Official, More 20s, Expenses, Time to get sandy, Oversharing

I arrived at home last night with a For Sale sign in the yard marking my home officially being on the market.  It felt a bit strange to be sure but I have had a lot of exposure to strange and different situations recently so the impact was somewhat dulled.  It will be interesting to see what sort of interest may or may not be out there.  I need to make an effort to keep the house on the tidy side more or less at all times in case a request for a showing pops up.

I celebrated the house for sale sign with a quick calisthenics session in the bar park.  I once again pushed to get 20 pull ups.  I also got on the parallel bars and knocked out a set of 20 dips, another feat I had not accomplished in quite awhile.  It feels good to be pushing my limits again.

One thing that has become quite apparent is my living expenses are going to increase dramatically with this move.  I have become somewhat spoiled in my current situation where my primary mortgage is paid off, leaving me only a HELOC loan to worry about.  The mortgage payment on the new home is going to be huge in comparison although once equity from the sale of my house is applied the impact will soften significantly but still overall, my monthly nut will wind up being bigger.  I can swing it of course but it will require yet another mental shift in where my dollars go since now ancillary spending is something I never think about.

Tonight I have plans to go play some sand volleyball with a group I found on Meetup.  I have absolutely no clue how viable playing volleyball will be on my 55 year old body but if you don’t try you never know the answer.  The collection of friends and memories I gathered over my roughly 10 years of serious playing both in PA and Florida are very dear to me.  It would be awesome to start a new set of volleyball memories down here with a group of good people.  Advil will be a core part of this experiment.

So I recently made a significant change to access to the blog, making a user require to register if they want to access the content instead of it being available anonymously.  This change was made after thinking about why I share what I do and the impact it potentially has on both myself and others.  That thought process has expanded further into my thinking about why I share as much as I do in social media in general.  Is it because I am seeking approval from others, is it for adulation, is it to make my life seem more interesting or better than it actually is? The answer if I am being honest with myself is, maybe.

Like many things, sharing on social media has become a reflex reaction that I don’t even think about.  When I took the picture above my first impulse was to post it to social media, but I stopped myself.  Do I need to post large chunks of my day to day existence online to feel worthy, viable or sufficient? Of course not yet that is what I have conditioned myself to do.  The end result of this thought shift is going to be making a concerted effort to drastically reduce what I put on social media.  Even the blog itself will see further impact.

My normal routine has always been to put links to the most recent blog entry on Facebook, announcing it’s availability.  Again it was just what I have always done for a decade and a half.  That practice has come to an end as well.  If you want to read the blog you are welcome to do so but you will have to pull it, it will no longer be pushed.

So far 2023 has been all about change and self examination/analysis.  Just because certain things have been a certain way for a very long time does not mean they should continue to be that way indefinitely.  If you miss me on social media and wondering what the hell is going on, reach out and I’ll tell you.