Archive for the ‘Evil Anal Retentive Landlord’ Category

I know by now, many of you are probably wondering how my tale of Christmas 2009 ended.

I have received many inquiries as to how we finally gained access to our home.
Did we call the fire department?
Did we call a locksmith?
Did we break a window?
Did we finally get a hold of the E.A.R.L.?

Well….of all of those options…..None are the correct answer.

After going through every key my mom had in her house, checking every door and window only to discover that our house was locked up tight, my Hardworking Hubby did the only thing we could do. He took all of his Tae Kwon Do techniques that he has learned over the years (he’s a 2nd degree black belt), walked around to the side of our garage, raised his leg and lined it up just perfect and kicked the door precisely at the knob and low and behold….We.Were.Finally.In.Our.Garage.

There was minimal damage (thank god, because if the E.A.R.L. were to ever notice, we’d be dead for sure.)

I’m thinking it’s also a good thing that we didn’t lock the door from the garage to the house because then we would have been royally screwed!

After our successful break-in, we headed off to my parents house to spend Christmas with my mom’s side of the family and partake in the White Elephant exchange. I was lucky enough to win my old corded phone, Circa ohmahgawd I had that phone when I was a teenager, in addition to a 2008/2009 Phonebook. Check it out.

It came complete with the phone numbers of all my old friends, boyfriends etcetera. How much better could Christmas get?

There was a brief conversation with my Grandmother (I.WAS.SHOCKED.) She even referred to my children by their actual names. The only part she didn’t succeed at was when she opened her gift from us, a frame with pictures of my children, she pointed at the Drama Queen in the picture and referred to her as Anne (me).

After the festivities at my parent’s house, I returned home, sent the kiddos off to bed and went on my merry way to prepare for Santa (Read: Put out all gifts from Santa by myself, stuff stockings and remove all refuse from the house while everyone else sleeps including the Hardworking Hubby).

At approximately 11:03 pm my head hit my pillow after having been awake for over 36 hours. I am told that by 11:05, I was asleep.

The kids slept until 7:00am (1st time ever!!! on Christmas Day!!!!) and then we were off to open all of their worldly treasures from the man in the suit.

(EPIC MOM FAIL AHEAD)

This is the part were I would normally share pictures with you of 3 children ripping gifts open and creating a HUGE mess of wrapping paper, packaging and twist ties in addition to candy wrappers spread across my house.

But.

Yes, there is a but.

I was a bad parent this year and failed to retrieve my camera and take any pictures of my children opening their gifts.

Bad mommy!

Moving on.

After their gifts were open, batteries inserted, and all things assembled, I passed the fuck out on the couch until 11:00am.

Once I got up, it was a race to shower, get dressed and arrive at my in-laws by noon for a yummy Christmas Day lunch of Ham and scalloped potatoes, Cauliflower & Broccoli with cheese sauce, Ham, Chicken Parmigiana, stuffed mushrooms, chutney, caramelized onions and bread pudding. It was scrumdiddlyumptious!

So, after eating eleventy billion plates full of food, the kids finished opening the remainder of their gifts from the grandparents, we loaded everything and everyone up and made our way home to empty the contents of the truck and off to my parents, this time to spend Christmas with my parents, sister and brother-in-law.

We open what seemed like a pile of never ending presents.

I was THRILLED to get new bedding from my parents along with some other great things (like a sweet ass bag for our New York trip in 2010 for BlogHer10).

Once all was said and done we had our Christmas dinner (pizza from Papa Murphys) and again stuffed ourselves silly.

Zman & The Drama Queen remained at my parents house for the night while the Hardworking Hubby, myself and the Tatertot made our way home.

All in all it was a good, exhausting but fun Christmas.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I managed to survive it all and remain sane.
I would like to say that it was the alcohol and I drank myself into a drunken stupor.
But I can’t even use that excuse because I NEVER had time to enjoy an alcoholic beverage.
I did this all on numerous cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi.
Oh and the awesomeness that was the Twice Baked Potato Casserole I made!

Hope your Christmas was a great as ours!

Here is where my story continues…..

We arrived at my in-laws house right around 9am.
The kids were all charged up to open the gifts from Grandma, Grandpa and Auntie.
Ok……so was my hubby.
As for me…..I was still worried about that little itty bitty detail that you know….WE.ARE.LOCKED.OUT.OF.OUR.HOUSE.ON.CHRISTMAS.EVE.
Not like it was a big deal or anything.
Just the night that Santa Claus is to come to my house and deliver presents to our children.
Again….no biggie.
Right.
We opened gift after gift after gift after gift at my in-laws.
The kids were thrilled with their new toys, video games, movies etc.
The Hardworking Hubby was ecstatic to finally have Season 6,7 and 8 of Smallville in his possession.
Me. I was IN.LOVE. with my new toaster.
All in all we had a good time.

From there, we hurried to load the truck and head North to Great Grandma’s house for lunch, more family and more gifts.
Again, I shared the tale of how we were currently locked out of our home and that the spare keys didn’t work and our Landlords were not home.

By 2:30pm we were finished up North, loaded everyone in the truck once again to journey home.
On the way, we drove past our landlords house in hopes that they were home.
Of course.
They were not.

