The Day Before All Hell Broke Loose

March 31st, 2009, was a turning point for two reasons: it was the last day of my life as I knew it without Meniere's Disease and
 the first day of my life to find what would become the first home we would come to own. 


Even nearly two years later, it's funny to me how certain details of that date are imprinted in my memory.  I had worked that day, rushed to pick up the kids from school at 3:00, and come home to get ready to go out to dinner with a few friends from book club.  About 4:00 pm I called in an order for pizza at Costco and hustled the kids back into the car to go pick it up. 

As I pulled out of the driveway of our rented home, I noticed activity at the vacant house up the street.  No one had lived there during the entire three years we had been in the neighborhood.  It was a sad, old house overrun with wild juniper bushes and ice plant.  Wood shutters in the upstairs windows were closed and an eyesore.  But oddly I had always felt a connection to the house.  While we waited patiently for the Southern California housing market to return to its senses, I guess I felt on some level this house, or at least one like it, would finally be our ticket to home ownership.  So when I saw the worker's car parked in the driveway and the front door open, I slowed down, but kept driving.  I got a block away then impulsively made a u-turn back to accost the poor guy laying tile in the upstairs bathrooms.

It turned out he was the son of a neighbor who knew the owner.  I got them to give me the woman's name and number and the rest is history.  The excitement I had that evening about the possibilty of buying this house rates up there with the night my husband proposed to me, finding out I was pregnant each time, and the news that I was pregnant with twins; the future possibilities and the feelings that go with with them.  And really not the point of this whole story.  Regardless, it was a moment I will never forget.  It is pertinent because it lends a positive twist to the downward spiral in my world that was about to happen and it also began to be revealed to me that good and evil live in a funny parallel universe.

Dinner that night was uneventful except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed conversation with good friends, drank a few mimosas, and ate a delicious dinner at this very cool place serving only locally grown organic food.  It was delicious, but oddly salty.  I say odd because I love salt and, at the time, ate quite a lot of it, so for me to notice something was salty likely meant it was really salty.

I was home and in bed by 11 pm.  Nothing out of the ordinary that I remember about how I was feeling nor any sign that my life was going to change in less than 8 hours...