Introduction

In January 1999, we made a decision. This decision was that we were sick and tired of renting; we wanted to buy a home. The reason we made that decision was that we were messed around by a landlord one time too many. We were already sore at losing our home because of landlady spite a year earlier; the place where we had been living was okay, until the management changed and became the annoying "happy clappy let's make this a nice place to live" interfering kind. Now Don and I despise interference, we are private people and just want to be left to live; but one day there was a notice on our door.

The notice told us that we had committed a "vehicle violation". There was a list of potential offences, but none had been highlighted. I dropped the note right back to them with a note "Would you mind telling us which one?" It duly came back, with the real reason, and several more highlighted "as a precaution" which rubbed us up the wrong way from the start. Our car's registration had lapsed; we knew this, but there was also nothing in our lease that said it must be current, either.

I called and confirmed, and was told rather snottily that it was in my lease (it wasn't) and that then it was in the park rules. What park rules? I wanted to know. I never received them. And it's true; I never did. There was also no reference to additional park rules in the lease. Yet we were expected to keep them. It was demanded that the car was removed or registered within 24 hours. I told them (politely) where they could put that idea. Shortly afterwards, Don and I became very ill with the flu, but a more thick-skinned friend of ours called the landlady up from Alaska to say that she better cut us some slack as we couldn't walk let alone handle the car. We were cut some slack, but the damage had been done. I deeply resented the way I had been talked to, like some errant child, over something as trivial as a car that was unregistered and sitting on a private parking spot, not rusting away, and doing no harm. It was time to move.

When we got better, we tried to get the car through registration, but something very nasty happened to it. The poor car went to a scrap yard, Don and I spoke Words, and I called a realtor. That is how it started.

Finding our home

Our initial meeting was pleasant, but we found out very quickly just how expensive housing was in our area. A small two bedroom house usually would start at $260,000 or so - horrific, but there's Silicon Valley for you. We didn't want to do condominiums or townhomes, because we wanted to be apart from others even if only by a few feet, and condos often have idiotic biker unfriendly rules. We were not willing to pay good money to buy somewhere where we couldn't be ourselves.

After a while I asked about mobile homes, and we looked at some prices. Listings were produced and a viewing day was arranged. Mobile homes are much cheaper than houses, and involve renting a space in a park; however the rules are much less picky than condos so we thought we might be in with a chance.

Around the time we made this decision to go for it, the full moon came - it was the second full moon of January, and thus a blue moon. Not just any old blue moon, but the first of two in this year, something that had not happened for many years and will not again happen for nearly eight decades.

Terri and I went a-house-hunting. The very first property we visited was a tiny little two bedroom singlewide trailer, with a pretty rose garden. I got a lovely vibe from it, a greeting from the resident cat, and was very impressed. It had been the first listing Terri had produced, and I liked it very much. We then went on to some of the other parks and houses, and I quickly became enamoured of those, also; you got so much space for your money, and they looked like lovely places to live.

The next stage of course was to get Don into some of the properties. He wasn't as enthusiastic over them as me, and we got some calculations and found that the price would be a bit much for us anyway. Our finances and credit haven't been great, to say the least, and they felt that much more out of range. We were also not impressed by the mobile home salesman who seemed to think it was all right for us to have two cats so long as we lied to the mobile home park owners about it. Yeah, right. Profit before people encapsulated.

Don and I sat down and talked, and then Terri took us to see Little Blue Moon again. He thought it was lovely. We measured, calculated, and thought it would do - we would be a bit short on space, but so were we already, and we would be saving hundreds of dollars in rent... We also quite liked the landlady and her hubby, after talking to them, and the small no-frills park.

I filled out the form for a loan. We were going to make an offer on Little Blue Moon. Then a bombshell: the loan was rejected.