Ever have one of those times where you just can’t make up your mind as to what you’d do in a certain situation – if it were up to you – and then have something happen to help make up your mind and finalize your decision? Well, what happened yesterday was the final straw. We’re OUTA here first chance we get!

All was perfectly quiet yesterday, so it wasn’t pesky Jesse and his dogs that helped seal my decision, one with which Tom readily agreed. It all started when I went into the closet to get some material to try an idea I had for a new outfit for my Patrice doll and that was yet ANOTHER thing I couldn’t find having to have so much shit jammed in so tightly together thanks to the lack of space here.

I started getting pissed at whatever’s up there that thinks we deserve to live like this when we work just as hard as anyone else and realized that sometimes we can’t always wait for life to come and set us free of a certain situation. Instead, we have to do it ourselves. It’s just going to take a few months and we won’t be able to start working towards it till he’s hired on, but that’s looking more promising than ever based on a conversation he had with one of the long-time bosses at work. He was explaining to Tom that they give you a formal letter asking if you want such and such a position, explaining their benefits and all that when they go to hire you on. He also thinks they may pay more than he first thought, so since they said 5-10 months is when you usually get hired, we can probably move in June, the worst-case scenario being September.

It was the second incident that really reinforced my decision. It’s not just about the lack of space or Jesse and his dogs, it’s about the condition of this old dumpy trailer. We haven’t had as many problems as we could have, but we’ve had enough. I don’t know if I mentioned this but we’ve been having a problem with mold growing on the walls and window sills when it’s rainy, particularly at the bases of it where condensation settles. I’d kill it and it would grow back.

I’d been having a bad feeling about the closet lately and told myself I was just paranoid because we live in a little old shitbox. But when I went to pull out some boxes from against the back wall I discovered this gross, whitish, fuzzy-like fungus growing all over it as well as on some of our shit. I sprayed the holy shit out of it with Lysol and it did kill it, but today I have to pull everything out from floors, drawers and shelves to spray it even more thoroughly and see if any of our stuff got damaged. If anything of significance did, I swear I’ll deduct it from the rent! I don’t think it did, though.

Really, when I saw that shit I said fuck this shit! Something up there may feel we don’t deserve anything better, but I do! And we may never have our own home, but I’ll be damned if I’ll stay here longer than necessary! So unless they lay him off, this is the official beginning of the end.

I loved it at first. After 8 months of being stuffed in a tiny motel room in a seedy part of Sacramento, we were desperate to get out of there and anything seemed like heaven over a motel room. We moved in here in April of 2008 and it was pretty quiet because Whiskey was still a puppy at the time and it was getting hot. Jesse didn’t really start to get on my nerves with the engine gunning till August or September, and the dogs didn’t become a regular problem till he went back to work in November after being put on medical leave for a while. By then we were stuck here as Tom’s unexpected and unwanted 22-month Unemployment trip began.

It’s so funny to think of how disappointed Jesse’s going to be when we do move, LOL. We were good tenants who didn’t ask for much. We didn’t always get what we wanted like when we tried to get him to take responsibility for his own dogs when he’s out, but we never asked for anything unreasonable. So as he’ll know good and well, he may get a repeat of the nightmare that was in here before us. Oh yeah, he had the tenants from hell for a month. They broke into his house, stole his gun and tried to steal his Harley. He had the cops out here and everything. They rented the place to what they thought was a single woman, but she apparently had a naughty boyfriend in tow as well. Even though he has the power to evict, may the next renters drive him crazy as hell!

We’ve simply outgrown this place either way. I am sick to death of it even if it could remain dead quiet forever. It’s not just the big picture, but all the little things I’m sick of. I’m sick of the water problems. I’m sick of old, rusty leaky faucets. I’m sick of having to use something to hold the bedroom door open. I’m sick of how often we get mice in here, though it’s been a while. I’m sick of the lack of kitchen counter space and plugs. I’m sick of how the shelves and cabinets are mostly too high in here. I’m sick of not being able to take a bath because the back of the tub isn’t slanted. I’m sick of the funky cooling system that has no thermostat.

I would really like to have both an AC and a swamp cooler, especially in a REAL house that has a real attic with up ducts for the swamp cooler. And with normal ventilation. The cooler here isn’t fed through any vents, so I can’t close the bedroom door when I’m sleeping during the daytime in the summer, and if I’m sleeping into the night when it’s not that hot, I often wake up cold because the window’s still open which couldn’t be closed before I crashed since it was too warm. If you don’t have up ducts for a cooler, then you have to crack windows. And try not being able to walk all the way around your bed for a few years and see how much you miss it! Having to move the heater just to open the closet door is getting awfully old, too.

And so I have decided that I’m ready to take risks in order to be able to have a decent amount of living space and to be able to set up, use and find things when I want to. Why not? We live on the edge anyway, living paycheck to paycheck, so I figured so what if a bigger place sucks every last dime out of us since we can’t even save here. As long as it’s still somewhat old and noisy we shouldn’t lose it. And that’s just the thing; it’s almost certainly going to be noisier than this. It’s also going to take a hell of a lot bigger deposit to get into the type of place we want than this little dive which only took $175 and the first month’s rent to get into.