We continued home with the plan of finding a way into our house.

More to come tomorrow….

There are many things that just suck.

Many of those things seem to happen within the walls of my home.

Let’s start with the part where my Financial Advisor at school made a HUGE fuck up and that cost me a PELL grant.  Yeah–I might not be able to get this grant anymore since she didn’t do her damn job.  I am still keeping my fingers crossed and that slight glimmer of hope is still a twinkle in my eye that this will be resolved.

Oh and then there is the part that sucks that my Financial Advisor is not so great on returning phone calls or emails—basically she just lacks communication skills.  I’ve been trying to get in touch with her for 2 weeks to figure things out and find out where everything stands, but of course no one ever taught her how to communicate.

Next thing that sucks.  I AM NOT going to Florida this weekend for Izeafest.  Yep. Sucks. I know.  Since the Hardworking Hubby got sick and had to miss work (without pay) expenses for the kids and their activities, along with minor things like I dunno….feeding my family and keeping a roof over our head and that part where my Financial Advisor (yeah, I’m not going to let that slide anytime soon!) fucked up, we just don’t have the funds for the plane ticket and spending cash.  The only part I could afford was the hotel.  So, needless to say, I will not be in beautiful Orlando FL this weekend and am totally bummed that I can’t attend Izeafest and meet A LOT of awesome people!!!

More things that suck.

The E.A.R.L. is STILL hanging out around the outside of our home.

Now they want to scrape and paint our deck.

IRRITATING!

I had to empty Tatertot’s sandbox and remove all his toys from the deck.  (Of course, I didn’t get to finish doing any of this since it decided to rain everyday so far this week.  Kinda hard to remove items, sweep up the leaves and hose down the deck when its raining and not to mention FREEZINGASSCOLDOUT!

Yeah—remember the part where we live in Wisconsin and the weather can change seasons in the blink on an eye.

Moving on.

Another thing this week that can just suck it is our XBOX360.

Here’s the scoop.

Santa Claus purchased the XBOX360 in December of 2006 because it was the only thing ZMAN asked for the ENTIRE year.

After he received the gift, we continued to invest money on games, controllers……Guitar Hero (with 2 guitars).

Yep.  After all is said and done, we have invested about $700-$1000 into the XBOX360 over the last (almost) 3 years.

Enter the RED RING OF DEATH in early 2008 (if memory serves me correctly).

Microsoft made it very easy for us to get that repaired and we had our XBOX360 back in working condition about 3 weeks later.

Then in March of this year, we wanted to watch a movie on the XBOX360 and low and behold it started shooting out ERROR messages at us.

Lovely.

I attempted numerous times to submit a repair request online but could not do so without the help of Microsoft.

Fast forward to the present day (after reminding, nagging and yelling at Hardworking Hubby to call Microsoft to get things resolved).

I gave in.

I had enough.

Here we have almost $1000 tied into this systems and there it sits on a shelf not doing anything.

Just sitting.

I CALLED MICROSOFT.

I GOT THEM TO FIX THINGS IN OUR ACCOUNT.

I SUBMITTED A REPAIR REQUEST ONLINE.

I WILL BE THE ONE TO SHIP THE XBOX360 FOR REPAIR.

YES.

I DID ALL OF THIS.

Then what does my XBOX360 do after sitting on the phone with some CSR who is outsourced from India for almost 20 minutes?

It decides it’s going to work.

Ahhh…..but that didn’t last long.

Hardworking Hubby got flashing red lights when he tried to use it this morning.

It’s going back to Microsoft and nobody is touching it until then.

**********

I watched a movie last night that sucked.

I was bored and I had just finished watching HSM 3.

Yes.

You read that right.

I watched High School Musical 3 last night and I liked it!

Any-who.  Back to the movie that sucked.

Wedding Daze.

Don’t watch it.

It sucked.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

***********

Be sure to watch for other random things that suck in the life of Anne for the rest of the week or should we say, remainder of my life?

This post is co-authored by Hardworking Hubby

Part 1- By Anne

Since the weekend of 9/11, the E.A.R.L. has been a major pain in the ass around here.
It started when they came to paint the side of our house that Friday. (Even though they painted the ENTIRE exterior a year ago).
They were here for the whole day.
Hanging out on the side on our house painting and whatnot while we had our garage sale.
For the most part, they were kind.
Minus the bitching about the helicopters and grass in the rock bed.

They came back the following Tuesday and painted the other end of the house.
This did not affect us at all since we hid out inside ALL DAY!

Then they called so they could paint around the garage and the overhang.
They had planned to do it that Friday.
We planned our garage sale again.
Instead, they came and laid sod on the side of the house since the grass was gone.

Fast forward to Tuesday of this week.

Part 2- By Hardworking Hubby

Then my WONDERFUL (sarcasm intended) wife sent me out to get the mail while they were still here.  This is when the bitching began.

“You need to sweep out this garage, the leaves are from last fall and there shouldn’t be any cobwebs in here”  First off Anne had been sweeping for the past couple of weeks for the garage sale and secondly…ITS A GARAGE!!!!!  Leaves and spiders get in!!!!!

