Make a Sandwich
You know that old saying about when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade? I have my own version: When life hands you shit, make a shit sandwich. I think it's truer to the circumstances.
When you make lemonade, what do you do? You squeeze the juice out of those bad old lemons and add water and sugar, maybe a sprig or three of mint. What you end up with generally tastes pretty good, and it's refreshing, too. Golly, you're pretty much better off than you were before you had lemons. You're even glad you had lemons. You take a sip, kick back on the veranda and think Ain't life grand? Yeah, right.
Now, when life hands you shit, there's really not a whole lot you can do with it. As with the lemons, you just have to take it, but you wouldn't want to squeeze that juice out and make shitade, would you? No, but since you have to take it you'll want to do something to make it more palatable. Add bread. Hell, add lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cheese, mayo and ketchup if you like. Now you've got your shit sandwich and you can choke it down, but there's no way you're going to think it's refreshing and tasty, no way you'll swallow it and think Ain't life grand? No, because all the while you're chewing it up and swallowing it down, you know it's shit. You can try to make it better, but there's no way you'll ever make it good. That's reality.
We're busy making sandwiches over here right now. Big, steaming brown ones. We just got word that the pain-in-the-ass buyer's loan didn't go through on our house. Seems she's lied about something or other with regards to her income and now she can't get a loan at all. We're screwed.
We've been hanging by a thread for the past two months as we crawled our way to this point, paying the mortgage on two houses with only one income, just holding on tight until the day the house sold and put some money back in our pockets and stopped taking it out. Now there's no end in sight.
This is my fault, in large part. It's this fucking job that's not a job. If I were working the way I was told I'd be working, we'd be doing just fine. Hell, we could probably stretch it and pay the mortgage on three houses. But I haven't been working much, if at all, so we've been living on Beth's paycheck and it just can't go that far. The tension around here is palpable. I'd say you could cut it with a knife, but you'd probably break the knife trying.
Sure, we plan to keep the buyer's mortgage deposit and sue her and everybody she brought into this mess, but none of that's going to put money in our pockets anytime in the near future, and in the meantime we still have two mortgages to pay. At this point we're considering taking the house off the market and renting it, but that will only stem the hemorrhage of money, not stop it. Even if we were to keep the house on the market and accept an offer on it tomorrow it would still be at least a month before it sold and we'd still be paying on it in the meantime.
Pass the bread.
