well, when do you admit defeat? I'm down to a hand full of change, a quarter tank of gas in both vehicles, out of meds, and short on dog food. I have about a weeks worth of propane, although it should last longer than that because the furnace and the water heater are both out of commission. I have till Friday to pay for another week here at the campground. I see no light at the end of the tunnel and at this point I'll take the train as long as it is quick and painless.
How can anyone call themselves a man when they can't even support a wife and a dog? I feel like I have failed at life. I used to see security guards working a little shack at places that I picked up from and thought, " If I ever have to resort to that I have failed at life"! Well,,,,right now I'd take that guard job if I could find one. I'm sorry I ever thought that way. I don't know what lesson I am being taught through this never ending experience in poverty but I will say this. I GOT IT! ENOUGH ALREADY!
I have asked for help from family members to no avail. They go to church on Sunday and reject you on Monday. I just needed a few weeks stake to stay afloat but there is no help coming from family. You get told that there is no extra to be given, that "Things are tight", yet you see them out on the town on Facebook going to concerts, fancy restaurants, Buying the latest fashions and more. Yet there is no room at the Inn for a pittance of help for a family member. How do people like that walk into a church without bursting into flames? I think that the term is hypocrite isn't it? They look like the best of Christians on Sunday but as soon as they are out of church they loose their religion with the first glass of beer or wine.
I'm done with family. From now on I have none. I know that sounds harsh but you can only take getting kicked so many times. Eventually you stop going back. If I end up at the end of an off ramp begging for change, at least I will not be begging from relatives. I may not be far from that as the point of desperation has been breached more than a month ago. I have an RV, and a truck to pull it with so I will have a place to live. There are no tags on either at the moment, don't need them as long as I'm parked. But soon I will be evicted from this campground and will have to take my chances on the road again. How do you hide a 36 foot RV that has no tags on it?
I now know how the elderly feel when they have to choose between medication and food, or food and the electric bill, gas bill, and so on. I have been out of medication for at least a month now. I am diabetic and do my best to eat what I am supposed to but it ain't easy when your broke. I barely eat in a poor attempt to control my sugar but my Neuropathy is getting worse. My feet are numb all the time now as well as most of my fingers. My right thumb is constantly splitting and is painful most of the time. When I wake up in the morning my hands are so twisted that they don't unwind until I've had my second cup of coffee. None of the drugs that the doctors in Illinois ever worked. There were plenty of side effects but none of them did what they said they would.
Besides family I believe I am through with the pharmaceutical industry as well. At this point I would leap back into a truck if I could only pass the physical and afford to gain my CDL back. I know that trucking is one of the reasons that got me here but at least I had a place to stay and a paycheck in the bank. 15 years of slaving in the trucking industry and this is what I get from it. Nothing! What a waste of my life. I'm 48 years old now and feel like I'm 70.
I hope my family are all warm and happy in their big ole homes and their flush bank accounts tonight. I know that I am not supposed to be bitter but I am. I can't help it. Sometimes I wonder if I was adopted. At least then I could understand the treatment I have gotten all the years of my life.
I am debating just walking off into the wilderness and fending for my self. I know how to hunt, fish, build shelter and more. I spent 12 years in the U.S. Army and six of that in the Infantry, I know how to survive. I just can't do it with a wife and dog. I think I could swing the dog, hell she can eat whatever I'm eating. She won't complain, she will be loyal and stay with me as long as she lives. Why is it that dogs are that way and humans have to place conditions on everything?
I heard that if you went out west that there are ranches that will let you stay on their land if you help maintain the ranch. If I had gas I'd head that way and try my hand at ranching. I'm not afraid to work, I would love to be a part of something bigger than myself. What I need is what the old timers called a Grub Steak? Something about getting enough supplies on hand to make it to the next job? My father always called thoughts like this "pipe dreams" like this is the stuff that dope heads think about instead of towing the line and getting on with the way your life is supposed to be run. Who determines how your life is to be run? I've spent my whole life up to about two months ago trying to live it the way everyone else thinks that I should. And when it no longer works, they all forgot that they had all those suggestions.
I don't care if I have to set fence posts in a blizzard! If there is a small paycheck, a meal, and a warm place for me and the dog to lay our heads, I'm in!
Rant over! I'll just sit back and hope that's not a trains headlamp that I see!
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Day One
morning! Sunshine and nearly 50 degrees! Wow what a difference 400 miles can make huh? Fist thing on the agenda is get the 5th wheel moved into a permanent location as we were in an over flow area the night before. We get it set up and it takes me over an hour to get it somewhat level. I say somewhat because I was more concerned with the broken window from the night before. Rain is in the forecast and there is a huge hole where there was once a window. All I could think about is the new carpet in our renovated RV getting wet. I call the local RV repair shop and he quotes me nearly $800.00 to replace the window! Are you kidding me? Dejected I talk to one of the maintenance fellas at the campground and he sends me to a local glass company. I explained the situation telling him that I can not afford glass and is there an option for Plexy?
