize your value, minimizing cost and maximizing quality.  The worst way is to spend someone else’s money on someone else, because you have no incentive to minimize costs or maximize quality.  We knew we were being set up with an apartment that cost $155 per night, over 30 days, so you do the math and think “~$4500 a month in rent for an 800 square foot apartment must mean it’s one swank-ass place, right”?  And you’re wrong, because it’s not.

Like we said, not a bad place.

It doesn’t look like that bad a place.  Little dated on the outside, but the leasing office and pool are in good shape, the hedges are trimmed, etc.  It’s better than the kind of places we lived in college, more like the kind of places we lived in grad school.  It’s 4 pm when we arrive and there’s some appliance installers getting off work and drinking Miller Lite on their patio.  A couple of old Mexican women pushing kids around in strollers.  A fat, bearded 25-year old who looks uncomfortable in the sun and whose attire (sweatshirt, shorts, dark socks with Tevas) screams “computer programmer”.  Friendly enough and should work well enough until we find our house to rent.

But the trouble is the one thing we cared about isn’t there.  We’re not picky, we didn’t lay any requirements on their search other than “within 5 miles of work”.  When they first found a place for us and asked if it looked OK, Betsey responded, “No, it’s on the 3rd floor, we need something on the first floor, because I don’t want to cart the stroller up and down the stairs five times a day”.  And they said, “no problem, we’ve got an identical unit on the first floor.”  Which wasn’t the case.  Either they were lying, incompetent, or European, but in America an apartment that is up a flight of stairs from the ground is called a “second floor apartment.”  So we weren’t to happy about that an called our contact to straighten things out.  And then she called the middle man agency who was supposed to call the apartment complex and find out if there were any real first floor apartments.

So after this not happening in 20 minutes I walk fifty feet to the leasing office to check on the status of a ground-floor unit, ascertain that there is not such thing, and go back to gather up Betsey and the kids and the dogs, thinking we’ll go pick up my car (which was shipped from AVL to AUS).  We start walking back to the car, and we can her some sort of shouting/yelling noise in the distance.

As we’re rounding the parking lot, a couple walks into view on the other side of the lot, pushing at each other and yelling in each other’s faces.  They’re early 20′s, white; she’s blond, barefoot, wearing shorts, a halter top, and tattoos; he’s got dark lanky hair that looks like it’s plastered to his skull, wearing sneakers, athletic pants, and a black wife-beater.  And to give the name to his attire and prove that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, he punches his girlfriend in the face, about 10 feet from where we’re standing.

She starts shouting “Call 911, he hit me and is stealing my cell phone”.  A part of me wants to help her, call upon my long latent Tae Kwon Do skills and knock the asshole down, but a much, much bigger instinct takes over and I hustle my kids to the car in double-time, point off towards the office and telling her “go to the leasing office over there, they can help you.”  Wife Beater stalks off stage left while her dog now enters from stage right: her unleashed, untagged, uncollared American Pitbull.  Who proceeds to defend his owner by jumping onto my dogs, and my wife, and my children, wanting to play; but if there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach my kids it’s “never, ever ‘play’ with an damn pitbull, because their idea of fun in suddenly turning on you and ripping off your face”.

So while Blondie alternates between chasing Wife Beater and her dog around the parking lot, we get the boys into the car.  I get Elliott strapped in and hop in the passenger seat.  Betsey is getting Grady in, but before I can close my door, the pitbull shows back up and jumps across me and sits down in the drivers seat, looking for all the world like he’s ready to go for a ride.  And in a moment of freakout strength and speed I manage to lunge across the car, throw open the drivers side door with my right hand, grab the (50 lb.) dog by the scruff of its neck with my left and throw it out the car door.  Betsey gets in, we slam the doors and hit the gas and we’re gone.

So now we’ve decided to forgo having other people do our short-term leasing for us, and we’ve taken up residence at the Homewood Suites in the Austin Arboretum for the next 30 days.  A nice, clean, professional chain hotel.  With free breakfast every morning.  And free dinner (and beer!) 4/7 nights a week.  And nobody getting punched in the face.  And, to boot, it’s only $145/night, which is $10/night cheaper than the North Austin Domestic Violence and Unleashed Pitbulls Villas.

So, again, Milton Friedman is right: you get better results when you’re spending your money (or budget in our case) on yourself.

A portrait of Elliott that I shot at Betsey’s practice.

Betsey came home from work and we made a last run out for supplies. Betsey has already made sure we were taken care of for food, batteries, blankets, candles, etc., so we went looking for a sled. No dice. We did find new boots for Elliott, thankfully, because he’ll need them. We get home around 3, driving through light flurries. Within an hour, there’s an inch on the ground. Elliott wants to play, and who am I to deny him? So we get bundled up in boots and snow gear, and start to trek to Glen Arden Elementary, about a 1/4 mile away. On the way, the neighbors lend us a sled. By the time we reach the school, we’re in 2.5 inches or so of powder. We spend 15 minutes sledding down the hill before Elliott gets cold and we head back. There’s 4″ by this time. And it keeps coming and coming all night. At 8:30, the power goes out, so we head to bed early.

In the morning, we’re greeted with one of those classic Americana snowfalls. A thick blanket of powder with a crust of ice across the top. Its hard to walk through, and slow going whenever we head outside. At most we can handle 30 or 45 minutes at a go before Elliott loses his energy and needs to come inside. But its wonderful, and joy to see his delight in it. A bit of a meltdown on our first journey out, but our second one is a great time, throwing snow at dad, and sledding down the big hill at Glen Arden:

So, in the end, he reaches the conclusion – on his own – that jumping on the ball probably isn’t the best thing to do (“that ball is so hurting me”). And that’s probably a good conclusion to this episode. We watch him, guard against the worst impulses, and let him figure out his own limits. And we get some funny footage to boot (as a side note, Elliott finds the video hilarious).

This is Christmas, this year, in Houston:  Betsey and I wake up in the dark, quarter to six, Elliott is in the hallway outside Bruce and Carole’s guest bedroom, penned in by a dog gate and silhouetted against the dim light of the kitchen.  “Elliott, son, what are you doing?”, I ask him.

The natural response, “Did Santa come?”.

“I think he did, I think I heard him last night, did you?”

“Yeah, I did, I heard him sayin somethin”

“And what did you hear him saying?”

“HO HO HO”, he responds in the best deep voice a 3 year old can.  Betsey double checks that he heard the reindeer and sleigh on the roof, then encourages him to settle back down and cuddle for a while.  But its Christmas, and neither Elliott nor I are settled enough to wait long in bed.  So we’re up just after 6, surveying what has been left in the night, the empty glass of milk, the cookie crumbs left on the plate by the fireplace.

There’s such a short time in our life when we can wholeheartedly accept and believe in the stories we’re told, a time when we can experience wonder and joy undiluted by our reason or experience.  Watching our son this morning, I can remember that feeling, and I can take such pleasure in bringing that joy to him; for me, that’s the greatest Christmas gift of all.