My Tuesday

This week, is something I've been procrastinating about for awhile now.   This week, I need to finish packing up our old house and move the remaining room into storage.

Everyones lives have ups and downs, the goods the bads, the hi and the low.  Poor choices and emotional devistations brought me to pretty much a screetching halt around the end of January of this year.   I was someone else then.  Someone who is gone now.  Someone I will miss.  She is dead in a sense.  There is still a part of her that lives inside of me, but I think that is part of what makes Chaps who she is.

Our house is being foreclosed on.  Not because of bad luck, not because of job loss, not because the banks are assholes.  The truthful reason is because we managed our money poorly, we did not communicate, we were letting go, of our house, of our life, of each other.  The payments were high, one month of not having enough to make that payment led to being short the next month and it all just escalates after that.  As those of you who have house payments you've been late on before, you cannot make a "partial" payment, they just send it back to you.  Catch it all up or don't send it at all is the philosophy.  And so, I am where I am today.

It's not so bad.  We have a newly refurbished 1 bedroom apartment.  Small, no yard.  I'm sad that I didn't get to keep my cats.  I cried alot over that choice.   But the human society found all of them loving homes and I didn't have to go through the agony of holding them tightly, my tears drenching their soft fur, while their eyes went glazed and they took their last breaths.  The alternative to putting them up for adoption was to put them to sleep.

The bank has sent numorous mailings, telling us the house was going up for Auction or scheduled for foreclosure.  We moved out thinking that we might come home and find our doors rekeyed and a notice we could not enter.  Fear of loosing all of our belongings and not having a place to sleep moved us to find this apartment at the end of March.

We moved alot out of the house, figuring we would be coming back daily or weekly to get the rest.  We had moved the most important things to us so we figured there wasn't as much of a rush to work on the remaining.

I got to the house about 12am just after leaving a Twisted Party.  I went to unlock the door and realized the bolt was set.  That was odd, I thought, we never set the deadbolt from the outside.  I just figured my daughter had been there and set it when she left, so I opened the door and entered the house.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  I'm pretty good at noticing the movement of items from where I last saw them, so I continued towards the back of the house to our old master bedroom.  It turned on the light.

Something seemed out of place, but didn't alarm me, most everything seemed to be exactly in the shape and placement I had left it.  I walked farther in the bedroom, then saw the gun safe door ajar.  As I neared the safe, I could see it had dents in the door, and there was some debris on the floor of the closet where the safe was hidden.  I opened the gun safe door farther, it was empty.  Things were missing out of the closet as well.  What things, I couldn't tell.  This was my husbands side of the closet.  I had no idea what had been there.

I realized that the thing I saw out of place was a small amp that had been on the floor was gone.  The strangest part about that amp missing was that there had been a neatly stacked pile of papers, a pair of pants, and a tape gun on top of the amp.  This pile, was now on the floor where the amp had been.  Still, in the same order, still neatly stacked, as if someone took care to pick it up, move the amp, and set the stack down, not wanting to mess it up.  Funny, I wouldn't have thought somebody who was ripping you off would care if a small stack of items was pushed to the side in the heat of a theft.  Not unless they knew you and cared about you anyway....hmmmm

I checked the windows and the sliding glass door of the bedroom.  I opened the doors to the the other bedrooms, nothing had moved.  There was still a keyboard in plain sight in my sons old room and my craft room hadn't been touched, even though a computer case sat right inside the door in plain view.  I went to the back door and found where a crowbar had been used to break through the bolt, the lock assembly now lying on the floor, the but door was closed.  How thoughtful of them.

It was about then that I got that feeling I should have had the moment I realized we had been robbed.  The prickly sensation you get when the hairs on the back of your neck perk up and the adrendalin kicks into your system.  I left the lights on, shut the door and locked it, and got into my car quickly.  I had no idea if they were still in the house or coming back.  I called my husband and told him what I saw, then went back to the apartment.  Scared and mad.  How fucking dare they.

This is about the time, others would have called the police.  I know, that is the logical thing to do.  But you have to understand my circumstances at this point.  I was working under a thin sheet of sanity at that point in my life.  The house was gone, my pets were no longer in my life, my marriage was in serious danger of imploding, I was driving my husband to and from work, out to estacada and other places every night, trying to keep my committments at sesso, and not sleeping.  I was a wreck.  Plus, I had no idea what was in that gun safe AND I had just left a twisted party so I was dressed in knee high vynal black spike boots, fishnets, and a black corset that matched the boots.  Yea, like that wasn't going to stand out.

Fast forward to today.  No, they didn't catch them or find the stuff.  No, I don't "KNOW" who did it but yes, I have my suspicions.  Doesn't matter.  Life goes on.

After being told of 4 different auction dates since December, they tell me the house was going to be foreclosed on Oct 1, yea, last friday.  Guess I'll call to day and find out if they did that or whats going on.  Point being, there is still 1 room left in the house that I'm having the worst time packing.  It's my stamp room.

No, not postage stamps, rubber stamps.  Yes, I should tell you I have a fetish for rubber stamps LOL.  Small blocks of wood with an attached rubber design that can be used as artwork for so many types of mediums.  Three 8' walls are lined with the blocks, most of those shelves have double layers.  Everything from a series of House Mouse to the landscapes of hawaii and the forests.  What do I do with these stamps?  That is for future blog posts.  It's a hobby.  A vanilla hobby.  Something "Chaps" has not allowed me the time to appreciate.  I've realized after my vanilla weekend with girlfriends, that I need to do this more, dive into the ink like I used to.  It allowed my senses to flow when I could be creative.  I just need to do it.

The room, is in disarray right now, packing has been hard for me.  There are so many small pieces, they have to packed just right so that nothing leaks, nothing bends, and nothing is broken.  I went there this morning and tried.  I really did.  I got about 3 boxes worth packed, then had to stop.  My head was hurting.  My heart as well.

I moved on to some knickknacks in the master bedroom that needed special care in packing.  Shelves that I wanted to keep.  All now wrapped and packed, waiting to be taken out of the house.

I will go back again this week, all week, until I'm finished.  I have to close that door one last time so that I never have to go back to what it once was.