First, the background.
Last weekend we had a fire. A middle-of-the-night, smelling-smoke, seeing flames, emergency wake-up-the-kids-and-get-the-hell-out-of-the-house kind of fire.
It was scary.
It was 2:30 a.m., more or less, and cold, and we were all in pajamas or what passes for pajamas in our house, and of course barefoot, and we all stood/sat/wandered around the yard and driveway watching as what seemed like a dozen fire trucks and a hundred firefighters (I know it wasn't that many, but it seemed so at the time) arrived, got the fire under control, and slowly departed.
Let me pause here for a moment to say how incredibly grateful I am to the firefighters, most of whom are volunteers who gave up a night with their own families (and do so frequently) so that they could come save our house and our family. I will never be able to repay this. I can't even begin to try.
So ... in the aftermath, we were cold and shocked and muddled. I drove the kids to their Nana's to catch a few hours of sleep. Drove back home and tried to sleep for an hour with Barry in Cole's bunk bed. Got up around eight and started to get it together.
Almost immediately it became clear that we wouldn't be able to stay in the house. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. Now it seems delusional but I actually thought we'd be out only a night or two. We are now going on night 12 in an extended-stay type hotel. Not a bad place as these places go. Pretty new and pretty clean and there is breakfast for the kids before school. If there were only a Starbucks nearby, and if only Ivy could be here with us, I think I'd be pretty content to stay forever.
But not really ... because we are 30 minutes from home and the driving is KILLING me. The traffic is a nightmare. I don't know how anyone lives in L.A. I'd surely shoot myself.
So we began looking for a rental home to stay in during the (four? six? eight?) months that we will likely be out of our house. Unfortunately, in Western HoCo, rental homes are very few and very far between, and mostly very, very expensive ... and very dog-unfriendly.
Hey, I can't blame them. A family of 5, with two dogs, one a Tibetan Mastiff ... no way would I rent to us. So no hard feelings. But we needed to come up with another plan.
Hence, Operation RV. It's not actually going to be an RV. It's going to be a trailer. I've never spent any significant time in a trailer, though we did discover last summer that we as a family actually do enjoy tent camping, but I'm not naive enough to think that camping at the beach for five days will compare in the slightest to living in a trailer with two teenagers, a college kid and two dogs for an entire summer (or longer).
There are bound to be some entertaining moments. So I'm going to try and keep up with the story here, mainly so our out-of-town friends and family can know what's going on with us. (I'll give you a hint: It likely will involve lots of alcoholic beverages).
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