So… if anyone noticed the lengthy ’silence’ on the blog, and figured it meant we were up to our necks in some sort of mayhem, the answer to that would be yes.

The sort of abbreviated version is that Joy now works at the computer shop with me as our scheduling coordinator, and we are once again moving. Yes, again. We really did love this house and had planned to stay here until we were in a position to buy our own house, but the bottom line is that we just couldn’t afford it, and were struggling to make ends meet; unless we made some changes we’d never get out of the rut we were in. So now we’ve shortened the nearly 70 mile round trip daily commute by half, we can carpool most of the time, and we’ve significantly cut down on the rent and utilities. It’s a positive step towards being able to have our own house someday.

The negatives are that we are leaving behind our garden, the yard we had just fenced, a great landlord, and a roomy house we adored for a smaller house with no basement, but in exchange we get back a much quieter neighborhood (no more living over or under the Interstate!) with an equally nice landlord, a bigger yard, and some more of our life back. I’ve been making that run back and forth across the mountains every day for a year and a half now, and it’s about two hours lost out of every day, not to mention the horrific gas bill, wear and tear on the car, and the pollution going into the atmosphere.

The long version of all this I will save for later; it was an absolute nightmare finding a place (the hardest time we have ever had) and we ended up in Candler instead of in Waynesville because no one would rent to us with the animals. We had to either give notice or renew another year’s lease so we were committed, and at the time we made the decision there were a ton of rentals available — then once we were looking seriously they all seemed to evaporate. It was scary. We actually started looking at buying a house, which we really weren’t ready to do yet, because it was beginning to look like that would be the only way we wouldn’t find ourselves homeless once the thirty days was up.

We’ve been selling some of our furniture and stuff to help fund the move and make for less stuff to haul and I sprung my back moving that stupid giant dresser of ours out into the yard for the yard sale we had this weekend, then back inside when it didn’t sell. As a result, I spent most of yesterday flat on my back on the couch. At least someone came and bought the blasted thing yesterday evening, so it’s maimed me for the last time.

We move at the end of the week, so posts may be sporadic, but we’re still alive and kicking!

This past weekend we decided we needed a new clock and went hunting for one on eBay — more to get an idea of what we wanted than to actually purchase one. After spending hours looking at hundreds of clocks, we came to the realization that we are apparently very picky about clocks… then we saw The One.

It was a very interesting art statue of a cat with a clock on the side, not something we’d normally go for but in this case it ‘worked’ and we decided to go ahead and try and bid on it, something we’d never done before. The auction for the item was ending in an hour and a half and so far there’d only been one bid of ninety-nine cents, so we initially set a maximum bid of five dollars.

Bidder #1 came back and outbid us, and here’s where the bloodlust set in… I went from being sort of half-interested in the clock to obsessed over it, and apparently this uncovered a previously unseen ugly competitive side to me. Who was this person? How dare they try and take OUR clock? I was taking this personally, and me, the person who hates sports, party games, and gambling was now determined to fight my way to the top of the eBay food chain. I devised a plan that we’d bid again about five minutes before the auction end, which I thought was pretty clever but apparently, I now realize, was maybe not so original. The other bidder sat tight and waited until about thirty seconds before the end to counter, and as I was frantically trying to type in another bid, the auction ended.

First came the disappointment, and the anger at the person who I was convinced outbid us just to be mean, and then came “the rebound bid”. Now instead of just looking for clocks we were looking for “cat clocks” and found an interesting little alien-looking ‘cat in a bathtub’ wall clock. We were the only bidder and it’s now ours. Of course, instead of a unique little one of a kind item from a private seller, we’ve got a new item from a dealer, not really a living room wall clock kind of thing, doesn’t match our color scheme, and we discovered that the “French Kitty” cat in the tub is actually from some line of stuff of that name.

Still, it is pretty cute, and we have a little collection of cat-themed stuff we have on a display shelf in the cat room that it will look very good with … it’s just that if we weren’t sitting there bummed about losing the clock we really wanted, and well into a bottle of Blue Moon Reisling, we probably would not have bought it. Some people, perhaps, should stay away from eBay.