Curtailing Due to the High Cost of Everything

I've cut back on so many things, because everything is so expensive now. I don't go anywhere unless I'm trapping cats or transporting them to a clinic. Gas is so high. I've cut back on food, too.

I get about $640 on Disability per month plus HUD. You pay a third of your income on rent and utilities when you have a HUD voucher. I am very grateful to have a HUD voucher because I'd live on the streets without one.

But the utility allowance is calculated under a government mandated formula, and has gotten lower and lower. So what happens is a person ends up paying way more than a third of their income for rent and utilities, since utilities have gone way up. The %14 Pacific Power rate hike that occurred last fall was devastating to me. Albany has since raised water rates and garbage rates just jumped, also. Life is getting harder for many people. I understand why people have garbage piling up around their places. They can't afford garbage service.

I've never lived in a decent place before I lived in this house. I have lived in many slums and housing projects that were really not very pleasant.

I did love the last little slum house I lived at. It was teensy, set on cinder blocks, had water under it constantly that sometimes came right up to the floorboards on one side. It had a well that chronically tested positive for fecal coliform. I did become ill along with my cats, with digestive issues there, even though I hauled in water rather than drink the questionable well water, filling water jugs even in people's yards, using hoses, for my drinking water.

I know. Very white trashy.

The bathroom when I moved in, had a lot of mold. There was no vent fan and no heat in the bathroom, nor in the bedroom. I ended up ripping out three layers of old vinyl flooring that had water and mold inbetween each and replacing even some of the totally rotted floor boards and sheet rock in the bathroom. I put in new vinyl flooring and even replaced the toilet myself, without landlord reimbursement. I scrubbed with clorox the walls, trying to keep the mold at bay but without a vent fan for moisture and without heat in there, I had no chance. I finally painted it with the Killz paint, which has zinc in it and is supposed to deter mold. That helped.

If I had not done these things myself, the repairs would not have ever been done and the mold was making me ill. The latch on the bathroom doorknob once froze also, being extremely old, effectively shutting me out of the bathroom. It was quite uncomfortable. I finally got the doorknob off however, and eventually installed a new one myself.

The lack of adequate heat was an issue. I froze most of the time. The average temp in the house even with the gas furnace on was usually right around 50 degrees, lower in the winter sometimes. I became intolerant of being inside in adequately heated buildings, because my body had adjusted to living in cold.

The gas furnace blew only one direction, out into the living room, and was extremely ineffecient due to a failing motor. RF interference, just after the motor started up, every few seconds actually, would cause snow on the TV. You could not watch TV AND be warm. The heat generated by the failing furnace would dissipate immediately, once the furnace shut off, because there was zero insulation in the house.

During the last two years I lived there, I got routine CO readings on my monitor. They were mostly under 100 ppm, but sometimes would exceed 100 ppm. My landlady told me I was nuts and the readings had nothing to do with the bad furnace. I could have died there.

The landlady would contest these words. She contested anything I said and would always say I was the only tenant who ever complained. This was not true. The tenants in her other house were horrified at the conditions. Rodents. Rot. Nothing worked. They finally moved out. They would return each Christmas to bring me cookies. I liked them, but they didn't stay at the house next door very long.

The landlady would get mad if I would try to defend myself when she'd claim I was the only tenant who ever asked for repairs by citing the other tenants in the other house. She'd tell me I was not to be talking to the other tenants. There was a lot of intimidation going on. I didn't know what to do. Her husband however was kind to me and called me a hero for what I did for the cats. When they divorced I knew I was done for there. They had fought all the time behind me and now without him to yell at, I knew it'd be me the target most likely.

She'd yelled at me also when I'd called the fire department, said it embarrassed her with the neighbors. I called the fire department because my wall clock had blinked off and I noticed it had blinked off. I got up and picked up the clock. It was hot. The cord was hot. The wall was hot about the outlet. So I called the fire department. It was late, after midnight.

The fire department found that the whole house was wired on one circuit, with a much larger amperage fuse in place to keep the circuit from constantly breaking due to overload. They contacted the city, in an e-mail I have a copy of, that said even poor people should at least have safe places to live. The city wanted to inspect and possibly would have shut the place down as a hazardous dwelling. The thing is, I had just had abdominal surgery.

I had huge tumors in my abdomin that the doctor thought might be ovarian cancer. It was endometriosis. I'd never heard the word until the doctor stopped by in recovery after abdominal surgery years after the pain set in. Huge endometriomes had made my life hell for a lot of years. I couldn't sit sometimes without the bubble of pressure on my left side. Oh my gosh.

One reason I ended up at Portland Adventist on a psyche ward just before Christmas in 1998, where they beat me so badly my neck got ruptured, was because of the extreme abdominal pain I'd been going through. I had not been able to sleep for so long. It was determined, however, that the pain was psychological caused, a symptom of mental illness, not physical, something I knew wasn't true. It was just all so hopeless. Later when the correct diagnoses finally emerged, after the abdominal surgery, I at last felt somewhat vindicated.

But trying to recuperate from abdominal surgery with the city wanting to inspect the decripid shack where I lived, was not an option. So I left the city a message and stated I couldn't leave this place right then, after major surgery, so if they came to inspect, I'd be forced to stand outside naked and scream "rape". They didn't come.

