Last month, a friend of ours commented that the problems we are having with our house in La Moraleja (water leaking, ineffective heat, grumpy neighbors) are like rocks in our shoes. Sure, we can keep walking and making progress but they slow you down and generally make things no fun.

Since we seem to have trouble escaping the 6 month funk, and life in Spain is still not so fun (don't get me wrong, we do have fun but we have a lot of not fun as well), I'm on a mission to identify and remove as many of these rocks as I can. Unfortunately, this means trading money for time and convenience. At this point, I'm wiling to do that. Once I get things smoothed out I will need to cut back and get more cost effective.

(I apologize in advance. These are such first world problems and I'm embarrassed to complain when there is so much suffering in the world, but they do decrease our overall enjoyment of life and therefore I want them gone!)

The rocks (and my strategy for fixing/removing them)

Mowing, watering, trimming and maintaining the landscaping (gardener hired)
Using our little spare time to try to keep (housekeeper hired)
Jess and I are still driving on our US driving licenses. We're not sure how legal (or not legal) this is. It's causing stress for two reasons:
1. Never sure what will happen if there is an accident or we get stopped by a policeman who wants to check if we are residents.
2. We continue to have to rent a car from Hertz since my company will not give us a leased car until I have a local Spanish driving license.

(Jess signed me up for Spanish driving school which is a three-day intensive course, over an entire weekend. This is the first step towards getting my local license.)

This sounds really trivial, but I don't have Mr. Ren to help drop-off and pick up my dry-cleaning and dress shoe repair. In the US this isn't really a problem because you can drop it off to/from your commute to/from work. For me, I only know of one place where I know the system and how it works. And this place is not near my office and the opening hours (like most Spanish businesses) is not convenient (e.g. opens at 10:00am). Could I do it on the weekend? Yes. Do I want to spend my Saturday running errands instead of hanging out as a family? No. Note that these types of businesses are not open on Sunday so Saturday is the only option. (Investigate and find a place near my office that would allow me to conveniently pick-up and drop-off. Or, move to a new house with a dry-cleaning place within walking distance, and ask Fang to help with the pick-up/drop-off.)
Getting a local EU corporate credit card. We have a Spanish debit card, but when I travel I need a credit card. For the past year I have been using our US credit card. This is bad for many reasons, but the main one is that we don't get paid in US dollars any more. So to continually rack up debt in US dollars means we have to pay the credit card bill from savings. And the funny thing about savings is that if you only take out, and never put in, you eventually don't have anymore savings. Go figure. (Finally, I bit-the-bullet and spent a few hours registering for a local card (I was denied once on a technicality so I had to do the entire process twice.) So now I just received my corporate credit card for Spain. I even figured out how to activate it. However, I haven't figured out yet how to pay my bill.)
Not being able to speak Spanish. This is a tricky one and something that is causing daily stress. We have enough 'survival Spanish' to order coffee or go to a restaurant. That's not really what I'm talking about. The situations that cause stress are the non-routine things. Like yesterday when I missed a package delivery at home. You have to drive to a random warehouse and coordinate a pickup. The package was addressed to Jess and not to me, which is a minor thing but it blew up the entire transaction, and I had to call in a friend to do the translation. Was a big deal? No. Was it stressful and make me miss 30 minutes of family supper time? Yep. Did I have to abandon the entire process and come home empty-handed? Yes. (Continue my Spanish lessons but put more effort and energy into taking lessons regularly and practicing daily. I think the formula for learning a new language is quite straight-forward, however spending the time required and executing on it is not.)
Switching the kids from their current school (ICS) to the American school (ASM). We've talked about this enough so I won't go into details about our rationale for wanting to change. (Done. Deposit on the tuition has been paid for 2014-2015 school year.)
Our house is fine. The location is great, we have a nice backyard, the kids can walk to ICS and my commute to work is less than 20 minutes. However, it's not located near ASM or our church, and the house is old enough that it has a lot of heating/cooling/plumbing 'inconveniences' (nothing catastrophic). We don't need to move but I think it would be more convenient to live on the west side of Madrid in a newer house. (We inquired about what it would take to move to a new house when our current lease is up. It's not easy. Through a connection we found an Argentinian family who is moving to London during the summer so we looked at their house. It could be a possibility.)
Here's another trivial thing that sounds about as silly as the dry-cleaning 'rock'. I take a gigantic salad to work every day for lunch. Salads are great but washing, peeling, and cutting vegetables every morning before work is not great. (In China, I eventually worked it out with Xiao Guo that she would prep vegetables each day, and make sure there was a salad prepared in the refrigerator for someone (typically me) every day. We're not there with Fang yet but it's part of my plan before summer.)