Help Suzanne Fox with her Florida move!

Hi folks! 

If you're reading this, I reckon you know that my mom, Suzanne Fox, has to move to Florida on January 21st. You may know her from her 38 years at Planned Parenthood, where she was a stalwart proponent of women's reproductive rights, and worked tirelessly without any possibility of a retirement plan. She went to Sacramento to campaign for the cause every year, too.

You may know her from the Freight and Salvage Coffee House, where she worked for even longer - she was working there while pregnant with me, even. She's been at every building, every stage of the Freight's existence, served on its board, and sang on its stage. She loves it and will miss it.

You may know her from Crestmont, where she sang with children for many years, bringing her original songs to many young people who are now old enough to have children of their own.

Maybe you know her from one of the choruses she's been a part of, a song circle, or any number of her many activities and goings on. So yes, if you're reading this you probably know my mom.

What you may not know is that she's making this move primarily because she can't afford to live in the bay area anymore. She's been working multiple jobs for 40+ years, and it's time for her to take a bit of a rest.

She's renting out her home and moving into her mom's old house in De Leon Springs. She'll be living next to her sister, and her costs will be low enough that she can eventually more or less retire, finally! She's of course very sad to leave behind all her lovely friends, groups, and organizations she's part of in the Bay Area, but this was the only solution we could come up with.

And the truth is she's got to exhaust her entire savings to make this move, and unfortunately, while I'm helping as much as I can financially, I can't cover as much of the move as I'd like to either. 

Moving with the menagerie of pets she's got is no easy or simple thing. We shopped around for the last two months trying to find the safest, friendliest, and least strenuous way to move her whole life across the country, pets included, and here's what we came up with. It's much more expensive than we imagined.

Pets: $4,700. A van is driving all her pets across the country. Believe it or not this was the cheapest option we found. We checked airlines (which are more stressful for pets, especially older ones), and they were much more expensive. There were some other options, but they were basically hot metal kennel-style boxes that her pets wouldn't have done well in. 

So there's Sunny, the old-timer shepherd/watermelon mix (he's oddly stripey), Lyla, her beloved Formosan mountain dog, Dina, the half-munchkin cat (only her front legs are short!), Dusty, the cross-eyed siamese mix, Jaspurr the big fluffy tuxedo cat, and her two turtles! That's a lot of animals, and taking care of them means she gets to bring something of her old life with her as she moves into unfamiliar (and less politically-friendly) territory.

Moving truck: $3,100. This is the best estimate we could find for the move.  She's moving a whole house's worth of stuff, and they've provided a window of between 7 and 21 days for delivery! Fingers crossed on that one.

Car transport:  $1,090. Frankly this is about as much as it'd cost to drive the thing cross-country, which she was ready to do, but I convinced her that 8 days of straight driving across the entire country in frosty January weather wasn't the safest plan. 

So that's where the total figure of $8890 comes from. There are additional expenses like flights, etc, but I'm already asking for a lot, and I realize that, so we're not putting those in here.

I realize this is a huge amount of money, and I don't expect to get all of it. But whatever we do get is really going to help, and it will go straight to her. (oh, but in full disclosure, gofundme takes 2.9% of the total as well as 30 cents per donation, and paypal takes 5% of the remainder)

My mom was too embarrassed to make a page like this herself, because she cares about those who are suffering in the world, and sees people on here needing to pay for medical treatments, loss of loved ones, accidents and disasters. She didn't want to make a big deal out of this, but I feel that she's done a lot for the community and for the world in her work, and I'd like to try to help make this transition a little easier for her,  so she can get back a bit of what she gives.

Thanks all!!

~Brandon Sheffield