The joys of being a grown up

I know there is no greater joy than having your own place to live, however when this place is given to you by the government, eh, the place isn't the greatest. Being military my husband gets the option and the benefit to have a house on post (what the Army calls the military installation). Now don't get me wrong, we are thankful to have a place to live and call our own, but lately the company that does our housing has just pissed me off. Piscern is the name of the privatized housing company and at first they were great. But it seems that the longer we live here the more frustrated I become.

There are pros and cons to living on post, however today my list of cons seems to outweigh the pros just because I am in a pissy mood. We live in a 2 bedroom 1.5 bathroom duplex with a garage, its nice and all and has about 1500 square feet; it's nothing huge but it works for the two (soon to be three of us). However, our home is NOT worth the $1100 that the Army gives us for BAH (basic allowance for housing). Because we live on post in the military housing they keep all of our BAH and we don't see a cent of it. Now if our house was worth all of our BAH I wouldn't have a problem with them keeping in all but when the place you live clearly doesn't add up to that amount it's frustrating to have the Army keep it.

Now, a pro to living on post, we don't pay for our utilities. I guess you could say that some of our BAH goes towards that as well, but it's still frustrating to not have the "extra" money to pocket. Another pro is when something is wrong or broken in the house you call maintenance to come fix it for you. When you have your own house you fix it yourself. Yet another con to the pro, the maintenance guys are always a pain to get a hold of and to have them fix the problem the first time, let alone actually getting them out to your home within a few days of the issue happening. For example, today Brian and my carbon monoxide detectors randomly started to beep, not go off, but just beep. We tried resetting them, unplugging them, and then putting them back in and nothing has worked. Well because it is Sunday, maintenance is off today and because tomorrow is MLK day, they will be off again. *sigh* So we are hoping that we can get a hold of someone on Tuesday morning and get someone out here by Wednesday to fix this rather annoying issue.

Sorry that this post is more like a whiny vent rather than anything important or entertaining. Just some Army wife insight on a "perk" of the military.