Home... again.

Long time, no blog. Again. This time a 7 year gap.

Several months ago, I managed to finally obtain my own, real housing. A rather spacious one bedroom apartment in a handy Berkeley neighborhood. Actually, it's only about three blocks from the encampment I'd spent most of last year at.

I figured that the three years I spent at a rented "office/studio" wasn't really "legitimate" housing, since we weren't supposed to actually reside there, although it sure was good enough and even zoned for live/work - but it didn't meet all the code specs for that purpose. Instead, it was on the wink-wink-nudge-nudge basis, just so long as we kept up appearances otherwise. Until the property changed hands again and I suddenly lost it.

I don't really consider the year spent in a converted garage "cottage" behind the house in Albany as totally genuine housing, either, since it both was not a legal unit and due to having to "share" the kitchen and bathroom in the house, too. The landlady turned out to be bonkers, a real pain, and only allowed minimal access. Until she simply locked me out, despite my being fully paid.

So, since I've had any form of legitimate, autonomous housing of my own has been at least 10 or 11 years. Whew! I'm glad that, back then, I really had no idea what a long, rough road this all was to become. Might've made it much harder to endure. At first, I figured it might take me only a matter of a couple or few months.

But now, I find myself in more of an 'aftermath' than I'd reckoned on. There's the 'adjustment' to make back to 'normal' lifestyle, but also now I have to finally contend with my storage predicament. As affordable as this place is, it's added hundreds of dollars to my monthly expenses. I no longer can afford this AND the storage container AND the RV storage space. Whoopsies!

Since this all got precipitated when the Berkeley Police began to harrass me, come after my truck, reneged on a deal we'd struck (and I'd begun partial payment against), then took my truck from me anyway, forcing me back onto the street, my entire plan underway came to sudden halt. I needed that truck. I'd taken storage way up in North Richmond because it was so much of a better deal up there than anywhere closer. But it's quite a ways from here and public transportation doesn't even take me all the way. There's a distance I've had to take a bicycle to traverse. Just the commuting up there and back can easily take half a day, which seriously reduced my time there to deal with things and restricts my ability to remove anything to what I can carry on a bicycle. And a bicycle that must be put on the bus front racks and taken into BART trains with me. Not very much at all.