An hour or two later and after making a template of the opening with some cardboard, I order the plexy for less than $70.00. Sounds cheap right? Well when you now have less than $600 in the bank, every $70 adds up. I must say that I did a fine job of installing the plexy window, I still have to scribe and peel the excess silicone off the edges but that can wait for spring. true to the forecast it rained like hell all the next day including a thunderstorm that night. The new window never leaked a drop. Neither did we find any leaks anywhere else in the RV.
I forgot to mention that amongst the things that the previous owner fixed or replaced, the furnace and hot water heater were not among them. I worked on that furnace for days with no relief. I have cleaned mud dobber and paper wasp nests out of this RV till I'm sick of it so I suspect there is something in the igniter chamber but I cant get to the bolts to get it out. We have a heating element in the roof air and propane for the oven and stove as well as space heaters so I may not mess with it till summer if then. The pilot in the hot water heater came apart in my hands today as I tried to clean it due to its inability to stay lit so that too is on hold until we have an income.
Oh yea, as I write this I have had two job interviews and only one of them is worth the effort. It is a 25 mile a day one way trip for a little better than minimum wage and we are down to our last $40.00 and that has to go for gas. I think we have food to last us until then but our rent for this RV space will come due before then. I am at a loss for now as to what to do about it. We will soon be evicted from our camp site but at least I made sure that no one can take away our home ever again! Worse comes to worse I can pull it out of here and live in 12 volts and propane until the money starts flowing again.
If you think that this is the end of the story then you are sadly mistaken, The last few posts are just a scratch of the surface of the bull shit that we have gone through as well as what we are still experiencing. There are stories of lies at the work place, lies in the family, insanity both in the family and otherwise. The depths in which you relatives can sink to while you are trying to crawl out of hell amaze me still to this day! The indifference of members of certain predominantly mid western religions, including family members in that religion make me sick! That could be the subject of another separate blog as well but it deserves to be told in many places.
I have no idea where we will go next if we fail to pay our rent here but it will be in this RV pulled by my truck and no one can take either from me! Mark my words! I will never own property again! Real estate that is. Never Never Never Again!
Oh I have a job opportunity waiting but I can't start for another week and that puts my first pay check more than a week beyond the time our rent runs out. So I may be dry camping behind a McDonalds or something for two weeks praying for warm weather as I don't have two full tanks of propane.
"Living in a Camper Down By The River"! I never dreamed that a Chris Farley skit would ever come true in my life! Here we are!
Thanks Obama!
An hour or two later and after making a template of the opening with some cardboard, I order the plexy for less than $70.00. Sounds cheap right? Well when you now have less than $600 in the bank, every $70 adds up. I must say that I did a fine job of installing the plexy window, I still have to scribe and peel the excess silicone off the edges but that can wait for spring. true to the forecast it rained like hell all the next day including a thunderstorm that night. The new window never leaked a drop. Neither did we find any leaks anywhere else in the RV.
I forgot to mention that amongst the things that the previous owner fixed or replaced, the furnace and hot water heater were not among them. I worked on that furnace for days with no relief. I have cleaned mud dobber and paper wasp nests out of this RV till I'm sick of it so I suspect there is something in the igniter chamber but I cant get to the bolts to get it out. We have a heating element in the roof air and propane for the oven and stove as well as space heaters so I may not mess with it till summer if then. The pilot in the hot water heater came apart in my hands today as I tried to clean it due to its inability to stay lit so that too is on hold until we have an income.
Oh yea, as I write this I have had two job interviews and only one of them is worth the effort. It is a 25 mile a day one way trip for a little better than minimum wage and we are down to our last $40.00 and that has to go for gas. I think we have food to last us until then but our rent for this RV space will come due before then. I am at a loss for now as to what to do about it. We will soon be evicted from our camp site but at least I made sure that no one can take away our home ever again! Worse comes to worse I can pull it out of here and live in 12 volts and propane until the money starts flowing again.
If you think that this is the end of the story then you are sadly mistaken, The last few posts are just a scratch of the surface of the bull shit that we have gone through as well as what we are still experiencing. There are stories of lies at the work place, lies in the family, insanity both in the family and otherwise. The depths in which you relatives can sink to while you are trying to crawl out of hell amaze me still to this day! The indifference of members of certain predominantly mid western religions, including family members in that religion make me sick! That could be the subject of another separate blog as well but it deserves to be told in many places.
I have no idea where we will go next if we fail to pay our rent here but it will be in this RV pulled by my truck and no one can take either from me! Mark my words! I will never own property again! Real estate that is. Never Never Never Again!
