There’s all sorts of…

There's all sorts of household madness going on here, and not in a good way. Yesterday, it snowed heavily -- thick, wet, and most importantly, HEAVY snow. After the snow, I happened to glance out the window, to see if my tulips had survived...and realized that they weren't actually there. The entire (heavy, iron) windowbox had disappeared. Ran out to find that yes, the brackets had ripped out from the weight of the snow, and the whole thing had crashed three floors to the parking lot below. We ran downstairs in a panic for our neighbors' car (although already thankful that no one had been standing underneath when the windowbox fell, because it would have undoubtedly cracked their skull right open). To find that it had, miraculously, missed their car, probably by no more than an inch. That's right, one single, solitary inch. We breathed a sigh of relief, cleaned up the mess, salvaged what plants we could, had our neighbors come down and confirm lack of damage to their car, and went back upstairs, thanking whatever kind gods of gardening watched over us that day.

But the masonry gods do not love us. On the plus side, the guy who came out to fix our leaking glass block window only charged us $750 instead of the originally estimated $1250. Good guy. And on the super-plus side, the condo decided to reimburse us for that after all. (Which they're supposed to do, but had been reluctant to do.) But there's still the big minus that we discovered yesterday that the damn window is still leaking. Masonry guy is coming back on Wed and wants to look at the roof. The roof!!!

Best case scenario -- it's a quick and simple fix that he can pin down easily, and that the condo agrees to pay for. Worse case -- it takes many attempts before we finally track down the problem and fix it. Worst case -- there's something seriously wrong and the building needs a new ($50,000) roof. Which might actually be so expensive that some folks in the condo can't afford it, and since we don't want to force anyone into foreclosure (a) because we're nice, and b) because it would destroy the property value), we might have to somehow find the money to pay for this all ourselves and hope that someday the condo people can pay us back. Terrifying. But hopefully that's just doom-and-gloom-ing, and there's really no good reason to assume the very worst case scenario right now. We'll take it step by step and see how it goes. Cross your fingers for us.