Why do stressful things have to all happen at once

A whole bunch of stressful stuff has decided to happen all at once and I really wish it would stop being like this.

A couple months ago my condo building had a water leak investigation taking place. They investigated the unit with full cooperation of my tenant, and never followed up on this.

About a week ago my tenant found a leak taking place in the laundry room, and she contacted me about it. It seemed that the problem was with the washer/dryer stack, and so I ordered a new washer/dryer to replace it. The new one arrived yesterday, and it wouldn’t fit in the laundry room without doing some work on the plumbing, and while looking at the plumbing it turned out the fixture was leaking a little. But it didn’t seem to be a long-running thing and wasn’t apparently connected to the leak investigation. In any case, we booked a plumber to repair all that so that the new washer/dryer would fit anyway (because the old connection was pretty hacky in the first place and should have been updated ages ago anyway).

Anyway, as part of following up on that, my tenant asked about the leak investigation, and it turned out that the building maintenance had, in fact, determined it was coming from my unit, and just never bothered to tell me. And because it was from my unit I was on the hook to pay for their services in determining that, so that’s another plumbing bill on top of the ones I’m already paying for, plus I was chastised by building management for not taking care of a thing I was never told I needed to take care of in the first place. And maybe if I’d been informed earlier, the work could have been taken care of sooner and maybe not cost so much, and maybe I wouldn’t have even been led to replace the washer/dryer in the first place. Argh.

So, parallel to all that, my brother is having a family gathering in San Francisco, ostensibly a first-birthday party for my newest nephew, but mostly an excuse to get together post-pandemic1.

I booked a nice AirBnB near him for not too much money. The owner canceled my booking, and then claimed to not know what happened, and then I was unable to rebook it. So I scrambled to book another similar (but not as nice) place, and that was all going well… until this morning when that owner contacted me to tell me he’d come down with a severe respiratory illness (which may or may not be COVID) and then canceled the booking out of an abundance of caution (which was appreciated, since even if it’s not COVID I wouldn’t want to be exposed to whatever he has). But this left me in a lurch for where, exactly, to stay.

San Francisco’s an expensive city to stay in, especially when booking things at the last minute.

My flight is tomorrow.

Which is, incidentally, the same time the plumber is supposedly going to work on the w/d hookup, so that’s another fun thing to juggle, and I expect that when I arrive in San Francisco I’ll have a bunch of messages about how something-or-other went wrong and it’s going to cost even more and even more shitty shit to coordinate and so on.

Because of the last-minute cancelation, AirBnB gave me a 20% off coupon for any replacement booking “of equal or greater value,” but the only places which would work for me are, at this point, at least five times as expensive.

So I went to the various hotel booking sites, and of course all of the good hotels are booked solid and/or very expensive, so I found a vaguely-acceptable one in the Mission district, and booked that.

Then I thought to read its reviews on other sites, and, uh. Bedbugs, cockroaches, dirty towels, unmaintained mattresses. Yeah.

And the booking is non-refundable.

I am a fucking ball of stress right now and I don’t fucking need all this shit all at once.

So anyway I’m having trouble focusing on work right now and I just have a giant headache and I want to lie down and have the world go away for a while.

Oh also the other night I had another carport prowler, which is just a cherry on top. As far as I can tell he only stole some pruning shears. Still doesn’t feel great to have my space violated like that.

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