Tom saw the house and found it to be nicer than he anticipated, though it is old. Most of the things I vibed about it are correct. It’s a small 2-bedroom, it’s old, it’s square, there’s an old guy involved, no garage/cellar, it is fenced in back and there is a picket fence in front. But I was wrong about Triple-A not managing it and about the exterior color. It’s yellow with green trim.

Anyway, the place has a series of positives and small negatives with one big negative in the middle of it all – next door’s driveway. Next door’s place is actually a garage that’s been converted to what I guess is a 1-bedroom. The sixty-ish handyman who showed the place to Tom described her as a “young lady,” and of course her car was there. Tom rides by the place every day and he’s been seeing the car regularly. Unless she works 2nd or 3rd shift, which I very highly doubt, I’m sure she’s yet another nutty disabled person who’s home all the time. She no doubt has tons of company, too. The only reason I was curious to meet Bev and Pat was that we had to live together, but I don’t want to meet this one even if she will practically be parking on top of our beds. Not unless she does anything that forces me to have to meet her. I know she’d just come off as a kind, considerate person up front just to turn into a rude bitch overnight. If she is tolerable, then I’m sure she’ll be gone by the end of the year. I’ll bet she’s big and heavy, too. I don’t know why, but it seems the heavies love to live next to me. How I wish it could be a drug-free, good-looking gay woman! I know better, though. I know better.

What the source of the noise curse could do is have someone move in with a little kid that uses the driveway to play in since, as we were happy to learn, it is not a shared yard. I’d also worry about freeloaders, given how cheap the place must be, or a college kid with loud music/lots of company, though the town’s only college is not nearby. At least there isn’t nearly the potential for trouble there as opposed to here. Then again, there’s also that big yard on the other side. Who knows what may go on there?

If only that driveway wasn’t there! That’s the one thing that really spoils it. If anyone, be it kids or adults that are either visiting or living there, wants to hang outside on nicer days, that’s where they’ll go. It’s the only place they could go.

The handyman said the woman called to tell him there were mice in the place so he set up traps there. He also set them up in our house just in case they were there, too. Tom assured him neither of us was afraid of mice.

The layout is pretty much as we expected it to be judging by the shape and location of the windows Tom saw. The bedrooms are on the driveway side with the bathroom between them. The thing I don’t like about the bathroom is that there are doors on each side, so you have to enter from the bedrooms and not from a hallway or the living room. There is no hallway, actually. You enter the living room and the front bedroom is off to the side of it, and the kitchen’s off to the back of it. He said most of it is sort of tilted. Anyway, the kitchen’s bigger than this one. It’s an eat-in kitchen, so that’s why. It has blue carpet that’s not new, but that’s been cleaned recently. I get the feeling the previous tenants weren’t very good. The reason the yard is dead is that they wouldn’t water it. It was a couple that split up. One moved to San Diego while the other went elsewhere.

It’s also right on a canal, so we’d have to make sure we didn’t leave doors open with lights on in the warmer weather at night so we don’t get swamped with bugs.

The gas heater is in the living room and while it may radiate into the other rooms, we may use our portable heaters in the bedrooms, but they don’t draw nearly as much juice as these kick-ass wall heaters here do so that’d be ok.

He says the oven’s comparable to this one and that the refrigerator’s newer. You don’t have to open the fridge to get to the freezer like with this one, and it’s self-defrosting, unlike this one.

We could be moving in as little as 10 days from now if he can work the money out and get Pam to accommodate us in any way we may need to. If not, then we’ll be here till the 2nd.

Tom says it’s only the driveway that keeps it from being ideal. As ideal as we could get for being in the city, anyway.

Of the negatives, we have to share a garbage bin with next door, but it’s bigger, so hopefully it’ll accommodate everyone’s trash. You have to go outside to get to the utility at the back corner of the house by next door, though it’s only two steps.

