I've also decided to give up on certain roses. I've bought some over and over again from Vintage. They always fail, probably because they simply don't want to grow on their own roots. I used to blame myself, but then a woman contacted me to ask for a cutting from Fantan. She said everyone else's had died, including the one Vintage Gardens had. Mine's still alive, but it's so tiny and so frail and it may never grow big enough to produce anything extra for cuttings. If it does give up the ghost, I won't bother buying another one. The same goes for Victoriana, Tom Brown, Gray Pearl, and a host of other itsy-bitsy, half-dead darlings.
There's something else in your post, Andi, that made me laugh: the idea of obsessive housecleaning as a virtue. For about a year and a half in my life, I had a surgically clean house. That was when I was married to an alcoholic homicidal maniac. I wanted to kill him, but he was more than a foot taller than I and more than 50 pounds heavier, so I killed germs instead. A single fingerprint on the toaster sent me into a cleaning frenzy. I used a toothbrush to clean every bit of grout in the tiled shower room every couple of days. Then I got a divorce and my house was never clean again.
As soon as I was a happy person with a strong sense of security and no feelings of imminent dread, I stopped the daily cleaning. So, a clean house was a sign of neurosis in my case, and a lack of urgency to clean is a sign of mental health.