I’m no longer worried about Jesse being a bad reference either cuz it hit me – duh – that he’d give any references he may give BEFORE we move and leave him with a few nasty surprises, not after. The new landlord isn’t going to wait till we move in, then call Jesse and ask what kind of people we are that just moved in so Jesse can then tell them how we failed to let him know about the broken heater so we could use portables to heat some of the place and make him foot the bill since he pays the electricity. And the fact that we left the place a mess and had the floor vents taped. When we realized it wasn’t worth having Jesse fix the main heater and that the oven heated the kitchen and living room much more efficiently, we knew this meant there had to be holes in the heating duct and so I taped the vents with clear packing tape. I was going to remove the tape when it started pulling the paint off the grille, so I’ll leave him to have to deal with this.

I’ve decided we shouldn’t have to clean the place when we leave because our deposit is non-refundable. If they want to give us the deposit back, then we’ll clean it, but since I don’t expect they’ll do that I’d like them to use the $175 to clean the place rather than us basically pay them to have us do it.

I not only wish he’d get hired on but could stay there till he retires, though that may not be very realistic. Almost all jobs will fire you or lay you off if you stay there long enough.

I just can’t wait to escape this place! I wanted to live here comfortably till we bought a place but in 500 moldy square feet? I don’t think so! And I still don’t think we’ll ever get to buy a place. I’m so ready to go that if we get a bigger place and then have to kill ourselves a few months later cuz they lay him off and we want to escape homelessness, I’d rather that and die sooner in a comfortable place than live a long life in a piece of shit like this!

It was nice to wake up smiling, knowing we have a plan in mind. looks up the hill towards Jesse’s place Yeah, smile asshole. :) Your days with us fine folks are numbered!:)

Later…

I’m already tiring down yet I still have so much to do. Part of it is this dreary weather and the fact that I barely slept 6 hours last night since I was all excited about moving in a few months.

It’s cold and rainy, but there’s not much wind. Tom said there sure was a couple of nights ago. He said the whole place shook and he was surprised I slept through it. Yesterday wasn’t as wet as they said it would be. Even the jackrabbits didn’t think so since a baby jackrabbit went hopping by at one point.

Eileen emailed me last night asking if I’d been to our mailbox lately, but nope. Tom stopped before work today so whatever she sent – a Valentine’s card? – will be brought home with him after work.

Got a message from Maliheh last night. A blood vessel in her eye is leaking and it’s been messing up her vision which sucks. We exchanged emails today too, and I let her know we’re fed up here and why.

I used up the entire can of Lysol we had so I have to wait till Tom gets home to spray the other corner of the closet. I left Tom a message to grab another can on his way in. He’s stopping at the store for soda and a few other things. I ain’t putting back in that damn closet nearly as much as I took out of it! The shelf and drawers, thank God, are okay.

I find it hard to believe Jesse didn’t know this occurs in the winter and couldn’t have at least warned us as he warned us about the poison oak. Didn’t he live here at one point before he moved into his house? Besides, other tenants would’ve said something about it, wouldn’t they? We’re lucky we didn’t get really sick and so is he! More reason not to feel bad about any mess we may leave behind. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Not even back east. I’ve also never lived in an old trailer before either.

God, things are going to take forever now! Unless he does get a huge raise, us having to save up the deposit money to move is going to really delay other things. I need new glasses and of course there’s still this dentist I’m just not meant to ever see.

Wish I knew last summer that it was our last July, then our last August, though if I had known it probably would’ve scared the shit out of me, not knowing it wasn’t because we were going to buy the house we’ll never have in 2012, but back to rental-hopping instead. I would’ve thought it was because we’d run out of money and had to off ourselves.

But so begins “the last” everything and the “I will never agains.” This is our last February in this dump. I will never again clean anything of theirs unless it’s for our own comfort (dusting the blinds, wiping the top of the refrigerator).

I am so mad at God above for doing this to us. Or for at least allowing it to happen. Why are we living like bums and still having to struggle so often at our ages while some 20-year-olds live better than we do and will never know a day in their life of struggling or living in old bummy places?

The excitement I feel of moving on, even if it won’t exactly be to peaceful paradise, helps balance out some of the anger. I’m not excited, though, about escaping these dogs since I know I’ll only have to listen to others wherever we end up. I’m just excited to escape this damn trailer.

I’d love to coat Jesse some pork chops in dirt and fry him French fries in motor oil like Andy and I joked, but he and Maryann will get something else instead. :) How about a nasty piece of my mind? Yeah, I might even tip them off as to my blog, LOL, but not till we’re out of here and it’s safe to do so.

I hope we get to get out of the roofing expedition. Last year he said he wanted to redo this roof “next year.” But it is next year. Oh God, please let us out of having to deal with that, too!

I know it’s just a dream like in the dream I had, but I wish we could get a 2-story house so I could run up and down the stairs for exercise. Then I wouldn’t need a treadmill.

There are some gorgeous houses selling for just 34k in Arizona. That’s cheaper than here, not that I’d ever move back to such a fucked up state. Arizona’s become a very dangerous place to be and there are more houses and fewer jobs than there are here, so that’s why it’s so cheap.

It’s been dead quiet today. Hmm…a sign that the end of our time here is near, or a sign of the rain? I’ve noticed that for some reason it’s either quiet or not overly noisy whenever I first move into a place. Then 4-6 months later it gets noisy, and in the last few months, it gets better. It’s a weird coincidence, alright.