Adventures in Moving with Bob and Kathy
Part II: The Adventure Continues
Hi Everyone,
Just thought we would bring you up to date on what's been happening here at the Rude Ranch since we put our house on the market and moved to our condo.
To begin with, we found a home for one of our foster cats, Blue. She was adopted by a young (well compared to Bob's and mine ages) lady who is an nurse. Although Blue now has a new life, she still stayed true to her roots, and helped her new mother eat an order of McDonald's french fries on the way to her new home. (Abbey, Blackie, Blue and Cali were all rescued from a McDonald's parking lot)
Blue
The rest of the Rude Ranch cats are also adjusting to their temporary home. Ghost and Maggie are sharing the computer hutch, while Mama has claimed "under the bed" as her domain. Tia has taken over the laundry basket while Cali still feels that the entire house and all the other cats are her toys. (Yes, she's still a tad spoiled.) Billie and Ashley have taken over the kitchen window, where they have hissing battles with Casper, the flame point himmie next door. Apparently Casper is not only fascinated by other cats and animals, (Boomer doesn't phase him at all) but he's down right nosy. We've lost count of the number of times we have come out of the shower or into a room, etc and there were a pair of Casper eyes staring at us through the window. Once again, we are quite grateful that he can't talk and "spill his guts".
Now on with the update: Three days after we moved into the condo we came across a listing for a house: 3 years old, 5 acres, large house, wood floors, gourmet kitchen, and no home owner's association. It was in an area we liked, and it was priced about $50,000 less than what we would have expected for a house like this, which lead us to the following question: What was wrong with it? We called our realtor and told her we were interested in this house. She looked it up and asked the same question. Still it looked like a good deal, so we made an appointment that day and joked about checking for blood stains under the carpets.
The actual tour of the house was an experience. We checked the yard for signs of recent digging activities (remember our comments from the above paragraph), glowing objects or anything else out of place. The yard needed some work, but still didn't look like it needed $50,000 worth of work. The plaque beside the door about the house being a Spiritual Institute slowed us down a little. The people in the house slowed us down a lot. You see, when we drove up and were walking around the house, we could see people moving around inside. No big deal, we would walk through and leave them alone. Then when we knocked on the door there was no answer. We could still see and hear people moving around in the house, they just weren't opening the door. Just as our realtor started to reach for the door to open it, the door seemed to open by itself. Expecting a person to be on the other side of the door, our realtor started to say hello, and introduce herself. Then she realized she was talking to thin air. All the people we had seen walking around the house had disappeared. Ok, so it was starting to resemble a scene from the old TV show the Addams Family. At that point we preferred to think that someone opened the door and everyone ran into the garage.
As we walked through the house, we quickly realized the house was perfect for what we wanted to do in terms of animal rescue and general living conditions. We also noticed that this house was the headquarters for some off shoot sect of the Hari Krishnas. There were clay statues of the "leader" all over the house. The weirdest room in the house was the "temple room". This is where the Krishna "deities" were kept on an alter. Just to be on the safe side, we did check under a couple of rugs.
After our tour we noticed the house was listed with O'Connor, Piper and Flynn realty. As mentioned before, we've had really really bad experiences with this company in the past. However, our realtor told us that this particular OPF realtor was one of the best and we shouldn't have too many problems with the company. Besides the house was pretty much what we wanted, at a really good price. There was just this thing about the house being the headquarters for a world wide cult. We put a contract on the house, hoped we didn't tick off any unknown deities (we don't follow the Krishna religion, but why take chances) and waited.
In the meantime back at the ranch, we were still trying to follow our trap/neuter/release policy with the feral cats living behind Uncle Nicky's restaurant. We knew there was at least one new cat there, and we wanted to catch him before he went into the kitten making business. Apparently he didn't agree with our plan to remove certain parts of his body... no matter what kind of bait we put in the trap, he would eat the bait up to the trip plate in the trap, then turn tail and run. He really made his opinion known when he started spraying the trap.
Several days later we heard about the contract on the house. They accepted it, we had 10 days to get things rolling. We quickly scheduled an inspection and started looking for a loan. It was during the inspection that things started to get a little hectic. Bob and I were both still working part time at Uncle Nicky's --- Bob's sister's restaurant. However, with moving and working at the animal shelter we had dropped back to "emergency only" status. It was during the inspection that my beeper went off: it was Uncle Nicky's, one waitress had just called in sick, how soon could I get there? Half an hour later Bob's beeper went off, Uncle Nicky's again the cook called in sick, could Bob work? A few minutes later, both our beepers went off Bob's other sister had gone into labor and Bob's mom, who was also working at the restaurant had to leave to take care of her other kid. How long would it take us to get there again?
We hastily finished our inspection (no big surprises, needs paint and cleaning mostly) and headed for the restaurant. It was in the middle of the dinner time rush that our realtor showed up with a contract on the Bowie house. At least we were getting a lot accomplished that night. Bob's sister had a baby girl later that night - the baby even waited 'till everyone got through working at the restaurant before she came into the world.
By the end of the week, Bob and I felt we had gotten a lot accomplished: we had a contract on the house we were selling, we had put a contract on our new house, had it inspected, and worked out a loan on the house, our new niece arrived, and we made a couple hundred bucks at the restaurant. Both houses were set up to close at the end of April, giving us 7 weeks to finish packing up the Bowie house, move the fish pond, and find renters for the condo we were currently living in.
We thought all was going well with our world, but then again Bob and I are optimists.....
