When You Vindictively Refuse To Winterize Your Family’s House

When you refuse to winterize your house and demand that no one touches anything that you may have a claim to because you are too busy chasing some casino whore and thinking you can recoup your losses from bits and pieces of the house when you finally get the family out and on their impoverished way, unfortunate events tend to happen.

Kids will be kids.

We heard a super loud thud. It woke me out of a nap I was sharing with my little boo-boo Viking cat. I had been considering making a pot of coffee and getting on with some unfinished work when I dozed off. The kids jolted me out of my sleep with,  “What was that?!” Knowing the blizzard was coming, I said, “Don’t worry it’s just the wind.” That was before I started hearing, then seeing the emergency vehicles outside. On the street in front of the house next door, there was a crash. It looked like a truck ran off the road and hit a fire hydrant. The speed limit is 25 MPH and it is only a neighborhood street. But when people use it as a bypass to hop from one casino to the other, no one takes care. Speeding, flicking cigarette ashes, guzzling coffee, and taking snapchat selfies are the rules of the road.

Little did I know that the children were looking out their window too, the window with the air conditioning unit still left in place from summer (because remember everyone is forbidden to touch or do anything with anything that is his!). As I was watching out my window and enjoying how many times I was able to call someone a dumbass when they would finally realize that they needed to turn around and go another way, because really, who plows forward expecting to  get through when they can clearly see ahead that there is a large crash and the whole street is blocked, I heard another crash. It had nothing to do with the collision on the street because my eyes never left that scene, and I had binoculars, so I know I was getting the full story. A few seconds later, the biggest boy came into my room and apologetically informed me that the air conditioner had fallen out of their upstairs window. When I looked, I saw that the cord was still plugged in and my first thought was that the unit was dangling and I could reel it back in. Nope. It had ripped away from the cord and landed on the snowy ground below. That’s a garage sale asset that will be in the refuse bin this week.