Remember how I said Tom and I agreed I’d one day win a vehicle? Well, I sorta did! That is if you want to call a 2007 Yamaha Rhino ATV valued at $9000 a vehicle! What a win!!! Yes, it’s too bad it’s not a regular car, but we might be able to get around 4 grand for it. The question is how long it’ll take and what hassles we have to go through while we’re at it. You know we have to fight tooth and nail for most of my wins. We don’t know if we’ll be required to come up with licensing fees and all that in order to sell it, or if the dealership would trade us a cheap car for it or what. We don’t know anything yet other than that fortunately we won’t have to pay taxes on it till ’09.

We’re glad we didn’t win it up in Oregon. Klamath didn’t have a Yamaha dealer, so we’d have had to go up to Medford just to get the thing. It seems I’ve won more since being in this state than the two years I swept in Oregon!

We’re hoping to get 4 or 5 grand for it. What we’d do with the money will depend on a lot of things. I played mix-n-match in my mind with all the possibilities, but we won’t know anything for sure till we find out what we can get for it. We both agree that the number one priority is getting a new vehicle! One that’ll be reliable for more than 5 minutes.

When Tom got the overnight letter about it two days ago, our first thought was to get a car, then hope for a house, but probably end up stuck in an apartment with hopefully a little money left over for some furniture and other things while we had to listen to the neighbor’s shit all around us and he looked for a better-paying job that would insure us both. Then maybe in a year or two, we could finally find a suitable house till we either came up with the money to buy land and have something built, or to buy something in a retirement community in 5 years. But as much as I love this state, it’s just so damn expensive here that I still think getting a house may be too hard. Plus, it’s not like he could just go out and get a better job overnight, and we may never be able to afford land here anyway, which means we may have to shoot over the Nevada border a couple of hours away. We’re kind of hoping we don’t have to do that, though, and have him be jobless again. We nearly lost everything twice and that’s more than enough!

Then an idea came to me. We both agree the worst places to be are apartments and motels, so why not get a cheap motor home or trailer if it truly does turn out to be that our only options are to either stay here or join the circus in a complex? Yes, campgrounds and trailer parks can get a bit wild too, but at least we’d own the thing outright and it wouldn’t be attached to someone else’s place, and the cost of renting the space to put it on would be cheaper. We’d be cramped in, but this way we could take our time in figuring out where to go from there. Finding the right rental house and a new job takes time, so a trailer may give us the time to do things right, and of course, if he did find a job that paid big bucks, that’s not something we’d want to just throw away, so there are going to be a lot of variables as to where we end up, but I just want to get there! So hopefully we’ll soon be on our way to a place we can one day finally call home for good.

As long as he has to drive around in a piece of shit that won’t even idle and that has an expired plate, we can’t cruise around looking for individuals who will rent houses to just about anybody because they can’t afford to advertise online (so they stick a sign in their window) and who can’t afford to be too picky like those going through property managements. Most of them require you to make 3 times the rent when it comes to houses. All we could get would be a 1-bedroom apartment. Maybe 2, if it were especially cheap and kind of dumpy.

There’s a chance we’d either have to keep our stuff in storage indefinitely or that I’d have to sell a lot of the dolls and definitely the mannequins if we did get a trailer, but I’ll gladly do just that if it means keeping out of apartments. This may explain why I haven’t had apartment dreams like crazy. I’d think I’d be bombarded with apartment nightmares if that’s truly where we were headed.

If we never win enough to buy a place outright, or close to it, then I’m still hoping we can get a reliable vehicle, get into a house here, then buy a house in a retirement community also here. I think that’d be the easiest thing. Either that or still get into a house here, then save 10-20 grand to get a trailer and take it to some cheap land elsewhere. I’d just hate for him to have to be jobless again! Even if we owned a trailer and they fired him or laid him off, we’d still have to find a way to pay for the space it was on. Who knows, a trailer might be what we should’ve done from the get-go. We should’ve maybe done here what failed in Oregon. I still wish Satish would call to say he was ready to rent his house to us! That’d make life easier, alright, and I could keep my stuff and get a few more goodies, too.

Tom and I laughed when we remembered getting excited over my first “big win” which was the $630 special edition guitar. Even diamonds are pennies compared to this one!