In the search for a lifestyle that suits me and something I can manage with my chronic illness, I have had some interesting experiences. In 2014 I decided to sell my condo downtown and search for a different, less expensive lifestyle. It sold towards the end of 2014 and I went on a five and a half month trip through Asia and Europe. The original goal was to become an expat in Thailand but I discovered the expat life isn’t for me, so I came back to California. After I came home from my trip, I fell into housesitting more or less full time. The problem was that the jobs didn’t always line up back to back so I had to find places to stay in between jobs. I was really mobile because I carried everything I needed with me in my car, no furniture or anything.
The first place I booked on Airbnb looked great until the owner gave me the tour. I am pretty green and want to save the planet and reduce waste but this lady took it to the next level. She had a bucket in the shower to collect the water that she would use to water the plants. She wouldn’t flush the toilet until it had been used several times. Things like that, all these rules she expected me to follow. And they are all very good ideas for saving water but to expect a guest to follow them is going too far in my opinion. I never even used the shower and flushed the toilet before I used it, which of course got me yelled at. I’m sorry but that’s gross! And she was so negative. All she did was complain about people and watch horrible negative things on tv. I left the next day.
I went and stayed with a friend while I regrouped and tried to find a new place. I figured if I could rent a room cheaply, then I could just use it between jobs. I found a house with a cheap room that was kind of cluttered but seemed ok. And they had an adorable lab puppy. So I put the deposit down and moved in. What I didn’t know us that the owner was a controlling banshee who yelled at her daughters all the time and tried to treat me like a child. There were signs up in the house like in the laundry room warning me to use my OWN soap and NOT TOUCH their supplies! (Not that I would have, but yikes!) And she had several small dogs that peed and pooped freely all over the house and no one cleaned it up or tried to potty train them. The last straw was when she tried to tell me what I could and couldn’t do in my own bedroom. So one day I packed up all my stuff and moved it out to the car past her while she was watching tv in the living room. She didn’t even notice what I was doing. When I was all packed, double checked to make sure I had everything, I announced to her that I was moving out, she had my 30 days notice and left.
The next place I looked at was super clean and really nice. The lady was friendly and the area was good, so I thought this was going to finally be the place that worked out. I put down my deposit there and came back the next day to move my stuff in. As I was bringing stuff in, this really ratty homeless looking man came in from the garage and said hello. Now, I had been told it was the lady and another female roommate that lived there, so I had no idea who this man was. I looked at him and said “hello?” He introduced himself and said he was the owner’s ex-husband and he was living in the garage. Wow. Lie #1. Lie #2 was that the owner had failed to mention that the washer was broken and she had no intention of fixing it. Still, I was tired of moving around so I ended up staying there for a few months. I was rarely there because when I wasn’t housesitting I would get up early, go out to a local coffee shop, work on my computer all morning, run errands, do dog walking jobs, anything to stay out of that house until late at night. One weird thing was that for some reason, I never used the kitchen aside from storing a few things in the fridge. I had a kettle in my room and I would make coffee and oatmeal and such but I just never felt comfortable cooking in the kitchen, and I never knew why until I moved out. There were just a lot of little things that made living there difficult which I won't get into here. The final straw that made me leave was on Christmas Eve. The ex-husband was there with his son and some random guy who I will call “the idiot.” They were drinking and getting more and more rowdy as the night wore on. The idiot was bragging about having a gun. Eventually it broke out into a fight and I left through the front door, went around the corner and called the police. The owner and her daughter had gone in the back yard which didn’t have a gate, and were trapped there. She shouted over the gate that the idiot’s pit bull had bitten her. I asked her if she wanted me to send EMS but she said no. I was still on the phone with dispatch when the idiot got in his car - drunk - and drove away. I told the dispatcher as much and added that the fight was probably over and that I was sorry if I had wasted her time. She said that was ok and asked if she could send some officers later to check on things. I said that would be fine and thanked her. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted that I go over to their house that night. So I ended up spending Christmas Eve and morning with my friends. When I went back, I told the owner that I was giving my 30 days notice and she wasn’t surprised. Then she started telling me all about the roommate. Turns out she was schizophrenic and had made food for the other roommates but put things like dish soap in the food, trying to poison (?) them. They also had her on camera opening the front door and physically kicking the dachshund out of the house. She never bothered to tell me any of this before when I was living next door to the lady and sharing a bathroom with her and the ex-husband, but she spilled the beans that day.
