Parallax

You know from the title this is going to be stuffed full of WTF and confusion, don't you? Yup. It is.

About a year and a half ago, Bank of America (henceforth titled BOFA, because I can, and also because one of my innernet pals uses the word as a synonym for being violently sick, which works for me) informed my mother that they were going to foreclose and kick us out of the house.

That, of course, was VERY BAD. I got pissed off, and I started plotting ways to stay put. And then I got strafed by the Blue Angels during an air show, and I got pissed off in a different way, and I started plotting ways to get the hell out.

Then a bunch of things happened. I busted my butt trying to find a new place to move into. A whole mess of financial stuff fell apart. And my mother got into some complicated deal with a legal-services place to see if we could get the foreclosure unforeclosed - aft-opened? - so that we could keep the house.

During this the bottom fell out of the economy, so that was sort of a problem too.

I finally found a place that was local, not scary, would accept Riley (most won't), and affordable. We are poor folks, so that last was the tricky part. Since we weren't paying on the house during this lengthy process, we paid on the apartment, as a sort of backup. See, we had no idea if the bank would decide in our favor or not. And if they decided against, they would do so in typical soulless BOFA ways: you have thirty days, die for all we care, GTFO. So, my thinking was, we needed a place to land, should we be ejected. It took me the better part of a year to find that backup duplex apartment place. We were going to hold onto it if we needed it.

The problem is that, somehow (me being me most likely) this was not adequately explained to the guy we were renting from. He lives in Texas, so I figured he wouldn't care - we weren't wearing and/or tearing on the place, and Apartment A was still inhabited, so the building wasn't standing empty and tempting people to break in and steal the copper wiring.

Months passed, I spent way too much time stuck in traffic couriering folders of very legally confusing paper back and forth, and then two weeks ago we got the notice: BOFA had decided to be generous. If we make the payments on time for I think nine months, the probationary period is over and we're back to being ordinary homeowners with a mortgage. (The payments are ridiculously low, too. 575/month for a 2bed house and a gigantor yard? Yes.)

Had I known it'd turn out this way I wouldn't have bothered renting that apartment - it'd have saved us a ton of money, and that's always useful - but the peace of mind was worth it, you know, in knowing that if BOFA turfed us out we had a place to go. I'm big on backup plans and redundancy and Things Not Going Totally Fucked. So it was worth the expense - and at the time, we weren't paying on the house, so it was affordable.

Yesterday I swung by the apartment to pick up a chair Bleu had left there for me, and see if I'd left anything else lying around. In true only-me fashion, before I'd even turned the car off, Larry the Landlord showed up and was very confused. He'd come back to Florida to find that the guy from Apartment A had done a runner, Apartment B (us) was exactly as he'd left it, and he had no idea what was going on.

This could have been awkward, or bad.

Now. As much of a raging TOWANDA! feminist as I am, I recognize that occasionally I can tilt things in my favor by playing up the established patriarchal crap. That being: when a Good ol' Southern Gentleman is confronted by a youngish and reasonably not-hideous woman who is embarrassed and apologetic, he will bend over backwards to assure her that everything is, in fact, okay.

Which is what I did: oh my god and I thought you knew and I am so sorry and I feel like such an idiot and really, this is horrible, I had no idea etc etc etc. Put a hand over my mouth, look away, squinch in on myself a little bit, babble slightly. Worked like a fucking charm: Larry the Landlord assured me that everything was okay and then, to top it off, went and brought the chair out to the car for me. As Badger said later: You conniving wench! Which - hey, if it works, why not? We wound up laughing about the whole thing, Landlord Larry and me, so I call it a win.

So that's settled, and this is settled, and Indi's Home for the Deranged and Busted will be staying where it is. Which works out for everyone, because Landlord Larry then told us that he prefers Texas and is probably going to sell the duplex. That likely would not have gone well if we were living in it. Also, the neighborhood the apartment was in is in a different evacuation zone, A instead of B, and in Florida that is a thing to consider. If a big storm hits everyone on the peninsula is pretty well fucked, but if it's a little one, we'll be more okay here than there, I reckon.

I am content here, more or less, with the guanacaste and the sabal palms in the back yard, with (or perhaps despite) the airplanes coming in all hours and all colors overhead, with the frequent unexpected serenades of reveille or taps or the national anthem from either the base down the street or the park just next to that where they do baseball games. It's not perfect, and it's not particularly what I want out of life, but it'll do for now.

Now if I can just get the damn tree spiders to stop colonizing my car.....