Joys of renting

Last classical concert at Britt Festival for the season

Bozo lived here and his largest known still  (1 block from our house--COME! we'll show you.)

For our first breakfast in town, we walked 6 minutes to The Good Bean: free refills.  (“Jude” ate someone’s scrambled eggs because the chef said his name wrong.   Five minutes later Chef called Jude again and someone else ate Judd’s over easy eggs.) People in line seemed to be locals, bikers or musicians who work in Jacksonville for the summer at the Britt Festival.

We felt we needed to “shop for essentials” all day yesterday and managed to avoid cleaning out all the cupboards/cabinets/baseboards and rafters. Today we got to it about 3pm and found more dog hair and dust and spiders and cobwebs than we imagined a new rental should have.

We washed new towels and sheets only to find sopping wet towels at the bottom of the broken washer (no spin cycle.) Found a laundromat 9 minutes away so we could finish the 3 loads of dirty clothes /cleaning stuff. Since the washer wasn’t technically part of the rental agreement but “thrown in to use while it’s here,” the landlord will not be replacing/repairing it.  So we need to decide if it’s worth buying a new one, calling a repair man or just paying the $6 of quarters for a triple load at the laundromat once a week…. We’re still deciding.

A sign for an “estate sale” caught our attention at an intersection going home to Jacksonville. The address was just minutes from our new home so we dropped in on the lady. She said that everything had to go so she could move back to Alaska--we were to walk around and make her an offer on things. We did but the formal estate sale is next weekend so we’re to “check in” with her later in the week.  I’m afraid she’ll get a better offer.  We told her we were on a restricted budget.  Although if things don’t sell for her next weekend, maybe she’ll be desperate to part with things and we’ll get a bargain.  For now, we take our camp chairs and camp “coffee table” on the deck for dinner and in the house at night for the next day’s breakfast, anxiously awaiting our U-haul box with some China amenities.  We heard today, it’s “been shipped.”

After dinner, when strangers started parking in our front and side yard, we realized the Britt festival was about to start.  Tonight we walked the two blocks to see what the concert was about.  We passed two landmarks:  one—the first place gold was discovered in Jacksonville and two- the home of the original Bozo the Clown, which also happened to have a giant still in the yard. We talked to 4-5 Britt volunteers who were running crowd control at the concert.  They were very welcoming, let us get as close as one could come to the concert without a ticket.  If this video doesn't work for you, try Instagram:

Presently, a deer with two fawns graze in the back yard and strains of Gershwin’s American in Paris are oozing in the front yard from the finale of the Britt Classics this summer.  There will be other famous bands through September. Judd is madly trying to get us tickets on his phone since we still have no internet for the computers yet. It’s my mission for tomorrow to procure internet service (or to spend another hour at the coffee shop using theirs.)