Oh I have a job opportunity waiting but I can't start for another week and that puts my first pay check more than a week beyond the time our rent runs out. So I may be dry camping behind a McDonalds or something for two weeks praying for warm weather as I don't have two full tanks of propane.
"Living in a Camper Down By The River"! I never dreamed that a Chris Farley skit would ever come true in my life! Here we are!
Thanks Obama!
Where We Are Now (Still in Hell) Albeit Warmer
In order to tell this story, I first must start with where we are now. We sold our house at auction in December of 2013 and took a bath on it. After the IRS and the county got done with us over back taxes we had very little left. Very little is the understatement of the century. We got out of there with few possessions and very little cash. We had to buy an RV to live in and a truck to pull it. The new owner of our home was less than sympathetic of our situation so as we were trying to figure out what we could buy with the money that was left, he was always present in one form or another asking when we were going to vacate the home.
The auction service explained to everyone at the sale that we need a little more than a week to get an RV, move into it and head south. That didn't seem to phase him though as he was more than a pain in my ass as I tried to salvage what was left of our lives. To make matters worse, we found an RV, a 36 foot fifth wheel, that we could afford if the owner would come down a grand on the price, but it was 160 miles north of us. The snowstorm of the century was coming out of Canada and headed right for us! We left around 1 P.M. and headed north to see this RV the day before. It was an older 5th wheel that had been restored inside and out and it was just what we needed.
The gentleman listened to our story of despair and still refused to sell it to us for what we could afford. He said he needed to sleep on it so we headed back south 160 miles with heavy hearts. The only other RV in our price range that was liveable was more than 300 miles away damned near the Kansas border. Now, I have the new owner or should I call him, "Slum Lord"? yea I know that is a bit harsh but he is known for having multiple rental properties in the area that he got for next to nothing and charges large rent for. So he is still on my back and I have no clue when or if I will ever find something liveable in an RV. Oh yea there is still a huge snow storm coming with minus zero temps right behind it. At this point driving Damned near to Kansas is out of the question.
I thought that I made a decent offer on the 160 mile north RV with some UN-needed construction tools to boot. He called us back on the way home and accepted that offer but I told him that the wife and I needed to sleep on it because with the coming storm we may just be loading a rental truck and rolling south. The next day as we pondered our desperate situation he called back, I told him that we would have to pass on his RV and just head south because of the impending storm. He then counter offered with my original price and said that he had thought about our situation and the coming storm, he believed that we in a desperate position and would take my offer without the a fore mentioned construction equipment.
let me explain our price range for a second without giving the actual price, what I offered him for this 36 foot older 5th wheel was about $300.00 MORE than we could really afford. So when he took the offer, we were still scared to death about not having enough money to pay campground rent when we got down here.
At this point it is about noon or better on the day that it is supposed to start snowing. With that in mind we rolled north at a high rate of fuel consumption to buy this RV. I knew at that moment that if I could get this RV home, we could get out after the snow was done. With all the paper work finished we rolled south back to our little piece of hell. I bought a big block ford F250 to pull this with but I had to pay someone nearly $400 to fix the lights on the back of it and install the plug for the trailer lights. it used over $100 in gas just getting it back down the 160 miles to Hell Headquarters. I had pigtail problems on the way home and that brought two state troopers into my wake.
I got two tickets for no tags or insurance on the truck! Two tickets that I can't afford to pay. It was so nice to tell them our story of despair only to have them write me two tickets and threaten another on our way out of the state! What a nice parting shot from the Obama state of Illinois! I was in no way shape or form going to pay Illinois for new plates on two vehicles that were leaving the state as soon as I could get out!
We get the damned thing home, backed into the yard as it started snowing, and waited out the storm. We were so tired and angry that we didn't want to attempt loading it until the next morning. Well the next morning brought what could only be described as a blizzard, with almost two foot of snow that would not relent until the day after next. Remember the Slum Lord? Yea he called twice and came by once as we were loading the camper in near two foot of snow and -15 degree temps, not including the wind chill! He had the nerve to ask me if I could pay him rent for the week we spent in HIS house after the sale! Can you believe the Gaul of some people? I basically told him to go eff himself and that we would be out the day after next which was a Thursday. That was the last time I ever saw him and IF I ever see him again the results may be a lot different.
Fast forward to the next morning and we are loading the fifth wheel with everything we have left, which isn't much. It is like I said -15 static. the truck was stuck in a ditch because it is a road truck, meaning it was designed to pull a trailer on the highway not deal with snow. There are three good tires on it with the one exception being the drive tire which is bald or near bald. With two foot of snow there is no time to swap the rear tires so the better of the two is on the drive side. We loaded the RV up, got the truck pulled out of the ditch, and proceeded to attempt to hook it back up. I said attempt right? Well there was too much snow to get the truck up under the nose of the trailer.
