"Your words have no power to alter the truth. Your perception does not affect any reality but your own... it is your words and deeds that cast your reflection. "

~Luna Jade, musician

Monday, August 16, 2010

The move to Pottstown

So we returned back to N'Awlins from Pa. I had a new job in hand, assuming I could find us a place to live. We'd checked the papers when we were up in the area and the prices were a tad much for us, considering only one of us would have a job when we got there. Stupid, yeah I know, but to us it looked like an improvement. I wanted to stay another day in the area and try to find a place to live, but he had this terrible urge to get back down south. Seems that urge was right on the money.

When we got back to the duplex, we found a note on our door. It was from the landlady saying she was going to be in the area inspecting the properties. When? That very day. Did I mention that we had 12 cats and 8 of them she had no clue we had? We'd been away for 3-4 days and ... well let's just say it was a HORRID mess. Not that it wasn't normally a mess because the jerk wouldn't do that one friggin chore as often as he was supposed to (2-3 times a day for that number of animals and I was lucky if he did it ONCE)... but this was 10 times as bad. Why did we have so many cats? Because nature boy had allowed not just one stray access to the house (the idea was to adopt the ONE cat off the street) but 4 of them. We didn't have the money to fix the one, nevermind all 4 (plus the male kitten we'd adopted) so when the 2 stray females went into heat I tried my best to keep them separated from the rest. But ding-bat... thought the one female was "too old" to conceive and allowed her free roaming when I wasn't home. He learned quickly that there isn't usually a too old for cats. Top things all off, one of the stray males got ahold of the other stray female. *sigh* Both litters came within days of each other. Only 2 kittens survived in each litter. So you can imagine the mess we came back to and how we spazzed trying to get things cleaned up before inspection. He headed out the door with a rent check and managed to convince her that we'd just gotten home from a long trip and that I wasn't feeling well but things were working great in the house. Thankfully, that was enough to get her to not show up on the doorstep.

Not sure where I found it, but I got a listing of the rental properties close to the area we needed to target and found one that "would do". The landlord's secretary was very nice and sent us some photos so we could see the place and decide if we liked it. She said it was similar to a single wide trailer in width with a basement access. We figured, we'd been in a single-wide before and it wasn't so bad so we sent in the app with a first month's rent with the condition we could send in the next part of the deposit when we got there as we had other expenses to deal with as well (moving being the biggest). An agreement was come to and we were all set on that end. Now to just get our stuff there.

Originally, a friend of ours was going to pay for a moving van so we could get our stuff to Pa. It was being done this way because we didn't have a credit card to put the truck on and they wouldn't take cash (especially for a cross country move). The object was to get moved and then pay the friend back as we could. At least that was MY intention, I can't say if it was his but my bet would go to that he wouldn't. Somehow, the deal fell through. Not sure if it was there wasn't enough credit on that card or if it was that the friend thought about it and decided that they knew better than that.... all I know is that there suddenly was no truck for us to utilize. What to do? Ok... so we take the little extra we have and ship at least some of the stuff and pack the car with the rest. I packed up everything, weighed it all and then went to the UPS site to calculate about how much it would cost to ship. *SHOCK* Omigoodness that wasn't going to be an option. Time to pare things down. So I started the process of weeding out, reboxing, reweighing, entering the totals, *sigh* rinse and repeat. This went on for two days. Everytime I said that it was still too much, he'd fuss and scream how he couldn't possibly weed anymore out. The biggest problem? His books that he just HAD to have. In his defense, many were limited editions and a number of them were first editions... so he DID have a point. However, when you have to choose between books or NECESSITIES for the home, I'm all for the necessities. He kept saying to put some of the stuff in the car. I told him it wasn't going to work as the "kids" had to ride somewhere. The whole back seat was going to be taken up with their travel cages as it was. Of the 12 boxes we shipped, we ended up with 8 of them being his damned books. Very little went in the line of household items, in fact I had to replace nearly everything that was in the kitchen. Thank goodness for Salvation Army stores, I'm tellin ya. I would guess that about 95% of the household goods and personal stuff got left behind.

