Well, once again we blew Patti off.

Remember last entry when I mentioned numerous phonecalls? Well, one seems to have come through.

Today, we looked at a 1997 Dutch 16×80 trailer. For a repo, that thing was immaculate. It has no appliances, but we were told it was a 2000, so we’re hoping that the fact it was really a 1997 will sweeten the pot a little bit. But we loved it. It was clean, bright, and didn’t have a huge number of things wrong with it like the others we’d looked at. Aside from being told the wrong year, what we found were nitpicky things that could be fixed pretty quickly/easily.

We made an offer on it and put down our $200.

Then we took off and went to Parkwood Green, got an application, and checked out the lot that would be ours. Ed (aside from me misunderstanding that the park office was also his home) seemed to have no problem whatsoever with what was happening. The fact that the bank was willing to play ball with us tells me that our credit can’t be that horribly off. The only thing they said was that we’d be better off with just Mom on the mortgage, or else the student loans may mess us up. (No problem.)

So far, it looks like we’re going to be paying about $150 a month on it, on top of the $320 for base rent. Not counting any overages from the electric, that basically comes out to be just $5 more than what we’re paying at Alpine Meadows. However, we won’t be paying for water, sewer, or trash… nor will we have to pay for Luna or our cats.

When we got home, Patti was bent all out of shape because we didn’t drive back down to 54th street to place an offer on the tight thing she showed us.

I’m trying to be nice to her, but her pushiness knows no bounds. As far as we were concerned, there was no “thinking” — she basically told us we were coming in today at 4pm to place an offer. Not, “would [we]” or “if you would like to”… but told us we were coming in to place an offer. I told her we weren’t interested and why. (Too tight, master bathroom pretty much unusable to us, etc.)

She tells me, “We have other trailers, hun.” *growl*

“Yes, but our health is suffering… my grandpa suggested we should find an apartment and regroup once we’ve had a chance to rest.” Yeah, health as in Mom has almost had an accident every night this week since we’ve spent the better part of the day running from one end of the county to the other.

“With your credit, you won’t be able to get into anything.” Oh, really. How do you know? Have you checked our credit report without our consent?

I pitch my voice more aggressively, “Patti, we can not afford to keep driving to 54th street and beyond.”

At this point, she is not happy. Not happy at all. Oh well. I guess she’s starting to get it that we’re not going to be paying her an extra $2000 and she’s not getting whatever kickback she wanted to get by shoving us into Glenwood Estates.

Anyway, provided things go through okay we could be looking at only one or two days without a place to stay. We could move our things in (by next Wednesday possibly), but we can’t live there ourselves until all inspections are done.

Please keep your fingers crossed and prayers coming. There’s going to be a lot of prayers in this house until we figure out where things are headed. I’m so tired that I can’t even dredge up the hope. Patti’s deflating comments about our credit have gotten to me a bit. Everyone I’ve talked to has said to ignore her; she’s just getting a kickback from Glenwood… but I’m emotional enough that I am feeling discouraged.

Maybe this is a solution, but I’m just not sure. I’m discouraged/depresed enough that ambivalent really doesn’t describe me.

To start this off, I have to stress that it’s not a case of us being completely innocent victims. I hate that idea of people passing themselves off as completely innocent of any wrongdoing; Alpine Meadows has been pulling that with us for the past few weeks. So I’m not going to try that myself. We were in the wrong. We didn’t pay our rent and didn’t have the courage to ask for help when it could have been easily given.

And we were evicted because of it.

That being said, I feel that our treatment at the hands of Alpine Meadows, the courts, and the realtors at First Choice Mobile Home Sales was completely deplorable. We’re not criminals, we’re not trash. We’re people who just happen to be poor.

This entry is kind of rambling and VERY long (9 pages, 3873 words). I broke it up into pages to keep it straight. (Lj cuts if you’re reading it there.) I’ll include dates and times so we can stay clear about the timeline, since I do tend to jump around a little bit.