Remember when I said that we sold damned near everything? Well that is exactly what we did! I had no shovels, snow or otherwise. Just a hoe and a push broom left in our pitiful inventory of things salvaged from our lives. I used an old garden ho to rake the snow from the driveway in order to get the truck under the trailer. I bought a 5th wheel that did not have your typical king pin hitch on it. It has a ranch, goose neck adapter. So when you hook up you don't have the luxury of getting close and letting it ride on in, you have to be on the mark. Try that in -15 and two foot of snow!
Long story short again, we got out! A family member gave us a financial gift that over half of went to gas for the trip down. Yea, I drove the truck at 55 MPH all the way down and it still ate over $250.00 in gas. That is not including the gas the wife's car used. So we got here at the campground with a little over $600.00 left in the bank. Did I mention that we took a bath on our house? Just imagine that you are selling a house that at best is worth Forty grand as it is still on sub floors, and you sell it at auction in the middle of winter in a horrible market. Then have the IRS take a huge bite out of it because you owed taxes from failing as an owner operator trucker. With all this in mind you can do the math and see how we got here.
A little back history on the job market in southern Illinois? Obama forgot what state he came from, if that in itself was true. I lost my job as a truck driver due to obesity driven diabetes. I was on short term disability for six months trying to get back in the drivers seat of all things. When that didn't pan out I took the only job from the only business in the county that was hiring. Walmart. It was a 120 day temporary job that seemed to have a promise of full time work after the 120 days. While I was unloading trucks on the night shift my wife was working nights at a local hospital. The ends were meeting ok but not great. When the 120 temp job at Walmart came to a close they laid me and about 50 others off so they would not have to pay benefits. No warning, just took us off the schedule! I didn't need benefits as my wife had the insurance where she worked but they didn't care.
If you shop at Walmart because you think you are saving money I want you to know that you are contributing to the poverty of millions of Americans not to mention the employees Walmart has in foreign countries. If low prices mean hurting your fellow Americans then I'll pay more somewhere else. There are many different alternatives for low price shopping that don't include wally world. That subject is better told on another blog, which may arise in the near future.
so here we were with one job and no hope to make it through the winter before we went absolutely broke. Yea I could have sat there and dreamed about fixing the floors over the winter but that would have been only dreams. there was just too much to be done and too little money to do it. So we did what anyone else in our situation would have done. We hired an auction house and sold it. Sold it to a less than enthusiastic crowd I might add. I had over three grand worth of our final possessions on the wagons and got a little over a grand for them. Then they sold my house for a mere fraction of what it was worth even in the condition it was in. So when Mr. Slum Lord came calling I pretty much treated him as a thief once he made it clear that he didn't care about what we were going through.
Now we are back in the south pulling into the campground that we got lost trying to find, and I hit an unseen speed dip, you know, the reverse of a speed bump, and break a safety glass window in the living room of the 5th wheel. We checked in with the night campground host and went to bed in the RV with a busted window and downed spirits. Broke and scared. It isn't over, I'm still scared!
Stay tuned, it gets worse if you can believe that!
The auction service explained to everyone at the sale that we need a little more than a week to get an RV, move into it and head south. That didn't seem to phase him though as he was more than a pain in my ass as I tried to salvage what was left of our lives. To make matters worse, we found an RV, a 36 foot fifth wheel, that we could afford if the owner would come down a grand on the price, but it was 160 miles north of us. The snowstorm of the century was coming out of Canada and headed right for us! We left around 1 P.M. and headed north to see this RV the day before. It was an older 5th wheel that had been restored inside and out and it was just what we needed.
The gentleman listened to our story of despair and still refused to sell it to us for what we could afford. He said he needed to sleep on it so we headed back south 160 miles with heavy hearts. The only other RV in our price range that was liveable was more than 300 miles away damned near the Kansas border. Now, I have the new owner or should I call him, "Slum Lord"? yea I know that is a bit harsh but he is known for having multiple rental properties in the area that he got for next to nothing and charges large rent for. So he is still on my back and I have no clue when or if I will ever find something liveable in an RV. Oh yea there is still a huge snow storm coming with minus zero temps right behind it. At this point driving Damned near to Kansas is out of the question.
I thought that I made a decent offer on the 160 mile north RV with some UN-needed construction tools to boot. He called us back on the way home and accepted that offer but I told him that the wife and I needed to sleep on it because with the coming storm we may just be loading a rental truck and rolling south. The next day as we pondered our desperate situation he called back, I told him that we would have to pass on his RV and just head south because of the impending storm. He then counter offered with my original price and said that he had thought about our situation and the coming storm, he believed that we in a desperate position and would take my offer without the a fore mentioned construction equipment.
let me explain our price range for a second without giving the actual price, what I offered him for this 36 foot older 5th wheel was about $300.00 MORE than we could really afford. So when he took the offer, we were still scared to death about not having enough money to pay campground rent when we got down here.
