Last year, I fell into a bit of rut. My job was okay and my social life was okay, but I felt like I was stagnating. For instance, during the year I lived in Houston, I covered three hurricanes and was ultimately fired by a group of managers who, apparently, were trying to play bingo with the most commonly cited traits of horrible bosses.

But it wasn’t boring. Last year, it was getting boring, and I always like to have a project to work on.

So I bought a house.

I always thought home ownership would be a large job. In actuality, to paraphrase an episode of The Simpsons, it’s more like 2,800 small jobs.

Consider the following examples:

1.) Light bulbs. I feel like I’m replacing light bulbs at a much faster pace than when I lived in an apartment. And you can’t get real light bulbs anymore, so when one of the lights above my kitchen counter went out, I screwed in one of those new-fangled compact fluorescents. Suddenly, my kitchen was bathed in a bright white glow that made the place look like a hospital in the 1960s.

2.) Electricity. While I can competently nail things into other things, I don’t, if we’re being honest with each other, know how electricity works. I started losing power, but only to certain circuits and only for brief periods of time.

One afternoon, I decided to get to the bottom of it by going outside and opening up the panel on my electric box. After poking around for a few minutes, I noticed a guy from Oncor climbing the utility pole behind my house.

“We’ve been having an issue on this block with people losing power, but only to certain circuits and only for brief periods of time. I’ll have it cleared up in a few minutes,” he explained.

Thanks to my willingness to poke around in the box, though, one of the circuits in the living room never came back on. That’s when I realized that, for me, the dream of home ownership centered around having a place to watch television.

“I could probably poke around some more and solve the problem,” I thought to myself. “Or I could have the issue addressed quickly and efficiently by a professional.”

I got an extension cord and plugged the TV into the kitchen, instead.

3.) The lawn. The other day, I was filling in for our afternoon anchor, so I wouldn’t have to go to work until after lunch. Previously, I might have slept in and then maybe get some flapjacks.

This time, I went to Home Depot and bought a lawnmower. A lawnmower! That’s a pretty far cry from flapjacks, but the grass had started growing again and I knew if I didn’t take action by Saturday, it was going to get really cold again and everyone would start posting pictures of thermometers on facebook and asking each other if they could believe it was really 80 degrees yesterday.

Since mowing the lawn was scheduled ruin my Saturday, I also decided to pay my taxes.

Every year, because I do a lot of freelance work, I have to pay. This year, I did freelance work and also sold a bunch of stock for the down payment on the house. At the time, I felt really good about myself. Several stocks I’d bought had appreciated handsomely. One pharmaceutical stock had grown 600 percent! And then I saw the bill from The Government.

Suddenly, I have an opinion on the capital gains tax.

“For cryin’ out loud!” I called out. “Why should I have to pay tax just because I did some thorough and effective research?! They should call it a Good Decision Tax.”

I could feel myself, in that moment, blossoming into a modern-day Jack Arnold. I can only hope that some day I marry a woman named Norma so that I might sit at our dining room table surrounded by a stack of paper and yell out things like, “Damn it, Norma, can you believe they’re gettin’ three bucks for sandpaper down at the hardware store? Lousy crooks.”

And I haven’t had flapjack one since I moved in!