See my car had just failed also. The exhaust system fell off. I'd walked the road looking for it in the freezing fog, too, holding my just operated on belly together with one hand, because I was afraid. There'd been something on the news about a car hitting something that fell off a truck and causing the people in the car who hit it to be injured. The cops were after the truck driver with a vengence. The cops in Corvallis hated me. I knew that. I knew if that exhaust system was on the road somewhere in the fog and somebody would hit it, (that's the luck I have) and I'd be put in jail forever.

I finally found it alongside 35th street. I'd just gone for a real short drive, to get a bit of food, after surgery. I walked a good five miles a few days after surgery looking for it. So I was in more pain than maybe I would have been, had I not had to go out looking for that exhaust system, to get it off the road, and drag it home hoping maybe I could find a way to get it back on, so I could drive my car and get the things I needed, like food and the water I hauled.

What white trash poor life drama, eh?

I finally talked back to her. I was just too tired of grovelling. The furnace was dead. It was freezing, December. She came and told me I'd ruined her Christmas (because the furnace had been condemned as dangerous). I'd about had it. All the repairs I'd had to do on my money. The hardships from the bad well and the bad heat and the bad everything.

She wandered into my bathroom. Butterscotch, the old campus feral was in the bathroom. It was the only small room where I could put her, with a space heater, so she could have a bit of heat. She'd become ill, like all the cats, with the lack of heat and bad water and water under the house and, well...it was bad there. The landlady tore into me about old Butterscotch being in the bathroom. She was really mad because the furnace had been condemned by the gas company, and she said I wasn't to have cats in the bathroom.

She knew what I did with cats. She knew it from the start and now, for her to tell me to get that cat out of the bathroom, it was too much. Old Butterscotch was very ill. Just too much for me.

Inside, I was hissing. Inside, I knew it was over, that I'd likely be on the streets, but a person can only take so much. Without money, you have no power over your own fate.

I talked back to her. She evicted me on the spot. It was very hard to take. The next 30 days were literally hell for me, not knowing what I would do or where I would go. I wasn't as worried about myself as I was about my cats. I almost died the move out of there was so stressful, physically and emotionally.

But I loved living in a stand alone house. It was my first time. I built a cat yard, mowed the lawn out front, which was huge, with my muscle powered push mower. I picked apples off of trees and made applesauce and I ate breakfast summers by a plum tree, picking the fruit fresh off the tree that otherwise went unharvested by humans but well harvested by birds and squirrels.

I tried to fit into a mostly home owner neighborhood but I failed at this endeavor. I was still a poor person in a middle class hood. I didn't need reminded of the fact that slum house was hated by neighbors. They told me. It was hard. I tried to please the neighbors, to do neighborly type things, take Christmas cards to neighbors, trap any cats any of them fed, etc. I kept up the yard. But they were not nice about it at all, the decripid little shack I called home that they wanted gone, especially one neighbor very closeby. They were happy when I was evicted over the furnace failing. That hurt, too.

I had tried so hard there, fixed so many things at my own expense. It still hurts to think of it. The slumlady was really exploiting me and HUD. I wanted so badly to fit in somewhere, to be accepted, to feel community, like I was wanted, needed, part of a group or something, an equal. I suppose I tried too hard.

HUD had wanted me out of there for some time, but I couldn't find anywhere else to go, so they were not being real particular, knowing I'd end up on the streets, but always urging me to try to find something of a little higher standard of landlord upkeep. I realize, it was a very bad situation there, but I did love having a yard and living in the country and being so close to so many lovely parks.

Here's the thing I'll say in my defense: I'll say, I still managed to save thousands of cats while living like that. I think that's spectacular. And I'm proud I could do it.

I was a lone feral, ducking blows, searching the eyes passing for any hint of kindness. The intellectuals and the policy makers have meetings and conferences and write inflated papers on how to deal with the human strays. They talk about the diseases we might spread, as if they have none. They'd call our hisses dangerous, even though their hisses are far more dangerous. Some would drug us up and throw us into isolated sterile confined living, parade us around now and then on chains, to glorify their egos, before returning us to our psyche drug cages. Some would euthanize us all. All I ever wanted was love.

This is why I empathize with the ferals and the strays. Because I am one.

So anyhow, this house is very nice that I live in now. But it is too big for me to actually afford to live here. I don't know where to cut back more to help afford to live. I've got car repairs I need to get done, too.

My brother is too far away to do any upkeep or repairs here himself. The kitchen sink leaks. I keep a bucket under it, until I can get the parts I need to fix it. I did remove the garbage disposal. The dishwasher broke and is disconnected but I don't need a dishwasher. The water under the house problem was never addressed and neither were the roof leaks, although so far, the leaks occur only in the attic. The particle board floor is not holding up to daily moppings, which I must do, with having cats.

Well anyhow. I don't know how to make it anymore, is what I'm saying. I am going to try to grow my own vegetables out back. This will help I think, especially if I freeze some, dry some, and cold storage some, for later use. There are ways to do this, right?

I got some seeds, but I don't have much knowledge. I dug the hole for the patio in part so I could have dirt to create a garden to grow some vegetables. I now have the dirt I need and today I am planting potatoes and onions. I am excited about trying to grow some vegetables. I love vegetables very much. My favorites are: yams, leeks, bell peppers, squash of all kinds, broccoli, peas, kale, well I could go on and on. I am a vegetable lover.

If anyone has any tips, I would sure appreciate tips on growing vegetables. Thank you.