Koi Vey

It’s been quite a week. As I mentioned in my previous entry, Kol Emeth held a huge event honoring Marcie’s uncle, Rabbi Shelly Lewis. The event ended up being attended by about 700 people and Marcie’s video was very much the highlight of the event (well, at least prior to Shelly and Lorri getting up at the end and saying a few words, of course). It was exciting to know that all of Marcie’s hard work really paid off.

After the event, we were very excited about our finally having some long-desired downtime. But alas, we ended up having another very busy/stressful week despite our expectations otherwise. For one thing, the response to Marcie’s video was so great that we ended up getting lots of orders for personal DVD copies (don’t worry folks: video sales proceeds are going to Kol Emeth) and it’s turned into quite an undertaking keeping up. But even more significantly, Marcie discovered a Sunnyvale home on the market that she wanted us to seriously consider purchasing. Although we like our little house in West San Jose, we’ve always thought it would be preferable to live near slightly better schools (our local elementary and junior high schools are OK, but the high school isn’t quite what we’d want for Melody) and even be closer to the rest of Marcie’s family in Los Altos/Mountain View.

However, the problem with trying to buy property in the Silicon Valley is that housing costs are ludicrously high and so you have to often make some pretty significant compromises (thus our living in a smallish home in West San Jose). The chief compromise of the Sunnyvale house was its tiny size (even smaller than our current house). Also, a public park bordered the back fence, freeway noise was omnipresent (though not overwhelmingly loud), and the kitchen was just plain weird. The trade-off was that the house was on a huge lot. The backyard was enormous with incredibly impressive landscaping, a swimming pool, a spa, and even a Koi pond! But of course, you live inside a house, not in a backyard. Thus the main reason for getting that house would be to add on to make it big enough for a growing family. But again, this is the Silicon Valley, which means that the cost of merely buying the house itself would be so high that there would be nothing left for expanding (let alone fixing that strange kitchen). After crunching some numbers, we realized it could be as much as 10 years to accumulate enough funds to expand the house to a functional size. In the meantime, we’d be packed in like sardines. So, after a very long and agonizing period of consideration, we decided to pass.

In the end, this was probably a good thing. After all, what do Marcie and I know about maintaining a Koi pond?! The poor fish would be doomed from the start. Now that we’ve passed on the house, PETA can rest easy.