New York Is Not North Carolina. But It IS Where We Are Today.

We really liked North Carolina. The small town we lived in and the bigger city not far away. 

We didn't complain too much about the muggy weather, and especially loved the thunderstorms and rain... Smelling the rain... In Seattle, it is only on a rare occasion that you could smell the rain, and it was delightful.

The people were wonderful, with the exception of the snarky teenage kids on their way to prom and the one drunk redneck who yelled at us to "tell that boy to get a haircut!". 

But there was one ginormous hole in our peaceful North Carolina-an existence; that house.

I can swear up and down that the house was unsuitable, but that means nothing. So I am going to show you some photos from the very night we moved in. Straight out of the camera, only edited to resize.

Grimy vents from the the gas heater in the kitchen.

Located in the busiest part of the kitchen, might I add.

Screws and nails jutted out at kid head length.

This was clearly broken, but the landlord assured us that the whole thing wouldn't come crashing down. At least.

The faucetry in the bathtub. We did end up getting the rust out after buying some CLR stuff.The window in the bathroom. Right beside the bathtub.This heater's coil got red hot - this was uncovered at perfect Boo Boo height and right next to the sink. Also, only has a "low" button, not an "off" one.The plate was installed upside down and the top piece was melty.

This jimmy rig kept the sink from wanting to slide off the base.

The sink also leaked, but we were waved away and told that it didn't.

Being from a huge city, Christian was not pleased with the windows that didn't close properly.The drawer was apparently sitting in the landlord's driveway getting rained on.The gross bathroom floor.A closer pic of the yuck.

Ceiling in the closet of the boys' room.Though easy to fix, a number of the covers were coming away from the wall...And some weren't there at all. {The air freshener came with the house, by the way.}

There were tons of holes, this size and smaller, throughout. This particular one was in the boys' room.

This one was the small hallway closet.

But there was more that you couldn't see; the smell for one, musty gross mingled with unwashed dog - so horrible in our room that we never even slept in it. There was fur embedded in the carpet fibers. I had to shove my fingers into the crevices where the carpet met the wall to loosen up some of the fur to be vacuumed. 

We called, expressed our concerns, most were dismissed, many were addressed, one was tackled but not rectified. In the end we were really made to feel like pretentious Yankee attention whores by the way he sighed whenever we called with a new concern.

And then, after almost a week of being out most of the day and busting ass cleaning for the rest. A week of cleaning up grime and rust and then re-cleaning the same areas. A week of sleeping on the floor {having not gotten to an Ikea and not wanting to bring any of our bedroom items along from Seattle - they were in need of replacing anyway}. We discovered the fleas. And if that wasn't bad enough, there were spiders the size of nickels living in the window areas too.

We called the landlord again as we treated the carpet, and our calls went unanswered. The treatments didn't work. We were putting so much money into these little things we could officially not move into a different place and we had no friends or family to stay with in North Carolina, couldn't waste money at a hotel because we didn't know if/when he'd ever get back to us AND pull up the carpets.

With no answer from the landlord, we took matters into our own hands and packed up and headed to family in NY where we could recuperate from what ended up being a $3,000 loss, and not to mention the cost of our utter emotional devastation. 

Words can't describe how Christian and I feel like failures. 11 days in NC. 11 days being four hours away from the light of our world. And we couldn't stay. 

When I called Samara to let her know what happened, she wasn't upset. {She still wanted to know why we couldn't live right next door.} She made me promise that we weren't going to Washington and I swore that we would never be that far from her again, and told her that we were going to be staying only 20 minutes away from where her grandparents and great grandparents on J.'s side lived. About an hour away from where she was born. 

This was a tangible place for her. She understood New York. She has a visual of it. So this excited her {more than NC did and we were CLOSER there!} and she just sighed along with me. We're still going to get her for our part of the Summer, still close enough to visit her - but instead of a day trip it will have to be an overnight, or weekend trip. Still and all - I feel like I failed her again.

We're in NY recuperating with mom and C. they have a ton of space, so we have enough privacy and a big area of our own. 

We're already trying to leave, but mom insists we take a few weeks to relax from the chaos. To give them an opportunity to love the grandchildren they've missed out on for the better part of a year. And to allow us a chance to reconnect. I'm trying to allow that all to happen.

I despise Ithaca, I do. It's boring here, and boring, and I don't know if I mentioned boring - which strains Christian and I because we're so bored that we're at each other's throats. Then there's his impatience at being here, us not wanting to be a burden {though we are not made to feel that way at all}, making sure the kids are on their best behavior - the stress of that. I fear having to throw some elbows because we both have history here {I was not the nicest person to go to high school with and he was kind of a skank}. I can count the people I WANT to run into on one hand, but I can guarantee they're not the ones I'll actually see. 

There are a lot of positives though. It's hard to list the less obvious ones while we're feeling like a dried up turd on a bad stretch of road, but eventually, I guess we'll get there. We haven't decided if we're going to head back to North Carolina, Christian and my brothercousin are cooking up a scheme to get a business of their own started and this area is in need of photography services - so there is great opportunity to start something amazing.

I'm officially not answering any more questions, I don't want to tell this story any more. I don't want to go through it at all. I'm exhausted - still unrelentingly tapped out and in a constant flurry of emotional turmoil, just trying to get back to a semblance of normalcy.

Whatever the hell "normal" is now...