Waiting for the other shoe

So it's happened, our house is sold. Our poor foreclosed-upon rental house was sold at auction on Monday (postponed from Friday) -- to the bank that held the loan, which is what my attorney-niece told me would probably happen.

So now we wait for the other shoe to drop, that shoe being our eviction notice. It is possible that the shoe will be some other form of contact, such as a letter from the bank demanding that we start paying it rent. We'd love that shoe! We'd love to go back to paying rent! But it probably won't be that shoe. It will probably be the eviction notice shoe, at which point we will have 90 days until we have to move out. The bank may argue that the 90 days began on the day of sale, which would mean we'd have to be out in mid-January. I don't know. We'll just have to see.

The immediate issue is what to do about the tortoises, who are just about ready to hibernate. We don't want them to go deep down in their burrows and go to sleep, since they will not want to come up again in mid-January when we might move.

Instead, we have banished them from their pens and are letting them roam around the yard all day. This is OK because it's not too hot during the day and not too cold at night. During the day they find shady spots to rest in. At night they burrow down in a pile of pine needles, under a tumbleweed, in a corner of the yard. When it gets really cold at night, we will put them in boxes, probably in the garage.

OUR ALTERNATIVES

As I see it, we have five alternatives, not all of which are under our control. I suppose that means they aren't true alternatives.

1. Move to wherever Rocket Boy gets a new job (not under our control, since as yet Rocket Boy does not have a new job).

2. Move back to Boulder and live off the income from our rental houses while we search for work. It would be vastly cheaper for us to live in our own house than to rent a house anywhere else. There's the health insurance problem though.

3. Stay in this house (not under our control, depends on what the bank and any future owners want to do).

4. Rent another house in Ridgecrest. Desperately annoying to have to sign a new 12-month lease, especially if Rocket Boy suddenly got a job offer elsewhere.

5. Buy a house in Ridgecrest. Prices are so low right now that we could end up with a mortgage payment lower than our rent. Then, whenever Rocket Boy got another job somewhere else, we could rent out the house for more than the mortgage payment. But it would mean yet another house to pay insurance and property taxes on. Plus we'd probably need to sell a house to get enough money for a good down payment, and it would take a while to sell a house, especially since they have tenants living in them.

Waiting, waiting.... waiting for the other shoe to drop.