Living was expensive. Korrey Orlosky knew this because he had seen his own mother struggle through poverty, raising him as a single parent. Although his new wife's parents had been generous, helping them to some degree, the house that they had chosen together was still small and dingy, a stain on the otherwise tourist-approved Barnacle Bay. After the construction had been finished and the furniture bought, they had only §500 to their name, which made them the poorest of their neighbors by far, not that Korrey could manage to make himself care about what the neighbors thought.
Korrey wasn't worried. He knew that, although having a bigger house and fancier things was nice (as he had learned from his brief visits to his wife's house when they were teenagers) it wasn't absolutely needed. He had grown up just fine, hadn't he? And he did not have to worry about Elayne - she had never been high maintenance, despite her growing up in a well-off family. The most she ever complained about was that there was hardly enough room to practice her cardio workouts.
As for Korrey himself, he had decided to pick up gardening... as a profession. It was something that his mother had done in her spare time, but it was one of the few things that he enjoyed in life. Elayne was heading for greatness in sports - this was apparent to the both of them. He knew that everything would turn out well for them, two sims who were both doing something they loved.
In reality, Elayne wasn't as cowed as Korrey thought. But, she kept it to herself, not wanting to fight with him. She loved him, that was for sure. Part of loving someone was knowing of their faults and accepting them, and Korrey tended to believe that he knew everything. People were not her passion. She had always been serious, and so when she couldn't relate to her peers, she would exercise. The same went for when she was worried, and so for the first few weeks in their new house, all Elayne really did was work herself until her muscles ached and then spend some time in the bathtub before going to bed, although sometimes she did find herself painting like her life depended on it, although she was neither creative nor talented.
In truth, Elayne was scared to death of being out of her parents house and on her own. She had grown up relatively safe, but she had watched Korrey grow up just on the other side of the street, his mother working herself to death in the Cafe kitchen trying to pay the bills for what was hardly a shack. Their house was the same - hardly a shack - but Elayne attempted to be optimistic. In time, once money started coming in, they could start renovating and turn their little, dated shack into a real house. But that was going to take work.
She was painfully aware of how Korrey had begun to settle for the life he'd had as a child. He wanted to become a farmer - to spend all day tending to vegetables and then selling them for a meager price on the market. Basically, a poor man's sport. As Elayne laid into her new job as a Rabid Fan, she hoped that he would come around... and perhaps learn the cooking skill.