At this point it is about noon or better on the day that it is supposed to start snowing. With that in mind we rolled north at a high rate of fuel consumption to buy this RV. I knew at that moment that if I could get this RV home, we could get out after the snow was done. With all the paper work finished we rolled south back to our little piece of hell. I bought a big block ford F250 to pull this with but I had to pay someone nearly $400 to fix the lights on the back of it and install the plug for the trailer lights. it used over $100 in gas just getting it back down the 160 miles to Hell Headquarters. I had pigtail problems on the way home and that brought two state troopers into my wake.
I got two tickets for no tags or insurance on the truck! Two tickets that I can't afford to pay. It was so nice to tell them our story of despair only to have them write me two tickets and threaten another on our way out of the state! What a nice parting shot from the Obama state of Illinois! I was in no way shape or form going to pay Illinois for new plates on two vehicles that were leaving the state as soon as I could get out!
We get the damned thing home, backed into the yard as it started snowing, and waited out the storm. We were so tired and angry that we didn't want to attempt loading it until the next morning. Well the next morning brought what could only be described as a blizzard, with almost two foot of snow that would not relent until the day after next. Remember the Slum Lord? Yea he called twice and came by once as we were loading the camper in near two foot of snow and -15 degree temps, not including the wind chill! He had the nerve to ask me if I could pay him rent for the week we spent in HIS house after the sale! Can you believe the Gaul of some people? I basically told him to go eff himself and that we would be out the day after next which was a Thursday. That was the last time I ever saw him and IF I ever see him again the results may be a lot different.
Fast forward to the next morning and we are loading the fifth wheel with everything we have left, which isn't much. It is like I said -15 static. the truck was stuck in a ditch because it is a road truck, meaning it was designed to pull a trailer on the highway not deal with snow. There are three good tires on it with the one exception being the drive tire which is bald or near bald. With two foot of snow there is no time to swap the rear tires so the better of the two is on the drive side. We loaded the RV up, got the truck pulled out of the ditch, and proceeded to attempt to hook it back up. I said attempt right? Well there was too much snow to get the truck up under the nose of the trailer.
Remember when I said that we sold damned near everything? Well that is exactly what we did! I had no shovels, snow or otherwise. Just a hoe and a push broom left in our pitiful inventory of things salvaged from our lives. I used an old garden ho to rake the snow from the driveway in order to get the truck under the trailer. I bought a 5th wheel that did not have your typical king pin hitch on it. It has a ranch, goose neck adapter. So when you hook up you don't have the luxury of getting close and letting it ride on in, you have to be on the mark. Try that in -15 and two foot of snow!
Long story short again, we got out! A family member gave us a financial gift that over half of went to gas for the trip down. Yea, I drove the truck at 55 MPH all the way down and it still ate over $250.00 in gas. That is not including the gas the wife's car used. So we got here at the campground with a little over $600.00 left in the bank. Did I mention that we took a bath on our house? Just imagine that you are selling a house that at best is worth Forty grand as it is still on sub floors, and you sell it at auction in the middle of winter in a horrible market. Then have the IRS take a huge bite out of it because you owed taxes from failing as an owner operator trucker. With all this in mind you can do the math and see how we got here.
A little back history on the job market in southern Illinois? Obama forgot what state he came from, if that in itself was true. I lost my job as a truck driver due to obesity driven diabetes. I was on short term disability for six months trying to get back in the drivers seat of all things. When that didn't pan out I took the only job from the only business in the county that was hiring. Walmart. It was a 120 day temporary job that seemed to have a promise of full time work after the 120 days. While I was unloading trucks on the night shift my wife was working nights at a local hospital. The ends were meeting ok but not great. When the 120 temp job at Walmart came to a close they laid me and about 50 others off so they would not have to pay benefits. No warning, just took us off the schedule! I didn't need benefits as my wife had the insurance where she worked but they didn't care.
If you shop at Walmart because you think you are saving money I want you to know that you are contributing to the poverty of millions of Americans not to mention the employees Walmart has in foreign countries. If low prices mean hurting your fellow Americans then I'll pay more somewhere else. There are many different alternatives for low price shopping that don't include wally world. That subject is better told on another blog, which may arise in the near future.
so here we were with one job and no hope to make it through the winter before we went absolutely broke. Yea I could have sat there and dreamed about fixing the floors over the winter but that would have been only dreams. there was just too much to be done and too little money to do it. So we did what anyone else in our situation would have done. We hired an auction house and sold it. Sold it to a less than enthusiastic crowd I might add. I had over three grand worth of our final possessions on the wagons and got a little over a grand for them. Then they sold my house for a mere fraction of what it was worth even in the condition it was in. So when Mr. Slum Lord came calling I pretty much treated him as a thief once he made it clear that he didn't care about what we were going through.
