Okay, it’s not so quiet at this particular moment because I have a Red Wings game on my television and my sister and brother-in-law just showed up for their first visit in three days, but still, it’s almost eerie, and perhaps a bit cliché, just how quiet this house has gotten since the kids moved out. Perhaps I notice it more than my parents because my bedroom is next to theirs, but still, even after they’ve been living in their apartment for nearly a week, during the day it gets uncomfortable walking around the house. Perhaps even more than the silence, what bothers me is just how empty things feel around here. If it were just a matter of their old bedroom being empty it would be one thing, but between their stuff being out of our loft (I can access my full-size music keyboard for the first time in nearly two years now), and out of the pantry and kitchen, this house seems too big for the three of us. Granted, I need more space in my bedroom (I’m loathe to move too much out to other rooms for fear of a break-in), but for the three of us there’s more space here than we know what to do with.

Last night I started looking through local apartment listings online. I’m not making enough money right now to get even the cheapest of apartments (and this month will be tough because I basically miss a bi-weekly pay period coming up here due to the way work handles adjunct pay), and ultimately I’d prefer to be able to save up enough money to put a down payment on a house rather than get an apartment. I’m rethinking that philosophy, though, as it’s something my father drove into my head all my life ("you’re just throwing away money when you rent an apartment since you don’t own anything in the end"), but if this house seems too big with my parents living here, I can’t imagine how I’d feel with a whole house to myself. Yes, I’m a packrat, but I don’t have that much stuff. It’s going to be a matter of weighing the financial security of having my own house versus the independence of living on my own, and it’s something I’m going to have to think about for a very long time.

One bit of business that remains to be done here is to move Skooter into the house; my sister and brother-in-law took Spyder to the apartment with them, and this house isn’t the same without at least one cat wandering around here. Whereas Spyder was a more docile cat, though, Skooter is rambunctious, and has a very annoying tendency to get underfoot at the worst times. This isn’t such a big deal for me, but both of my parents are over 60 and not all that mobile. The last thing we need right now is for one of them to trip and fall and break something, and so I’m giving serious consideration to putting a collar with a bell on it around Skooter’s neck. I hate having to collar a cat for any reason, but just as we had to put a flea collar around Skooter’s neck over the summer when she got infested because it was ultimately necessary for her health, collaring and belling Skooter may be necessary for the sake of my parents’ well-being. I’m not going to like doing it, but it’s something that I think ultimately has to be done.