We're anxiously waiting for our foreclosed rental house to be sold at auction, checking the notices in the newspaper every day. So far the auction hasn't been scheduled. But another house on our street (a couple blocks west) went up for auction, so I looked it up on the Kern County Recorder's website, and if I'm reading this right, it looks like it went into foreclosure TWO YEARS ago. Does that mean we have two years until we get kicked out? In some ways that would be nice (two years paying our rent into an escrow account -- we'd have a lot of money saved!), but in other ways it wouldn't. For example, this house REALLY needs a new roof. Hmmm.
It's weird to be living in a house for which no one is responsible. The other day, Baby A was banging a toy against the wall and I said "Don't do that, you're scratching the wall." And then I thought, who cares? Our security deposit is long gone. The bank doesn't know what the condition of the house was when we moved in. We could do all kinds of things to the house if we wanted to. We could trash it (intentionally, I mean). But that's so dull. We could paint the walls interesting colors. For that matter, we could paint murals on the walls. We could replace all the switchplates in the house (deducting them from the "rent" of course) with ones that look like this:
or this:
and who would care?
We could pull up the horrible front lawn and replace it with rocks (I'd really like to do this). We could... well, gosh, we could do anything. Or nothing.
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Ridgecrest has been having garbage/recycling problems almost as long as we've been here, and I haven't bothered to write about them much because they're so tedious. But this week things finally came to a head -- the old garbage company's contract ended Friday and the new interim garbage company's contract begins next Tuesday. Garbage collection occurs on Friday for us, so Thursday night we obediently wheeled our garbage and recycling bins down to the curb. The next morning, at the usual time, we heard the sound of a big truck, so we told the boys "The garbage truck is coming, go look out the window" (they love watching it do its thing). But the garbage truck didn't come. Instead, a crane came, and drove into our next door neighbor's back yard. It turned out that they were getting a new furnace (something else our house REALLY needs...hmm...). We watched with great interest. (All Ridgecrest houses have their furnaces on the roof -- I don't know why.)
After a few hours, when the garbage truck still hadn't appeared, Rocket Boy decided they weren't coming, and pulled the bins up to the house again. We decided that Benz, the old garbage company, must have quit a day early.
But around the middle of the afternoon, we finally heard the sound of the garbage truck, so Rocket Boy put the bins out again. The truck dumped our garbage... and then it also dumped our recycling (normally they send a separate truck for each). And then a man grabbed our bins and put them on a truck and took them away. Goodbye Benz.
Rocket Boy was livid. "They're just going to throw it all away!" he said. "I'm going to write a letter to the paper."
"Maybe they'll pull out the glass and metal," I said, trying to appease him. "Some companies do collect everything all together and then pull out the recyclable parts."
Rocket Boy was not to be appeased. And really, I'm sure he's right. They're going to dump all our nice recycling in a landfill.
A few minutes later we heard another truck, and it was the new garbage company, bringing us new bins. Onward and upward.
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And then today, Saturday, we took a trip to Lancaster and Palmdale. We hadn't been able to go there in a few weeks, due to our vacations, and we were low on lots of things, like Trader Joe's cat food and my favorite kind of cereal. Unfortunately, I didn't get enough sleep last night, so I was really tired and cranky this morning. Baby B would not allow me to put his shoes and socks on him, so I did what I sometimes do, and let him get in the car barefoot, setting aside his shoes and socks to bring along with us.
Thirty-eight miles later, at Jawbone Canyon, we stopped to use the bathroom (OK, latrine) and change a diaper. That's when I realized that I hadn't brought Baby B's shoes and socks. OK, what do you do then? If you drive back home and get the shoes and start the trip over again, you've added 76 miles to an already-much-too-long trip. So instead, we drove on. "I'll buy him some flip-flops at Target," I said. The only problem was that before we went to Target we had to go to (a) a garage sale in Lancaster to buy a used carseat (to have as a spare in Rocket Boy's car), (b) a pharmacy where Rocket Boy had to pick up a special order, (c) a Wells Fargo, because Rocket Boy needed to close an account and we don't have Wells Fargo in Ridgecrest, and (d) Red Lobster, because it was way past lunchtime. Baby B attended all these events in his stocking feet (I had extra socks in the diaper bag).
Finally we made it to Target, but they didn't have flip-flops. I found some cheap slip-on shoes, but Baby B would not even try them on. He ran up and down the toddler boys shoes aisle and finally grabbed a pair of blue and silver sneakers, size 5. I looked at the price -- $22.99 -- OK, not flip-flops, but he could use a second pair of shoes. So I found a pair of size 9s (his current shoes are size 8, but they're getting cozy), he tried them on, said he liked them, and that was that. He wore them to Trader Joe's and the coffee shop where we had a snack before heading for home.
Welcome back to Ridgecrest. It's supposed to be 104 tomorrow. Maybe I'll paint a mural.
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