Earlier I was really motivated to write, but Julien wanted to use the computer so I ate dinner instead…
He told me something tonight that kind of made me shake in my shoes a little bit. Apparently his partner Eric is sick of Atlantic Control, and Julien is too, and Julien talked about them closing up shop if I get tenure, and us moving to wherever I get a job. Selling this house and moving somewhere where we can get more house for the money. Where he can work part time, doing what he likes to do: home improvement, art, stuff. Where I won’t have a long commute. Because the chances of my getting a job in La Rochelle next year are slim to none.

It’s kind of hard to imagine. We live in a good community, but all it really is is a suburb of a Rochelle, a small city in itself. We don’t have much land, our neighbors, although cool, are RIGHT THERE. The schools are good, but they’re probably just as good elsewhere.

Julien is thinking of getting out while we’re ahead, being able to cash in on the high real estate prices here, and moving to someplace less expensive…with a bigger house and more land for things like vegetable gardens and chickens and ducks and stuff like that.

I need to think about this. We’ve lived here for 9 years. It’s a great place to live. The reason I most likely won’t get a job here is because teachers with more seniority want to move here. They have more points in the silly point system that the Education Nationale has, so they get priority. Stupid system. Not based on merit, but equality. I’m bitter about it because it doesn’t matter that I’ve been here almost 10 years and this is my home; I have very little chance of getting a teaching job in a school within a 30-mile radius. And I’m not ready to spend my life commuting.

One thing that bothers me about the idea of selling this house is the fact that real estate IS so expensive here. The piece of crap house we bought 4 years ago and fixed up is now worth its weight in gold. Well, maybe not that much. But if we sell and 2 years later want to come back, we’re SOL. Renting it wouldn’t permit us the same levity if Julien works part-time. We’d still need to make the mortgage payments.

I don’t know. But he’s right about one thing, Julien: within the next year we’re going to be at a decision-making point. Do we continue the way we’re heading, or do we change our lives and lifestyle “while we still can”? Deep inside I say “yes”. Because I’ve never felt as if I want to spend the rest of my entire life in France, and I don’t want to get so deeply rooted that I can’t change at all. We can’t (and I don’t feel the need to) move to the US right now, but if I don’t want to move when it makes sense and when it’s relatively facile, what will it be like if we need to move back to the States?

It’s food for thought.