Later…

I went to see Tom off to work. Meanwhile, I should have a few hours before the dog acts up, so I’ll take this time of peace to finish writing about the house.

Like I said, my only concerns are the driveway and anything else setting us back and fucking up our plans. Not just the big ones like the move to California itself, but the little ones like renting DVDs and buying small things every now and then.

Another small negative is that there are no light switches in the rooms, except for the bathroom. Instead, they have pull chains in the center of them. The bedrooms are about equal in size, but it’s hard to tell if the place is really smaller than this one because it’s laid out differently, Tom says.

Both the front and back have small covered porches towards the side where the giant yard is that’ll be perfect for my wind chimes.

Tom said it may be cool to set up the screen room next summer in the yard. That may be cool. I didn’t even know we still had the thing. It’s been sitting in the garage. We’ll have to store most of the stuff that’s been in the garage in the truck. Once it’s sold, maybe we can put stuff that isn’t of much value to us on the back porch or in the yard.

My first thought was to wish there was a clothesline, but then I said, Nah. We don’t have any king-size comforters that don’t fit well in dryers, it’d be too cold to use most of the year, and that may lure next door into using it and the rest of the yard too, although the handyman said they made a special point of letting the woman know that the yard is strictly off-limits to her.

I’ll have to wait and see the place for myself, but I guess I’m going to start off using the living room as an office and sleeping in the front bedroom while he uses the back bedroom for both a bedroom and an office. Right now I can’t imagine the car doors not vibrating the bedroom since it’s not on solid ground and the walls are of wood and not brick. If she won’t let me sleep, then I’ll swap the arrangement and hope for the best.

I don’t know what shocks me more; the fact that he learned it’s not a shared yard or the fact that two guys volunteered to help us move when he mentioned at work that he was looking for someone to tow the truck down there. I got a kick out of how one guy said he’d drive the truck down himself so that if the cops pulled him over he could just say he was thinking of buying it so he was test-driving it. The other guy said he could just drive closely behind it so the cops couldn’t get a good read on the long-expired plate. It’d be a $500 fine if he got caught driving with a dead license and an additional $300 for not having any registration or insurance, so I agree with him that it’d be better to pay $30 to have it towed than $800 in fines because you know we can’t get away with anything.

I was practically in tears yesterday on account of my ear. It’s just so frustrating dealing with the daily discomfort, not knowing for sure what the problem is, or if it’ll go away or get worse, and not being insured. This ear has been a definite curse from God! As if being the daughter of Dureen O hadn’t been enough to say anything of the areas in life I’ve been totally hexed in like sex, money, sleep/schedules and things breaking.

In some ways, our lives are still worse than they used to be. We were always broke, but not this broke. Also, we used to desire each other and we used to have a house we owned, even if one of them was in the midst of a nightmare, and we always had a vehicle to drive, even if it always broke down. Well, we won’t one day be younger, skinnier and appealing to each other, but we should own a place and have a vehicle. I just sometimes think I should actually put effort into seeking out a house I don’t want because then it’ll be harder for someone to take away from us. All I know is that the more I don’t like a particular place, the harder it is to get out of, so maybe I should paint the outside olive green, install gray carpet, and paint the interior a dull shade of yellow-gold. We couldn’t lose it that way! Especially with little Johnny screaming to the right and Spot barking to the left.

Meanwhile, so begins the beginning of the end of life on Shasta Way – finally!

Later…

Just as soon as the dog goes off which will be anytime now, I’ll put the music on.

Meanwhile, I got a letter from Mary, who was “overjoyed” and “honored” that I asked her to pray for me. Yeah, but I gotta tell her thanks, but no thanks. She’d simply be wasting her time.

She said she’ll be in an open dorm since she recently learned that if she were in Ad-Seg she would be unable to attend classes and recreation. She also sent 5 stamps so I could send a disk with her book on it to a friend in North Carolina. Of course, I only needed 3. We’re out of stamps, so we could use the extras.