Big Changes Indeed, or, How I Left The Homestead…
Whew!
Well, so much has happened in a little less than a year. My oldest son who lived with me turned 21 and my child support went up $1200 dollars a month. And then my tenant moved out and the cottage needed repairs, new flooring, carpets, and a paint job. I was in trouble. At precisely this time wall street got a little too crazy in their asset backed securities and derivatives money grab, so the market was crashing and real estate prices plummeting. I had just started a new job 5 or 6 months prior, back in the Sys Admin saddle again. Working in a small shop with CentOS on intel boxes with some heavy Xen virtualization going on. Glad to be in an office again but a small shop where you do everything and have no backup is no fun. You’re on call 24/7 365 basically.
Problem is with a less than stable employment history and a couple 90 days in my credit history, I couldn’t re-fi to get enough money to stay a few more years until a couple more kids turned 21. I also looked into cashing out an investment and was told it wasn’t an option. So, since the main house needed so much repair it was in essence a knock down, we just stopped paying the mortgage and started waiting for the axe to fall. After not paying for a year, I received a foreclosure complaint in June of ’09 and answered it myself at the supreme court. We started looking at apartments a few months prior and were dismayed at the shit-holes that were in our price range. The problem is we have Sid, and although some places take dogs, they often have a weight limit, they want small dogs, not 80 pound high drive GSD’s as tenants.
Well we found a great old pre-war building a guy I work with recommended, he has lived there for like 5 years or so. We got approved and saved up our deposit and first months rent along with extra for moving, etc. I had a doctor’s appointment mid August to get an ultrasound of my liver to make sure it looked OK. The tech said she saw a “little something” on my kidney. That little something was a 9 cm. tumor that I was told was almost definitely cancer and I would have to have my right kidney removed. Friggin’ CANCER, I forgot to mention we also had a motorcycle crash down around Chinatown and couldn’t afford to fix the bike, so we are definitely not having a good year so far. I went down to Sloan Kettering and met with Dr. Paul Russo, who is on of the best surgeons in the world when it comes to renal cancers. We scheduled an appointment for surgery the next week, on August 26th.
I went through the surgery, stayed in the hospital two more days (loved the morphine pump the first two days) and went home to recuperate. Knowing we were moving in 3 weeks and I hadn’t packed half of the stuff up I’d accumulated in 18 years of not throwing anything out was a disconcerting thought. Luckily I had moved my shed next door to my Mom’s property, so I had plenty of room for metro shelving and storing stuff we couldn’t bring but I couldn’t part with. I packed a little here and there without bending over, and we hired 3 guys and rented a truck and made the big move, from Mahopac, where I’d lived in the same house the kids were raised in for 18 years, to Sleepy Hollow. The move went pretty smooth, the poor guys carried 37 boxes of books up 6 flights of stairs to the 4th floor!
Here are a few pics of the building and the neighborhood. OK, that’s enough shocking news for one update and I’m glad I got this post in to keep it just under a year since my last post. I could be the once a year blogger… Although I’m sure many others would want to share that title. I’ll try and update again and tell you what else is new.
