Well, last week I had a brief reprieve from the massive torrent of crap that is being flung our way, and naively I thought, "Phew, that was it, we had a house sale fall through, a business owner threatened to sue me, and I almost blew up our television, but we SURVIVED! Tomorrow is, in fact another day, and it is a much better one!"
And then Sunday happened.
Y'all, I feel like all I've been doing lately is complain, but I am just so stressed out right now, I can't even ugly cry anymore. It's like I've gone into emotional shock... maybe I should elevate my feet or something.
So it all began--again--on Sunday, when we got an email from our property manager saying that our air conditioning unit in our South Carolina house had died on the day that the renters (and hopefully very soon, buyers) moved in. He'd had to send out his own contractor to do a bandaid fix of adding more freon, and wanted to know how we'd like to proceed. Essentially, we can replace the coil system and some other internal parts, or buy a new unit for maybe just a little less than twice the repair cost. The coil system has no warranty, the new unit does.
I immediately filed a claim with our home warranty company, they were supposed to send out a contractor, but after repeated calls to them, the contractor never contacted my property manager over the next 3 days, and on Wednesday, we discovered that the company is located in Charlotte, NC and had been telling the warranty company for days that they can't service our area. So the warranty company found a more local contractor, but THEY can't come out until next Monday, and in the meantime the a/c has already gone out for a second time, requiring more freon and our repair bills are already up around $1000. So the warranty company told me that I can find my own contractor and then submit the bill for reimbursement, but one of the agents I spoke to told me that the most I can get back is $1500 and all we can do is the repair, because in order to cover a replacement, we'd have to provide annual a/c unit service records.
The hell?? What a flipping scam. So, I'm waiting to talk to the repair guy my property manager has been using, but I'm expecting this whole thing will end up running us close to $5000 with all the repairs, and we'll maybe get $1500 from the warranty company. And then there's a good chance we won't even own the home in a couple of months. ARGH. We were supposed to close two weeks ago, THIS WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE OUR PROBLEM. And of course, it's on top of the thousands of dollars we just put into repairs after the inspection in order to get a clear CL-100 for closing. Ha. Hahaha.
Then, I bring our new/old car in for an oil change, and in very broken English, the service guy tries to get me to agree to some kind of repair that will cost between 3000-4000 Euro. When I told Colby about it, he was highly skeptical, but neither one of us are exactly car experts either. Between all of the costs we racked up doing repairs for the supposed closing of our house and now the a/c, I'm thinking we'll probably play chicken with the car repair for right now and hope for the best. Then, in a couple of months, I'll take it somewhere else and see if they find anything. Germans tend to have this concept that the Americans living over here are made of money, so I can't help but be a little suspicious of the fact that the garage may have been trying to take advantage.
Finally, and this is right now more "likely" rather than "definite", but we've discovered that there's a very good chance that Colby is going to have to be TDY for the month of October. You may remember the little fact that I'm due on November 22. With twins. And statistically, 70% of twins are born before their due date and less than 40% make it past 37 weeks. For me, 37 weeks is November 1st exactly. I am trying really, really hard not to freak out about this. Maybe he'll be able to get out of it. Maybe I'll go past 37 weeks. Maybe...
And to top it all off, at just 21 weeks, I've already started with Braxton-Hicks contractions. It's happened three times over the past week, I'll just have this tightening feeling, and when I touch my stomach, it's rock hard. It's painless, and they aren't consistent or frequent enough to be too concerning, but I'll definitely be bringing it up at my appointment next week.
So, basically, I'm thinking my best course of action for Friday the 13th is to bury myself under my blankets and attempt not to see the light of day. Don't go near the phone, don't look at email, and when I emerge on Saturday, the world might be over, but as long as I don't step on my glasses I should be just fine for the rest of my life.
