Well, Mr. Weezy and I continue to prepare for our move the most/best we can with nine weeks yet to go until we leave. I've been checking online for rental homes to get a sense of what is available and what the rental process might entail Mr. Weezy has been working on just how he is going to arrange our motorcycles in the moving truck. In the midst of our preparations, we received a phone call. From my mom. Oh, boy ... She has been living with my brother and sister-in-law in Durham, North Carolina for the last year. Because of her age and her health, we had to move Mom out of her house in Miami; she just wasn't able to live alone anymore. My brother and sister-in-law were in the best position to take care of her because they already had a house, and my brother had a pretty flexible work schedule. Without going into details of how that situation worked out, I will say that my brother is ready to hand off the Mom duties. So, Mom either moves into a nursing home or comes and lives with Mr. Weezy and me. A nursing home would not be a good financial decision (read $$$$), and despite her age, Mom is in decent physical and mental health, so there isn't any reason she needs to be in a nursing home at this point. That means she and her cat will move in with me, Mr. Weezy, and our two dogs. Like I said ... oh, boy.
Now I'll have two new tricks to learn that I hadn't anticipated. The first is living with my mother in a completely new context; that is, I'll be the caretaker now, not her. The second is getting our two dogs accustomed to (or maybe accepting of) living with a cat. Our female pretty much loves everyone and everything, so I'm not too worried about her. Our male, on the other hand, seems a little more aggressive. I get the impression when we are walking him and he sees a cat, he would try to kill it if we let him off the leash. I've already talked to our vet about the best way to introduce the animals and get them used to each other. I am going into this with the same attitude I have for the whole move: we are going to find a way to make it work. Hey--if this dog can learn new tricks, so can the other ones, right??!!
This new living arrangement completely changes the type of rental home I now need to find. To start, we need a 3/2 now, not a 2/1. Many of the 3/2's in our price range are newer homes that have two stories. That is OK except Mom obviously has to be on the first floor, which is usually where the master bedroom is. We have a king sized bed, so that means if we find a two-story house, we have to make sure one of the bedrooms on the second floor is big enough to accommodate our bed!
We have narrowed our home search to Charlotte/Concord/Kannapolis, North Carolina. In my searching around on the internet, I discovered what I believe to be an incredibly helpful website called Neighborhood Scout. I first found it when I was researching crime statistics for the cities where we are looking for houses. The site does way more than give crime stats, though. You can enter a property address, and under the "description" tab, find out all kinds of information about the neighborhood like home values, average rent, whether most properties are owner or renter occupied, vacancy rates, and the income classification of the area (average, below-average, etc). This information will be very useful in further narrowing our possible rental homes. I am going up to Charlotte the first weekend in August expressly for the purpose of seeing places we are considering, so giving more focus to our search means less time spent driving around to look at places.
I feel close enough to our leaving now that I am getting excited. Of course, that may be partly due to the fact that the heat and humidity here in South Florida are positively oppressive right now, and I know that as fall progresses in North Carolina, we can look forward to more comfortable temperatures, something we wouldn't be able to do here.
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