“I cleaned the blinds in the garage (these are for the window in the garage that we totally forgot existed) and they were filthy, you should clean them more often”  Again we forgot the window was there. We haven’t touched the blinds in the garage once since we moved in two years ago so she can shove that up her ass!

“Let me show you something, these seeds and grass in the rock bed here needs to be removed, your kids should come out here and pick it all out by hand”  My children have a VERY busy schedule, greatly reducing the amount of time for them to do it, by the time they would have finished, a little here a little there, the leaves would have been falling.

“When your son is mowing the lawn you should be out here watching him.  He is too young to be doing it alone and you could get in trouble because he is under the age of 12″  My son does a mighty fine job of mowing the lawn.  There is no law against having a ten year old mow the lawn.  I wish she would just stop sticking her ass sniffing nose in our f***ing personal business.

Then she goes on and on and on and on about how much time and effort goes into maintaining a house.  Yes it does when you are the EVIL ANAL RETENTIVE LANDLORD WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHEN TO SHUT UP AND DOESN’T REALIZE THAT PAINTING WOOD SIDING EVERY YEAR DOESN’T HELP UNLESS YOU EVENTUALLY STRIP IT AND REPAINT IT.  THE PAINT KEEPS COMING OFF FOR A REASON!!!!!!!!!

So that was the 20 minutes of my life that I will never get back all because Anne had to have the mail right away!!!

I am pleased to inform you that my family is able to shower once again!

Yes, you heard me correctly, our shower has been repaired.  As of last night, we are no longer the family that smells! (We also have the cleanest house ever)!

The Hardworking Hubby called our Evil Anal Retentive Landlord yesterday morning and left a message in regards to our little shower problem that my father was unfortunately unable to fix.  The Evil Anal Retentive Landlord returned his call about an hour later and as predicted came over to assess the situation.  Upon discovering that we were not the cause of the broken shower, the Evil Anal Retentive Landlord put in a call to the plumber and left us with the words…”We’ll give you a call when we are on our way back with the plumber.”  (Mind you–this was directed at the Hardworking Hubby because I was hiding out in our bedroom napping after having been up all night long cleaning the house and finishing the laundry and let’s face it I was exhausted and unbelievably tired and needed sleep!)  A few hours later we received that phone call we had been waiting for and I once again took shelter in our bedroom because I was not about to get us evicted by saying something to the Evil Anal Retentive Landlord that would seriously offend her in some way shape or form waited for their arrival.

While hiding out in our bedroom I was able to eavesdrop on the conversation between the Evil Anal Retentive Landlord and discovered that we are not the only people that she irritates, annoys and drives absolutely effing crazy!  She was speaking to Scott the plumber (not to be confused with Joe the plumber) and his only response was okay, okay, okay, okay…..that’s when I began referring to Scott as Scott the okay,okay plumber while I was texting the Hardworking Hubby who was supervising our Evil Anal Retentive Landlord as she was supervising Scott the okay, okay plumber all while I was hiding out in our bedroom pretending to be napping.

A few minutes later I heard the E.A.R.L. talking to Scott about what our minor little shower problem was and it turns out that the faucet needed to be replaced.  So, he kindly put a new one in for us and suggested to the E.A.R.L. that he caulk around the shower fixtures to prevent any leaks and prevent this problem again.  She agreed however, she wouldn’t let Scott the plumber caulk it. Noooo….she had to do it, herself, with her own caulk because her’s is superior to that of a plumbers.  This is when Scott the plumber was lucky enough to make a quick exit! If only the Hardworking Hubby when have been so lucky.  She went on to bitch at my kind, loving, wonderful, yes I am really sucking up here handsome, best Hardworking Hubby in the whole wide world, that the caulk at the edge of the tub and the floor was cracking and we should have notified her the minute it happened because if water gets in there and the floor rolls it will be our fault and we’ll have to replace the flooring.  She then re-caulked that area **Note To Self:  Call E.A.R.L as the caulk has started to crack again and be sure to tell her it started to happen within hours of re-caulking using her caulk which is superior to the plumbers caulk.**

When she was done re-caulking the tub and all of its fixtures, she noticed that there were a few chips in the tub and began to yell at my Hardworking Hubby once again.  She insisted over and over that we had made these chips in the tub.  She went as far to blame the adorable 15 month old Tatertot for making the chips by banging his bathtub toys against the side of the tub therefore causing said chips.  Then she said that I must have had something hanging in the shower that fell and chipped the tub.  The Hardworking Hubby started to argue with her that the chips were there before we moved in, which is correct….they have been there since day 1…she however insists that we did it and went on to fill those in with her special little scratch fillers she uses.

I was never so happy as I was when I finally heard the E.A.R.L leave.

**She did return 3 more times for various other things outside of the house, but I will leave those stories for another time.  This whole broken shower experience has inspired me to start a series of Open Letters to the E.A.R.L.  I will also be sure to share the other various stories we have in regards to her and am also going to talk to a friend of mine who also rents a home from the E.A.R.L. and see if she would be interested or would allow me to share some of her stories as well.

Thanks for reading!