Home Ownership

I am going to sound like an ungrateful jerk in saying this but I'll risk it: I don't always love owning my house.

That is not to say that I don't love my house, because I do; but loving the house and loving owning the house are two very different things.

Honestly, we have such a great house.  It's really beautiful.  We named it 'Serenity Hill' because it's the perfect name for our house...but after a year of living here I'm feeling like it might be a little too serene.

Let me explain.  Our neighborhood is wonderful: wide, tree-lined streets, well-maintained homes, quiet.  There's one way in and out so no traffic except for the people who live tucked in our hidden area.  The only real problem we've encountered here are the jerks who "walk" their dog off leash.

We are in the southern part of New Jersey - Cumberland county - or Really South Jersey (RSJ), as I refer to it.  The thing with RSJ is that there's nothing down here in the way of a variety of things to do and other conveniences like restaurants, etc...and sometimes it's hard to believe that we are an actual part of the State of NJ - which is the most densely populated state in the United States. You would never know that here.  It's like living in Iowa.  I mean, I've never been to Iowa but I think that aside from its cities, it's probably a whole lot of wide open space with a gas station and convenience store every hundred miles.  That's kind of how it is here.


Proof of that is shown in this population density map of NJ:

You can see that in Cumberland county there are 322.2 people per square mile.
In the two other counties I've lived, the figures are 936.3* (Ocean) and a whopping 5403.6 (Union)!

I'm already feeling better about where I live after looking at those figures.
I don't know how I ever lived in a place where I was shoved into a single square mile with 5402.6 other people.  Just thinking about this make the claustrophobic and introverted portions of me very, very uncomfortable.

But, conversely, it isn't easy living in a place with so few people either.
Companies don't build or open businesses where there are no people...especially when the companies are retail-based and the people who live there don't earn a lot of money. How can they earn money? No companies means no jobs...it's a catch-22. Cumberland county is an agricultural county; we've got lots of farms which makes for a blissfully bucolic place to live but if I am to speak honestly...it gets boring.  In the year that we've lived here, a major supermarket and a national discount store both have closed in my town.  That says a lot.
And also, in a neighboring town a Sonic opened and subsequently closed a few years back.  Sonic. Closed! How does that even happen?

The boring here is both terrific and terrible.  Terrific because it's peaceful here and we have no real traffic.  Terrible because I have to drive one hour to get to the good stuff.  The good shopping, the good grocery stores, the good restaurants - and that gets old after about the first time you do it.  If I want a good sub sandwich...one hour drive each way.  So if I want to eat that sandwich at home, it's 2+ hours before I can which is obviously ridiculous.
What to do?  Do without.  Or postpone it until the weekend.  And sometimes I just don't want to do without or postpone it or take a freakin' two hour drive to eat good food.

So I get mopey.  Not ungrateful for my great house, but mopey that it is where it is.  We got very lucky with our house in that if you took our house and planted it almost any other NJ county, the price of it would be at least doubled.  In some counties, the price would be almost quadrupled, no joke.

The answer, of course, is to count my blessings and DEAL with the inconveniences.  And I am learning to do that but it is definitely not an overnight thing.

I'm not good at being slow-paced.
I am too young to be slow-paced.
I want to live in a slow-paced area...but I want it to be about 20 minutes away from the good stuff instead of an hour.

And I'm pouty and a little bit belligerent about it all about every third or so day.

But at least we're no longer living in Delaware.
That's a constant good thing.

Oh...
and I wholeheartedly remain glad to be back living in New Jersey.


 

*This figure increases dramatically in the summer months because of everyone flocking to the shore areas.