Now we are back in the south pulling into the campground that we got lost trying to find, and I hit an unseen speed dip, you know, the reverse of a speed bump, and break a safety glass window in the living room of the 5th wheel. We checked in with the night campground host and went to bed in the RV with a busted window and downed spirits. Broke and scared. It isn't over, I'm still scared!
Stay tuned, it gets worse if you can believe that!
Return From Hell, an Ongoing Experience in Survival!
Where do you start when your life takes a turn for the worse? That is really a relative term isn't it? "A turn for the worse". Where do you start in explaining how we got to this point in our lives?
I would assume that you start at the beginning. It is January, 2014, and this story starts,,,well,,,way back in 2008. We were living in Alabama, both working and the ends still were not meeting. This was about the time that the housing market started to take a nose dive. Our mortgage was sold, I don't remember how many times but with every sale the payments went up and up. To most people fifty dollars a whack may not seem like much but when you are already hurting, it makes a huge dent in your finances.
The only thought was to refinance, side the house, and sell it. We did that and thought all was going to be well. Then comes along a family problem way up north in Illinois. Something that could not be dealt with from a distance. we moved. Bought a house that needed work.
Needed work is an understatement, the more we uncovered the more there was to fix. It needed a lot of work just to live in it comfortably. We soon went through all of our cash and still were not done. It was liveable but the floors were a mess. The elderly man that lived there died and his relatives were in another state. When a neighbor smelled a gas leak, the gas company came and took the meter and fixed the leak. No one shut off the water! Winter came and long story short, the water heater froze. Spring! Warm weather! You guessed it! The water heater spewed water all over the floors ruining them. Rather than fix the problem correctly, the relatives of the deceased covered it up with really thick pad and carpet.
Along comes Tim and Kim, we paid cash for this house therefore did not get an inspection. Lesson learned number one! well it took us about six months of living in two bedrooms and a bathroom in the back of the house before we had a working kitchen. Once that was finished we took on the task of replacing the awful carpet in the living room.
Ok, first you need to know where we came from before I tell you any more about this little house. We moved out of 1475 square feet into 1105 square feet. We had to put a lot of things in the attic and in the garage to fit in this little house. So we were slowly getting back to normal, or so we thought.
On the day that I decided to pull up the carpet in the living room, I thought that I had saved enough money to replace not only the carpet but any bad sub floor as well. Then I pulled the carpet! Wow, what a surprise! It was the thickest shag carpet that I ever saw! As well as the thickest pad! They replaced the sub floor with 5/8's particle board, not OSB or even tongue and groove sub floor. This was the first particle board that was ever invented. Small grain cheap as hell! Whoever did it didn't even put the joints on the floor joists. so when you stepped on it, the floor dipped dangerously. Then I noticed the difference in floor level from one end of the room to the other. There was at least a four inch drop from one corner to the other.
This only means one of two things. Either some of the floor joists were bad or the whole house has sunk on one end. The crawl pace was too tight for me to get under there so I had no way of knowing. i assumed the worst and proceeded to price out the supplies to fix the problem. Well I soon ran into a snag as you might expect in a story such as this one. It seems that all of the windows in the house were fairly new replacement windows. Albeit the cheapest one on the market at the time. Oh they were triple pane and tilted in for cleaning but the catches on either side that held them open at various heights were really cheap and all were broken. You had to prop them open with cut off broom handles.
This seemed like a small problem right? Wrong! All the windows in the house were replaced after the house dropped four to six inches! This didn't matter as far as the ones in the rest of the house were concerned, I mean I didn't care that I had to prop them open with broom handles. But the ones in the living room were a different story. if I bought the necessary supplies, and jacked the house up, there was a really good chance the windows would not open again without the use of a fork lift or other large lifting device. The front door was sticking as well so jacking the house up would probably fix that but then the windows would need to be re-hung.
Remember when I said that I thought I had the money to finish the house? Well now we were in a mess of magnificent proportions and there was no way that we now had the money to finish. Because of the flood from the water heater, there wasn't a level floor in the house. the living room, kitchen and dinning room were on sub floors. At this time we were living on one income, that of a truck driver who had to take a job at a much lower rate than I was worth because that was all there was in the area. So we placed folded paper and little blocks of wood under the furniture, put down some large rugs and forgot about fixing the floors for the time being.
The floors never got fixed! we lived that way from February 2009 up until we sold the house in December of 2013. What followed this initial chapter of our lives in HELL can only be described as just that! Hell!!!!
Stick around and you will learn how we got out of there with very little of our personal possessions and what was left of our souls. This is going to be the new classic story of escape from the hell of poverty in the state Obama came from. It isn't for the faint of heart because as I write this, we are still trying to get our lives back together. We are out of Hell but the effects are still being felt. I don't have a clue where we will end up next but we are trying to rebuild our lives one week at a time from a campground way down south.