The hardest part of finding any kind of home is when you have fur-children to contend with. Many landlords prefer no pets but if you must have pets, then keep it to one or two and the smaller the better. Dogs seem to be better accepted than cats because they're "less destructive". A well trained cat, however, is not destructive in the slightest and if the box is cleaned properly they don't leave all that much of an odor (some, not much though). So basically, it's the owner's fault the house stinks. This same problem can be said regarding dog owners if they allow the pooch to potty inside. The smell tends to amplify with the number of critters the household has. Needless to say, most places are fine with one.. ok with two but anymore 4 legged critters than that, they draw the line. You can imagine what I was going through knowing I had 12 in this house. I finally drew the line and said that we needed to reduce the number of felines travelling with us. We'd keep the original 3 that we'd had since NY and the one kitten (who was a HUGE yearling at this point) we'd adopted from a family that was at the first school. Beyond that, I said ONE of the kittens each but the adults have to go. I chose the yearling's son (he was a long coated yellow tiger) and waited for a decision from dippy. He wanted the one stray male's son, which was fine (he was a cute little porker). Then it was ... "well we cant leave this one because he's ill and all they'll do is put him down"... which I relented to simply because although I hated the cat, the last thing I wanted was him put down because his "sick" was simply old age. We bundled the rest up in carriers and called Animal Control. While waiting, dippy decided that he couldn't live without just one more of the kittens... a faded calico female. We argued over that one for near on the hour while waiting for the AC to show up. I still don't know how I lost that fight. We turned over the other 4 to the AC when they showed up. God help me the lie we spun regarding the cats we handed over. Although it's fewer cats than I planned to send off, it's a miracle I got him to agree to at least 4. If he'd had his way, we would have had all 12 in that car. I do believe the lack of space was the only reason he relented.

We packed up the car the next day and headed out, leaving the keys with a neighbor and telling them to help themselves to everything we left. Clothes, stuff for the kitchen, everything was fair game except the appliances. There were 4 pet taxis in the back of the car (the oldest 2 cats each in their own carrier and the other 6 divided up into the remaining two) and odds and ends stashed around them. The clothes and the computer, which I insisted must go because I'd paid for it out of my own money and if he could have all those books then I could have this, were all stashed in the trunk. It took us 3 days to get there. The gas mileage was worse than the previous trip, but that was to be expected considering how loaded down the car was. It didn't stop him from bitching about it though. We won't go into the fact that a couple times the hotel we ended up at only had 2 doubles in the room (instead of a king or queen) and I opted to sleep alone. Hey, he was a thrasher and I wanted to be able to sleep. I mean, what the hell, he never wanted to touch me anyhow! Why should it bother him if Im in another bed, it's not as though I was sleeping with someone else.

It was late when we arrived at the new place. We checked it out and the place gave me the creeps. Not sure what it was about it. The livingroom was the worst with that huge window facing the street. You see, the place we'd rented was converted from one of those old timey stores. The ones that little boutiques are in in the small towns. You know the ones, with the big store front windows you can look into without stepping back from the sidewalk and the other big window around the side where their window displays always were. Yeah. One of those. No curtains available to put up right now and 8 cats that the whole town was going to be able to see. I freaked. We went to a hotel and signed in. I called the landlord's secretary to see if we could get out of the lease. The plan was to call the neighbor in the morning and tell them to hold up, we're coming back. Technically we still had that place available (*sigh* yeah, we'd jumped lease and until the 1st the landlady wouldn't have known anything, we still had time). Well, of course we couldn't get out of this for at least a year so we were stuck with this creepy little place.

Thankfully, we were able to get our money back on the hotel.... well most of it. We hadn't messed it up, just used the phone. Dippy took us back to that rental and we were met by the upstairs neighbor. She was such a sweet lady, but I had this cold chill go up my back. For you see, this lady was nearly the spit and image of that one girl dingy had a crush on years and years ago. Accounting for the passing of time, this is about what I would guess she'd look like. Short blonde hair, blue eyes that twinkled when she laughed. Time had come full circle and I knew the end was near.


2 comments:

Intense Guy said...

You can feel the end coming... its like the theme music from "Jaws" (or perhaps Psycho) has been cued up.

Sounds like WalMart really didn't understand you - but others I know that work (hard) there say the same thing (basically the store managers all suck).

LadyStyx said...

I won't say all suck because I've had a couple that were really good to me.

Still more coming to the story... another several months until the trip and then the several months up to the divorce. Really gotta get this done....