After that, I stayed at my friends’ house until I left for a training event in Utah. My intention after the training was to stay in Utah and try and find a job. I stayed with an adorable Mormon couple who offered to let me stay as long as I needed until I figured out where I was going. They were the sweetest folks! When they learned I had never experienced a weenie roast, we had one that night along with s’mores which I also had never experienced. They were delicious! The wife went to Salt Lake City with her adult children and left me with the husband who was nearly blind and deaf and an absolute darling and a hoot! He had built the house himself and done an amazing job. He told me all about the construction of the house and stories from his time in the Navy and the time he and his brothers bought a mining claim in Alaska and took turns going up there to work the mine. He had built a little contraption that you put marbles in the top and watch them go down all these little paths until they came out a receptacle in the bottom. It was mesmerizing and I spent a lot of time playing with that little contraption in their beautiful back yard. He also shared with me that one of his favorite things was to go down to the turkey processing plant and get a bag of the organs for cheap. He would cut them up and eat them with gravy. He finally convinced me to try them and I really tried to like them but I just couldn't. I was trying to take a bite and tell him they were good but he took one look at my face and said "that's ok, you don't have to eat it!" He was so nice about it. I think we ended up giving my portion to the dog. I'll never forget him; he was such a character and so kind. Within a few days I found a job at a lodge in a national park so I said my goodbyes and headed for my next adventure.
I arrived at the lodge and was shown around, given a uniform and schedule. I was to work at the front desk. The park was absolutely beautiful and I took advantage of some down time and booked a horseback ride into the canyon, an experience I will never forget. It was really fun to be part of the back of house and experience what it’s like to be part of the staff and eat in the dining room which provided breakfast, lunch and dinner. I met some great people, a few of whom I am still friends with. I also worked the night shift and learned how to do a night audit and start a fire, a very handy skill to have. However, I quickly learned that the front desk was seriously not organized, information was piecemeal and not consistent, the manager treated us like children and that it wasn’t a good place for me to be. Plus, my roommate was, let’s just say, very difficult to live with. She had documented mental health issues that management knew about, she had had problems with roommates before, there were other rooms available, and yet they still put me with her. In the end, I didn’t trust my manager because they didn’t keep the terms of employment I was hired with, and I decided to get out before I got snowed in. I had breakfast, packed all my stuff, and went to HR and let them know I was quitting. We did all the HR stuff and I drove from Utah to Yuba City in one day. Got to Yuba City at about 1am.
I stayed with my friend in Yuba City for a week or two until I found another room for rent in Oak Park. It was a beautiful house, nice and clean, and I was the first person to rent from the owner who had just bought it with the intent of renting out several rooms. He had a job at some residential treatment center so he was almost never home, so I mostly had the place to myself. Everything was great, and I was making myself at home. About a week and a half into my stay I sent a text to the owner about something and he replied with “I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” I asked him “Why? What did I do?” He said he couldn’t explain it, it was just a feeling and that I made prospective renters nervous which didn’t make any sense because I only saw them for a few seconds. Also, another lady he had agreed to rent to showed up with a moving truck on the day she was supposed to move in and he turned her away. I didn't think of it at the time, but that was a breach of contract. I don’t understand why he was getting rid of all his renters if his goal was to rent rooms in this house. Ultimately I didn’t get an answer and had to look for another place.
