Saturday, Sept. 17, 2005
One Thing After Another
Adam and I both live paycheck to paycheck. We aren't poor, but we aren't exactly wealthy. We have enough money to pay bills and used to have enough money to indulge in shopping sprees, dinner at nice restaurants all of the time, and so on. When I had to pay for my parking ticket fines it really, really set us back financially. We cut going out to dinner every week and most extra activites out of our lives for the time being. We've been working hard on paying back our friend who lent us money, as well as keeping up with all our other bills. I even got a second job to make some extra money.
For the past two months our rent has been late by about a week. Now, I know that you should always pay your rent on time and in full, but it was hard and we just simply couldn't swing it by the first of the month. Yesterday the landlord called Adam and gave us an eviction notice. Adam said that our landlord was really nice about it; as nice as you can be when you're evicting someone I guess. We only have two weeks to get out.
Financially, I think we'll be alright. Adam gets paid every week and I get paid bi-weekly. The next time I get a paycheck will be on the 30th. There might be a slight problem though. We have to be out of our house by the 27th. Maybe a landlord will let us date a check for the 30th? However, I'm going to see about getting a cash advance just in case. We'll both have our tips to use as spending money which we will need for food, so between Adam's paycheck's, my paycheck and cash advance, I think we'll have enough money for the first month's rent and a security deposit.
Didn't I just write in my last entry that Adam wanted to move back into our old place? That is really ironic. Of course we won't be able to move back in there, but we have to find somewhere to live. Adam spoke with one of his customers who comes into the bar yesterday who is a landlord and he has two vacant places right now. Today or tomorrow Adam is going to go look at them. I also just printed out apartments and 1/2 doubles that are for rent from the newspaper. A lot of the places have heat included in rent which will be nice for this winter. The things is, we don't have much time to find a place. We need to get the ball rollin' as soon as possible.
This sucks, but I'm trying to be positive. The truth is, I'm really not that content in the house I'm in right now. It just doesn't feel like a 'home' if that makes sense. I don't know exactly why, but maybe it's because it isn't really 'lived' in. We very rarely spend any time downstairs. The only rooms I use are the bathroom and bedroom and once in a great while I'll wander into the kitchen. At our next place I'm hoping we have a better landlord. The kitchen lights above the table don't work, the upstairs power always shuts off so we have to go to the basement to flip the breaker. The landlord was told about these things several times but had never done anything about them. It might be nice to move to a more modern house.
After looking through the classifieds, I've discovered that a lot of places do not allow pets. Since we have such little time, it is a possibility that we'll have to find another home for Monsieur Skins and Madame Black Panther. I'm going to hate doing that! I've never had to give an animal away in my life. When I was younger and we got pets, we'd keep them until the day they died. And Black and Skins are actually my cats too. I was the one who bought them. I clean their litterbox, I give them food and water, I took Monseiur to the vet's. Whenever Adam isn't home, they always lay with me on my bed while I watch tv. They greet us at the door when we come home at night. This is going to break my heart. I know that I'll cry.
Moving in itself is such a pain the ass. It seems like we just moved our bedroom set into our place and now it's going back out again. The major things we have to move are our bed, upright dresser, dresser with the mirror attached, my old dresser, our old mattress and box spring, couch, two chairs, dryer, desk, and kitchen table. The rest of the stuff is fairly small, but still a pain because it has to be packed. Today, we will get boxes and start packing away anything that we won't use within the next two weeks. We'll have to rent a U-Haul again. The actual moving part is what I'm really dreading.
I hate writing about this. It's really embarrassing because nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I don't mean to sound ungreatful for what I have. I know that a lot of people have it much, much worse off than me, but it just seems like it's one thing after another....