Of Course, I'm Not Listing My Condo This Week

Why on earth did anyone actually think I could?

It rained something wicked yesterday, and that was enough to make the rain gather in my fireplace wall again.

Because I care about all you nice people reading, I will here omit the recounting, in painstaking detail, of the forty or so emails that drifted through my life today.  The highlights of which included the condo association scheduling the Leak Detection Guy to come out next Saturday -- next Saturday is, not so coincidentally, the day my parents are planning to drive in from Arizona so we can celebrate my mom's birthday together.  Yeah, I'm sure they're looking forward to following up on that 8 hour drive with another 8 hours of sitting around my living room while some guy sprays a hose on our roof and waits for the water to come through the chimney.  Happy 69th Mom!  Hope you can handle the excitement.

Now, I'd had an appointment for my real estate agent to come out tomorrow and do the paperwork for the listing, and I suggested she come anyway so we'll be all ready to go (on the happy day that we repair the leak damage in my fireplace), and my agent tells me that her mom just died but she'll come anyway.  ("No," I write back, "You won't.")  Which is the sort of thing that just throws a big wake-up call of ice on my own Personal Pity Party, because even though all of this leak stuff and scheduling stuff is a major pain in the backside causing me apparently endless stress, it doesn't compare with an actual death of a loved one.

Which is a sobering thought, to be sure, but (as I've perceptively pointed out to other people in my situation) it doesn't make my own annoyances any less invalid.  I mean, yes, absolutely, things can be outrageously worse and I should, and do, thank my lucky stars that they're not.  But I still ate a half-dozen cookies, pet the cat for a good half-hour, and am wildly looking around for something ... centering (yep, that's the word) to do tomorrow, because I know that I'm a few more stupid HOA emails away from biting someone's head off and spitting down their neck.