God give me strength!
I would assume that you start at the beginning. It is January, 2014, and this story starts,,,well,,,way back in 2008. We were living in Alabama, both working and the ends still were not meeting. This was about the time that the housing market started to take a nose dive. Our mortgage was sold, I don't remember how many times but with every sale the payments went up and up. To most people fifty dollars a whack may not seem like much but when you are already hurting, it makes a huge dent in your finances.
The only thought was to refinance, side the house, and sell it. We did that and thought all was going to be well. Then comes along a family problem way up north in Illinois. Something that could not be dealt with from a distance. we moved. Bought a house that needed work.
Needed work is an understatement, the more we uncovered the more there was to fix. It needed a lot of work just to live in it comfortably. We soon went through all of our cash and still were not done. It was liveable but the floors were a mess. The elderly man that lived there died and his relatives were in another state. When a neighbor smelled a gas leak, the gas company came and took the meter and fixed the leak. No one shut off the water! Winter came and long story short, the water heater froze. Spring! Warm weather! You guessed it! The water heater spewed water all over the floors ruining them. Rather than fix the problem correctly, the relatives of the deceased covered it up with really thick pad and carpet.
Along comes Tim and Kim, we paid cash for this house therefore did not get an inspection. Lesson learned number one! well it took us about six months of living in two bedrooms and a bathroom in the back of the house before we had a working kitchen. Once that was finished we took on the task of replacing the awful carpet in the living room.
Ok, first you need to know where we came from before I tell you any more about this little house. We moved out of 1475 square feet into 1105 square feet. We had to put a lot of things in the attic and in the garage to fit in this little house. So we were slowly getting back to normal, or so we thought.
On the day that I decided to pull up the carpet in the living room, I thought that I had saved enough money to replace not only the carpet but any bad sub floor as well. Then I pulled the carpet! Wow, what a surprise! It was the thickest shag carpet that I ever saw! As well as the thickest pad! They replaced the sub floor with 5/8's particle board, not OSB or even tongue and groove sub floor. This was the first particle board that was ever invented. Small grain cheap as hell! Whoever did it didn't even put the joints on the floor joists. so when you stepped on it, the floor dipped dangerously. Then I noticed the difference in floor level from one end of the room to the other. There was at least a four inch drop from one corner to the other.
This only means one of two things. Either some of the floor joists were bad or the whole house has sunk on one end. The crawl pace was too tight for me to get under there so I had no way of knowing. i assumed the worst and proceeded to price out the supplies to fix the problem. Well I soon ran into a snag as you might expect in a story such as this one. It seems that all of the windows in the house were fairly new replacement windows. Albeit the cheapest one on the market at the time. Oh they were triple pane and tilted in for cleaning but the catches on either side that held them open at various heights were really cheap and all were broken. You had to prop them open with cut off broom handles.
This seemed like a small problem right? Wrong! All the windows in the house were replaced after the house dropped four to six inches! This didn't matter as far as the ones in the rest of the house were concerned, I mean I didn't care that I had to prop them open with broom handles. But the ones in the living room were a different story. if I bought the necessary supplies, and jacked the house up, there was a really good chance the windows would not open again without the use of a fork lift or other large lifting device. The front door was sticking as well so jacking the house up would probably fix that but then the windows would need to be re-hung.
Remember when I said that I thought I had the money to finish the house? Well now we were in a mess of magnificent proportions and there was no way that we now had the money to finish. Because of the flood from the water heater, there wasn't a level floor in the house. the living room, kitchen and dinning room were on sub floors. At this time we were living on one income, that of a truck driver who had to take a job at a much lower rate than I was worth because that was all there was in the area. So we placed folded paper and little blocks of wood under the furniture, put down some large rugs and forgot about fixing the floors for the time being.
The floors never got fixed! we lived that way from February 2009 up until we sold the house in December of 2013. What followed this initial chapter of our lives in HELL can only be described as just that! Hell!!!!
Stick around and you will learn how we got out of there with very little of our personal possessions and what was left of our souls. This is going to be the new classic story of escape from the hell of poverty in the state Obama came from. It isn't for the faint of heart because as I write this, we are still trying to get our lives back together. We are out of Hell but the effects are still being felt. I don't have a clue where we will end up next but we are trying to rebuild our lives one week at a time from a campground way down south.
God give me strength!
Monday, October 15, 2012
where have I been
Its been a while since I have been on here. It seems that trucking takes up so much of my time and blogging falls by the wayside. Driving a truck eats up my life to the point that I don't have much of a life outside of the damned truck. That my friends is about to change. I have decided to finally do something about it and get out of trucking all together. I have some things that I need to accomplish first and one of them is to buy a second vehicle. Kim works nights and long hours to boot so there needs to be two vehicles in the garage. I can't look for a job without the means to get to work can I?
