Snap Crackle POP!

So...

I've been looking at buying a little house since (as you all know) the one I'm currently renting is going up for sale August 1st. It's an adorable house with a beautiful backyard--creek running through it--its a mini paradise. Except, like all paradise places, there is a snake residing there. This snakes name is State Route 14.

My beautiful little backyard butts up against it and oh. my. GOD. at the incessant, unbearable NOISE! MiniWarrior won't play in the backyard. It's too hard on him to have that much constant noise happening. He doesn't even like to sleep in his room because the noise of the traffic echo's.

So yeah. We aren't buying that house and so, we have to decide where to live next.

Thing is, I hate the thought of moving again. The work, the resetting up..etc. Bleh.
I would love to find someplace permanent to move to but have you SEEN the housing market lately? Sheesh! People are trying to pawn off mobile homes for 200k. Mobile Homes! I don't think so.

I started looking at apartments. Spent some time yesterday researching them. I figure tossing money on a rental home was using more monetary resources. I could be saving money towards the future purchase of a home just in utilities alone.

Sounds good. Right?

I zipped over to an apartment complex yesterday after work. I had scoured their website and it seemed pretty promising. Playground for MiniWarrior--a pool. The apartments were split level with an attached garage. Yes yes. All good. It would be like a minihouse until the market settled and we could buy a home of our own.

Um...yeah.

I pulled into a concrete jungle filled with dilapidated, two story buildings that sagged precariously on their cracking foundations.

Hmm. Not quite the paradise the website mentioned. I thought. But, I figured I was there already so I'd check things out.

I sat in the rental office that smelled of mothballs and mold but looked fairly nice with faux cherry wood desks and upper end plastic plants. The Rental lady took me out to look at an empty apartment. As we wound our way through the maze of discolored buildings I kept pressing down the need to run. Far. Far away. I gamely pressed on and stepped through the door of the vacant apartment with a sickly smile at the nice rental lady.

"Isn't this nice?" She beamed at me, sauntering through and turning on lights.

I stood and blinked at her clamping my mouth tight. I think a little whimper escaped because a flash of panic flickered across her eyes and she went into a flurry of sales talk, flitting through the dank, stain filled place with frantic energy trying to whip some excitement into me.

"You see? This is a wonderful kitchen. Isn't it? Isn't it?!" I looked over at the peeling formica--rectangle shotgun style space--that huddled miserably beneath a blinking florescent light.

"Um..." I looked at her then back at the kitchen and winced.

"Well, let's look at the bedrooms, shall we?" She said mincing away from the kitchen from hell and down the narrow hallway. I eyed the open front door and thought of bolting.

The bedrooms were, well--I'm still shuddering and might need some therapy to remove the rancid images from my brain.

I bolted as soon as politely possible. I headed down the road back to my house with tears of depression blurring my vision. Apartments were out of the question. I just couldn't go back to dark squares of living space surrounded by the masses of community living.

Once home, I spied the red blinking eyeball of my phone telling me there were messages. I plunked down in my chair and dialed voicemail.

It was the Realtor. She wanted to arrange a time she could come over and view the house to give the owner an estimate of what he could sell it for. I felt my heart sink as she droned on and on about scheduling visiting times and meeting times and lock boxes.

I hung up the phone and looked around my little home. Memories of the year spent there with friends and family. Done. It was finished. Time to change. To begin again.

Too much change. Too many times of starting over. My strength meter flickered below the E line. I dialed up my guy to tell him about the realtor call. He was distracted by a project he had been laboring all day on. I could hear it so I hung up the phone and felt my reserves shudder to a halt.

I flung my phone away from me. It bounced off the floor and rolled against the entertainment center...in pieces. I stared down at my broken phone and snapped.

It was all just too much. My job, my house, my family...all just too much. I sobbed while trying to piece my phone back together. A crackle. A sign of life. Somehow I was able to redial my guy...the last person I had called. The phone had gone into speakerphone mode.

"Hello...Hello??"

"Can you hear me?"

"Hello...Hello?"

"Please", I sobbed back into the piece of phone still working,"Can you hear me?"

"Yes! What..."

"Come over...please. I've broken my phone!"

"I'll be right over."

I curled into my sofa clutching my broken phone to me and wailed like the desperate child I had become.

He found me there, still clutching my phone and sobbing into the arm of my sofa.

"Honey. What's wrong?"

"I...I've broken my PHONE!"

He must have thought I was crazy. Actually, I think he had suspicions about the validity of my sanity before, but I think I nailed that allusive assumption down tight.

So many things broken these past 2 years. So many things lost. It felt good to finally just scream them out in a psychotic crying jag.

Things will be Okay. My guy is off today to transfer my broken phone to his old phone (he just bought one of those cool i-phones so he had a spare phone)...and we are going to look for another house we can rent in the next month.

So we are gathering up the pieces and beginning again.

Deep breath.

That's what life is all about isn't it? Beginning again. And Again. And again...

Right? ... right?