Fortunately, one of my girlfriend’s sons was just moving out of her house so she offered to rent the room to me on a short term basis before she sold the house in the summer. That gave me enough time to find a listing for a trailer in Fiddletown. I was intrigued by the off grid lifestyle and thought this would be a great chance to try it. Unfortunately I signed a lease right when we had the flood of the decade so I was sidelined for about a month at my sister’s house until the flooding went down and I could get in there and set up. But it paid off, I learned a lot about solar energy, exactly what I need vs. want and that I really don’t use that much electricity. I didn’t have heat, hot water, refrigeration or a freezer, but I found I could live without those things. I had a little propane stove that worked just fine and running water from the solar well the owner had installed. I did realize that I prefer to have cell reception. My trailer was like a Faraday cage and I had no signal in my area so if I wanted to make a phone call I had to walk down the hill quite a ways. So that was inconvenient. I also learned that even though I hated the spiders, I could deal with them but as the weather warmed up the hornets discovered me and would hurl themselves against the screen windows to try and get into the trailer. I learned that hornets were a deal breaker for me. I would get up early before the hornets did and drive into town and not come back until dusk. But I couldn’t stay out too late or it would be pitch black and I would be exposed to any number of predators, one of which had killed two dozen sheep in the time I had lived there. I think it was probably a pack of dogs but there were confirmed sightings of mountain lions and bears as well so I definitely didn’t want to be hiking to my trailer in the dark. My friend Howard started calling me Spam In A Can because I was a tasty morsel in my little metal trailer. When I moved into the trailer there was a couple with two children living down the hill, three alpacas that kept the grass down, and the owner lived on site. After a few months, the couple split, the man left, and the lady and her kids left soon after that and sold the alpacas. I never realized the effect the alpacas had until they left. The plant life took over everything within about a month. There was no way I could drive my car up to my trailer and now I had to worry about snakes in the grass. Then the owner left on a long trip to Spain and I found myself alone on the 50+ acre property with no cell signal, trapped by a gate that was jury rigged to a car battery that the owner somehow expected me to be able to fix. Soon enough the gate malfunctioned and I had to climb over and release it from the other side to get out. I had clients I had to see so that was the deal breaker for me. I didn’t want to be trapped in or out by this gate, alone on the property unable to call for help if something happened. So I gave him my notice, drove up super early one morning and packed everything out before the hornets got up. I look back on that experience as a positive one, however. I really learned a lot about the pros and cons of living off grid and what I do and do not want to live without. And I have lots of great pictures and memories of my time there.
Another reason I left my Fiddletown place is because I had gotten a part time job as a TaeKwonDo instructor to supplement my housesitting income and because classes were in the evening, I was not able to get home before dark which was necessary for life in the woods. After I left Fiddletown I decided to try Airbnb again. I had better luck this time and found a couple of hosts that had great places for reasonable prices that I could book stays with in between jobs. As long as I kept enough days booked in a month, it wasn’t too hard on the budget. And with the TaeKwonDo job and side dog walking jobs it was actually working out pretty well.
After awhile, the lady I was working with at the satellite school wanted to leave her boyfriend so we arranged to get an apartment together. She found a gorgeous apartment that the tenants were breaking the lease on so we got it at a good price. Unfortunately after only a few months she decided she wanted to move back to her home town and broke the lease, leaving me holding the bill for the entire rent. That was not in my budget. It took me about a month and a half to get another renter in, but she turned out to be the best roommate I’ve ever had. She was quiet and nice, and I really enjoyed having her there. We ended up signing for another year. Then about four months before the lease was up she decided to move in with her boyfriend but made me an offer to pay a quarter of the rent because she felt bad about walking out on the lease. I took the offer and ate the rest of the cost but had the apartment to myself for the rest of the lease. Expensive but very nice. I miss that place, the grounds were gorgeous and the location was fantastic.
That brings me to where I am today. After the apartment fiasco I vowed never again to be financially responsible for a lease, and I got lucky and one of my friends knew someone who was renting a room with private bathroom and fridge in the garage for a very good price. So I moved in and that’s where I am now. At the time of this writing I have been here nine months and I don’t want to go anywhere soon. It took me five years but I finally have a place that is affordable and sane. It’s been a bumpy ride but interesting and educational, that’s for sure!