So this is it, by spring I hope to have the vehicle problem sorted out and on my way to finding gainful employment near home. I won't know how to act if I actually was able to sleep in my own bed every night. We live in farm country so I may look for something that has to do with farming, but if it involves having a commercial drivers license you can forget it.
I don't know what the future of this blog will be but once I am out of trucking you never know. I still love to cook but I don't have the energy to take pictures or write about it. I would like to write about my transition from trucking back to the real life but I may do that at another blog I own.
More later
Peace
Tim
So this is it, by spring I hope to have the vehicle problem sorted out and on my way to finding gainful employment near home. I won't know how to act if I actually was able to sleep in my own bed every night. We live in farm country so I may look for something that has to do with farming, but if it involves having a commercial drivers license you can forget it.
I don't know what the future of this blog will be but once I am out of trucking you never know. I still love to cook but I don't have the energy to take pictures or write about it. I would like to write about my transition from trucking back to the real life but I may do that at another blog I own.
More later
Peace
Tim
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Orange Glazed Pork Chops
I was doing a little experimenting a week or so ago and came up with what I think is the perfect orange glaze for pork chops. I have used this on chicken as well and it works great on it.
Here is what you need
Two pork chops (Boneless or otherwise)
Three large oranges
3/4 cup of fresh squeezed orange juice (from the three oranges)
The zest of three large oranges
Two heaping tablespoons of orange marmalade
Two heaping tablespoons of brown sugar (Dark ot light
Roll your oranges before you cut them to soften them for juicing.
Cut them in half and juice them.
Then grate the orange zest off of them. If you grate them before juicing them it can be a sticky juicing experience.
Once you have the juicing and zesting done place two pork chops into a fairly large skillet and with a bit of olive oil and start them simmering. Salt and pepper before putting a lid on it. I cooked mine on medium heat.
Put a tablespoon of butter in the skillet and fire it up on medium high heat. Don't walk away as you will be stirring this almost to the end.
Add the orange juice, orange zest, and brown sugar to the pan and start stirring. Once you get that all mixed in add the orange marmalade and stir. Once you get to this point you can leave it for a second and check your pork chops, they are probably ready to turn.
turn the heat up on the glaze and stir constantly until you see it start to separate from the pan a bit. You might see a little wave circle the pan as you slowly stir and that effect will become more prominent as the glaze thickens.
Once you get the glaze to thicken nicely open the lid on the chops and pour the glaze onto the meat. Turn the chops and spoon the glaze from the bottom of the pan back onto the meat as you tilt the pan slightly. Do this continuously turning the chops to coat both sides. Once they look like this,
They are ready to plate.
I served these with green beans a baked potato and a nice roll.
Let me tell you that there were no leftovers to share with the ole pooch!
Enjoy
Tim
Here is what you need
Two pork chops (Boneless or otherwise)
Three large oranges
3/4 cup of fresh squeezed orange juice (from the three oranges)
The zest of three large oranges
Two heaping tablespoons of orange marmalade
Two heaping tablespoons of brown sugar (Dark ot light
Once you have the juicing and zesting done place two pork chops into a fairly large skillet and with a bit of olive oil and start them simmering. Salt and pepper before putting a lid on it. I cooked mine on medium heat.
Put a tablespoon of butter in the skillet and fire it up on medium high heat. Don't walk away as you will be stirring this almost to the end.
Add the orange juice, orange zest, and brown sugar to the pan and start stirring. Once you get that all mixed in add the orange marmalade and stir. Once you get to this point you can leave it for a second and check your pork chops, they are probably ready to turn.
I served these with green beans a baked potato and a nice roll.
Let me tell you that there were no leftovers to share with the ole pooch!
Enjoy
Tim
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Spring is here! Well at least it is here in the plant incubator, here are some pictures of some of the seedlings that have sprouted.
Tomatoes
Roma
Cherry or Grape
Zucchini
And out in the garden there is signs of life in the cold frame.
Iceberg Lettuce
Only two pots here have sprouted, I am not sure if I am having problems yet as I have not had time to check the germination periods on all these seeds.
Most of that is Brussel sprouts, Broccoli, eggplant and some romaine type lettuce. I may have to restart these. It is warm enough here to till the garden but I am no fool, I will wait. I am taking my vacation this year to coincide with garden planting time, I can not wait. I have not received word if it has been approved yet so wish me luck.
Tim
Tomatoes
Roma
Cherry or Grape
Zucchini
And out in the garden there is signs of life in the cold frame.
Iceberg Lettuce
Only two pots here have sprouted, I am not sure if I am having problems yet as I have not had time to check the germination periods on all these seeds.
Tim
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