When I last posted (before the redesign), we were being evicted. Sadly, our awful landlord didn’t change his mind and we were unceremoniously kicked out of our place so that his son could move in. (We did find out that the son is, in fact, our age and single. Nothing against single people, but it bothers me a little that just one person is now inhabiting what was the home for our family of three.)

But we’ve moved on — literally and figuratively, at this point. We decided to move in with KC’s parents for the time being in order to save money (because, hello, rents in Oakland have gone completely insane) and because we’re hoping to someday have enough money to actually buy a place and not just rent forever. (Not having to move every few years? What a dream!)

And as though our eviction wasn’t bad enough, we had yet another issue with our landlord before we were able to clear the unit: 

Three days before we had to be out completely, I scheduled the walk-through with our landlord. We hadn’t done the final cleaning yet, but I wanted to do the walk-through prior to the end of the month so we would have time to fix anything he pointed out before he just decided to deduct repair costs from our security deposit.

The walk-through went off without issue. We had a few things left in the unit and told the landlord that we would be moving them out that day, and that the final cleaning would be happening in two days time.

An unfortunate casualty of our forced move was our cat, Seuss. Because we were moving in with the in-laws, we needed to find a new home for Seuss, who would not have gotten along with KC’s parents’ dog. Because we were in the process of finding Seuss a new owner, she was still staying at the apartment at the time of the walk-through (along with a litterbox, an auto-feeder, scratcher, etc.)

A couple hours after our walk-through, I got a text from the landlord saying, “Is this your orange cat? I guess I will put him outside.”

I hadn’t gotten the text right away because my phone had been in the diaper bag (and, oh yeah, we were in the process of moving so we were a tiny bit busy.) I was confused and texted back, “Our cat is calico and she doesn’t go outside,” because Seuss is indoor-only. I tried calling the landlord back to ask what the heck he was talking about, but his phone was off. Over the course of the next hour we determined that our landlord had re-entered the unit after the walk-through (despite the fact that we had yet to pass possession over), discovered the cat, decided that we had abandoned her, and put her (and all her things) outside.

Um, yeah. As though kicking us out of our house isn’t enough, you have to throw our poor 9 year old, indoor cat outside? Cool.

The whole thing resulted in neighbors being called, a very frank conversation between KC and the landlord, and KC having to go all the way back to the apartment at night to try and track down Seuss on a Sunday night after having moved all weekend long.

The only upside was that very night our lovely neighbors (that we were so sad to leave behind) ended up hooking us up with a coworker of theirs whose friend ended up adopting Seuss. So Seuss is now living that glamorous Hollywood life down in LA in her cushy new digs with her new owner.

We’re so happy that it all worked out for the best, but we really could have done without that last-minute stress on top of what we were already dealing with. I think if I were a believer in VooDoo I would have a landlord doll just full of pins at this point.

But here’s hoping that taking the high road really is the best approach (even if it is very unsatisfying in the moment.)