The seventh, and worst, sense (train of thought about place)

A sense of normal.

There it is. The last room in the townhouse is about done, which means we're finally unpacked and we can call this place home for a while. As Carly said, "and then we'll just move again."

This weekend, we got stuff to plant in the backyard. Tomatoes, peppers, figs. Yeah, figs. Carly says that the deck in the back of the house is the best part of the place, and I don't disagree. It's well shaded, off the main drag, and big enough for a small party to hang out. The greatness of the deck outweighs the other little foibles of the house.

Neighbors recognize us. They wave.

We went walking through the hood today, just to the store and then over to a nearby park where Wolfie went down the slide head first for the first time. He loved it, but got a little bit of a friction burn on his hands and we had to stop. The kid is interacting with the world in new ways every day. It's a riot. We're starting to hear subtleties in his weird words, picking out the differences between "sit" and "stairs" and "socks." Most of the time, it's a short sentence. "I sit," which means, "I want to sit down, here, now." It usually sounds like "OH SHIT."

There are a number of houses for sale in our greater neighborhood. Most of them are stupidly overpriced. Our neighborhood has been targeted by realtors. People keep leaving doorhangers or sending promo things or even knocking on our door--they go door to door in this hood--asking if we are interested in selling. We tell them we rent, and we just moved in, and they smile and leave. Then we get more letters.

I miss having the freedom of my own place. I also don't miss the obligations of paying property taxes and mowing lawns. Carly certainly wants to buy a house sometime. She talks about how she likes our neighborhood and is constantly checking real estate prices on Zillow whenever we drive through a new area.

I spent the first ten years of my life in a trailer at the edge of a trailer park. The next ten were at the house my parents still occupy. After that, it's been a new place almost every two years. Thayer. My folks' house again. Thayer again. Glenwood. Sugar Street. Raritan. Newark. Jersey City. The apartment on Georgia Ave. This place. It would be nice to not be a nomad anymore. I want the Wolf to appreciate having his own space, something he can rely on. Fewer permanent addresses.

And, on that note:

Life in Transit

One of the great wonders and frustrations of my modern life is mass transit.

Here I am, in an air conditioned metro car, stuck between stations, listening to podcasts over my sweet headphones, tapping away on my smartphone, watching the time drain away when I need to pick up my kid.

This week, Carly is out of town on business, which means I am a single dad. Without me picking him up, Wolf will probably be eaten by the daycare ladies. When I do finally rescue him, we have only a few hours to eat and play and run around before he crashes. Somehow, I need to find time to feed myself and do dishes and unwind before I crash.

And now, I have to switch trains.

How We Move 3: (I can't remember the third part)

Six months later, we have finally gotten away from the old landlord.

We found a townhouse about five blocks from the old place. It's a little older, used to have a bug problem, and has a few maintenance issues, but it's bigger, has a backyard and a porch. We got a grill of our own for the first time since we left Ohio. The kid and dog both love running around outside, and it's a hell of a lot quieter. There are no neighbors upstairs stomping around, no sirens right outside our window and solid cinderblock walls between us and the next townhouse over.

The move nearly bankrupted us. With the sudden cost of movers, paying double rent and utilities for a month, security deposits and everything, we had to dump out all of our savings and burn up a bunch of credit balances we were just getting ready to pay down. Six months later, we're no longer living paycheck to paycheck. It has been hard.

The Wolf's health has finally improved, also. From about Thanksgiving to the beginning of March, we all had some kind of illness or another. In December, The Wolf came down with RSV which led to pneumonia. He was in the hospital for about three days, lost a bunch of weight, and had a cough that lingered for months. I think he and I are just now getting over that--I still have some phlegmy mornings every week.

When we broke our lease at the Flats at Wheaton Station, Gables--the management company that owns the thing--took the option of imposing a penalty of about $2,000 on us. We tried to negotiate with them, because we thought it was really their company and their building that made the living conditions untenable, but they had nothing of it. They actually didn't even return our emails. Last month, we started to get letters from a rent collection agency.

The guy at the agency was quite cool. He was in the process of putting the file together to report us to the credit bureaus, but noticed that there was an old address on the file, so he gave us a call. "It seemed odd that they'd send a demand notice to the address that you broke your lease to leave from..." he said. I explained how the whole thing evolved, and we resubmitted our offer of paying half of what Gables was demanding. He said "that's about the most reasonable offer I've heard from someone like you and I've been doing this for over 20 years." He said he'd send it up and was optimistic that it would be accepted.

It wasn't. Gables wanted the whole amount.

The best he could do was 80% of the total, which is what his contract allowed him to collect without any input from Gables. So we did that. Hopefully, all these shenanigans won't affect our credit.

That matters so much now because the credit market is so shitty, you have to have a credit score of at least 720 to even be considered for a home loan. With our debt burden including the houses in Akron, old credit cards that bubbled up only a few years ago, weird little utility payments that we believe we paid but don't have any records of now, stupid, stupid, stupid lawsuits from former clients, and all our student loans... our scores aren't great.

But we're getting there. Our careers and our salaries are doing just fine. We've got a month or so of savings right now and a few ways to put our numbers back together. It's a slog, but we'll get through it.

Now, pictures of the Wolf.