Skip to main content

Brick Home

Recently while driving home from a beach town that gets is fair share of hurricane weather each year, I could not help noticing how flimsy the new homes looked compared to the older ones, which tended to be further inland. The older homes were generally made of brick, were single story and not close to the water. For all those reasons, they had stood the time even if they were not the most desirable pieces of property. The new homes have a nice view of the ocean which is a treat on days when the weather is nice. It can ugly when that is not the case. 

I wondered why more of the new homes were not made of brick and durable things that would not get flung around in a storm. People were not entering but leaving the profession of bricklaying for one - maybe fearing robots taking over their jobs in the future. In the interim, while those conceptual robots become reality, the pool of talent dries up and there is no one to build old fashioned houses. It is also true that these homes are not without challenges. But in a place where wind and water can rip your wood and vinyl home apart, brick does seem to be the better choice. 

There comes an extraordinary level of confusion I felt when a person has a choice in fundamental things - like how their dwelling should be constructed. The answer should be clean and unambiguous so you don't have to worry every time the season turns if some part of their home will be compromised. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...