Scarily Accurate, Ain't It?

You Are 87% Burned Out

You are extremely burned out. You work too hard, and you're not getting the results you deserve. It's time for a life change, as soon as you can manage it. You're giving away most of your energy to something you don't even enjoy.

Are You Burned Out?

I knew it would say I'm burned out, because DUH, but the description of the situation is downright uncanny. That's exactly it: I'm giving away most of my energy to something I don't even enjoy. Not even a little. And I feel just like that picture.
Stolen as usual from Cursing Mama

Just met with the painters recommended by my friend L. She's right, they are just lovely people, and can fix the wood damage caused by a young chewing Boston Terrier (yes, he gnawed on the house) and put up new gutters too. If the price is right, I have more fix-up work for them and I let them know it, so fingers are crossed that dangling future work before them will keep the price down. It works for our subs, and if they really are reasonable I'm happy to put them to work making this place market-ready - I've done a lot, but the finishing touches are theirs if we work a deal. I'd love to just be able to say "Do it."

And in an example of the Universe responding when you ask, today I happened to be here when my new yard guy K stopped by. I should not have been here and this is not his normal day, so it was totally serendipitous. He bought the business from my Beloved Yard Guy P, who had health problems and had to get out of the lawn maintenance biz. K's a good guy too, and I had a chance to ask him to give me a proposal for sprucing up the Planting Beds of Great HOA Offense. (Just in case I'm sounding rich here, my lawn guy is just a mower man, he rides a wee John Deere around the grass once a week. I pay a flat rate that is more than my MD cousin's condo fee, just to keep the grass under control because I can't do it myself on a weekly basis and live to tell about it. I don't have a real Yard Man who plants flowers and pulls weeds for me.) But K is eager to please and willing to take on extra work so I asked him to give me a proposal, because if he can haul a pickup-truckload of mulch to my house and put it down in an afternoon, it beats the hell out of me hauling bags home from Home Despot and doing it a few bags at a time, and the cost break on mulch bought in bulk vs. by the bag retail will at least partially offset paying him to do it if his price is reasonable.

So the next step is to pick paint colors and submit them to the HOA architectural review process. And yes, a variation on my letter of a couple of days ago will be included in the package. I'll take out a few bits of snark, but not many.

Oh, and the funniest of all - as the painters were leaving, one of them remarked that my lawn was so lush and springy and beautiful she wanted to roll on it like a little kid. The same lawn that got the shit-o-gram from the management company a few weeks ago for not being up to snuff and having dead patches. Yep. Same lawn. Just so you know it's not me when I say that I'm dealing with the HOA Nazi. The big dead patches in the common areas are still there, a couple of rainy days and mine are gone. It's kinda Biblical, isn't it? Worrying about the small dead spot on the individual lawn and not seeing the huge chunks of dead sod in her own eye area of
responsibility? It's The Parable of the HOA.

This isn't to say that I am totally anti-HOA. I've lived in neighborhoods without them and I do know that they are necessary, lest you end up living with people who think it's perfectly okay to bring the dump truck home on the weekend and park it in the front yard. (No, seriously, this happened in my old neighborhood after we had moved out.) And I don't even mind submitting my color scheme to the HOA for approval, if doing that prevents someone from painting their house entirely pumpkin orange, every inch of the exterior the same, as L's house was when she bought it. I saw it before she had it painted. It was pumpkin orange. It made your eyes hurt. The previous owner had obviously bought paint on sale and just spray painted the whole damn thing. She had it painted as soon as she could afford it, and it's now a lovely soft sage green with contrasting trim and looks like a showplace, and that's how she hooked me up with these painters. So I am not entirely anti-HOA, they do serve a purpose, and the things I was cited for are things I already had calendared to fix.

It's the level of anal-retentive detail here, and the barrage of letters and reminders that I can be fined, when frankly, the common areas I'm payin'for with my dues ain't looking all that special. Remove the dead sod from thine own eye, bitch.
If Ms. Anal-Retentive Bimbo put this much energy into policing the contractors we're paying for, I would not have this much of an attitude about being bugged about my landscaping.

But I shouldn't complain, the letters invigorated me. I am moving up my schedule, getting my ass in gear, and pushing to get this place in shape to sell. I had been discouraged about the slow market, but this was a reminder that slow market or not, this has to be done.