Has it been a week!  I'm sitting here, so utterly exhausted I don't know what to do with myself.  And I have a huge catering event coming up on Wednesday, so suffice it to say I'm going to have a crazy week this week as well.  Catering has been crazy...but that's only adding to the craziness of the rest of my life, not necessarily super stressful in and of itself.

So last week, our bathroom flooded again.  Haha, at this point, I'm incline to say it's not a huge deal.  This is probably the 4th or 5th time it's happened in the last 3 years, so whatcha gonna do?  But...this time, it started coming through the walls, through the window sill, along the door, through light fixtures...it was really bad.  And then the bits of mold that were growing over the next week became huge black spots, patches of white sponge, orange circles...great giant patches of mold!  We let our manager know, but nothing happened...so finally called the landlord about it to try and get things fixed.  She calls us back and is like, well...one time my ceiling flooded, and the paint kinda bubbled a bit, but then after a couple days, it was fine.  You shouldn't need to worry about a thing.  I'm like...uh, black fuzzy spots on the ceiling = mold, Einstein!!!  So she send someone to look at it and says oh, it's not anything, but I'll send someone anyway.  The worker she sends says our bathroom is a disaster zone, there's definitely mold growing, and we should move to another place at least temporarily ASAP, that they will begin tearing out the bathroom the next day.

So as circumstances have it, we were in process of moving into a new apartment.  It had some of the basics, but we had maybe 70% to go.  So Kristy and I stay up all night, like literally, all night, skip work, and move pretty much our entire apartment in the span of a night, without prior notice.  So the next day, you'd think, well...the landlord owes us something.  Our apartment flooded the week before (for which I took off work), we can't actually live in our current apartment because a third of the bathroom is being torn out, and we've now stayed up until ridiculous hours moving because we shouldn't be in the apartment when they pull down the mold, due to health risks.  We talk to the landlord, and she's like, well...since you have another apartment to live in, I'm not even goin to pro-rate your rate - please keep in mind that we pay rent on both apartments...and you should only be paying rent on an apartment that is habitable.  And she's like well, I shouldn't have to compensate you because no one's going to be living there anyway, so it doesn't matter.  One of my friends said that under that philosophy, I shouldn't have to pay rent while I'm on vacation either :P...I mean, technically, I'm not physically in the apartment, so it doesn't matter anyway, right?

So we fight and argue and do research about our rights, and finally, because the mold problem is so bad, the landlord has to come down to actually see the apartment (mind you, I've never met her in 3 years)...and as we're talking to her, makes it sound like she's doing us a favor and is going to cut our rent by $150.  I'm like seriously?!  You can sound that condescending for reducing our rent a measely $150, when there are so many problems wrong with this place, I could sue your butt off?!  A co-worker said she probably realizes that for some reason, we want to stay in the building, so she's treating us like sh*t.

I'm not even going to get into the other argument we had with her, but suffice it to say, dealing with landlords in the city SUCKS!  And yes, this is exactly one of the reasons we live incarnationally in our neighborhoods...that we experience and can empathize with our neighbors over these injustices, and that as educated, resourced individuals, we can advocate on behalf of our neighbors, have the arguments they don't know to have, fight for basic rights, make landlords take responsibility.  It doesn't mean it's easy though, and if I was a normal college graduate, I would've moved and then sued her to high heaven.  But as it is, we feel strongly about the work we're doing on this street, we know we can't move yet, and thus we can't be as aggresive lest we get evicted.  And it also means that when things get tough, and situations get messy, we don't just move and pass the buck, but we stick it out and dig into the problems.  And while of course we know it's right and good...it doesn't make it less exhausting.

It's...over?  Wow...still letting that settle in.  After the wedding, I was more tired than I've been in a LONG time.  I was rather dysfunctional actually...got home, refused to even try and unload my car, jumped in the shower, and collapsed in bed.  And here I am, about 12 hours later, having slept for a little over 10 hours, and so happy for Ryan and Teresa.  The wedding obviously didn't go off without a hitch, but hopefully from the pov of the attendees, things went smoothly enough.  The whole day was rather insane, trying to stay on schedule, get people moving, adjust to the last minute changes, go with the flow even when my brain was yelling that the schedule and plans rule, seeing one of my best friends married and full of joy...in terms of one of more mentally and physically challenging events of my life, this was it.

I was trying to compare it to a catering event and couldn't really.  You know...that's my business, that's my job.  And yes, there is always a good amount of stress involved, but at the end of the day, I'm exhausted purely because I've been on my feet for over 12 hours.  Some stress in getting things to the location hot and on time, but really, it's a physical type of exhaustion.

Yesterday was that and so much more.  You're trying to make your friends and their family happy...trying to accommodate everyone, putting on that face that says, yes I'm working hard, but of course I'm still happy to be chit-chatting with you right now :P, making logistics work when it seems like there's no possible way to get them to work, re-working schedules at the 11th hour, and all the while, needing to suppress for the time-being the emotions that I want to just sit in because of the magnitude of the day and the strong emotions that come with it.

Even as I sit here now, I think this is the first time I've really let myself just be happy and reflect on the significance of yesterday.  Like someone was talking to me about on Friday, it's not like throwing a party where the party's over and life moves on.  The party's over, but the marriage has just begun.  Even as I'm not the one who got married, there's some significance to that for me as a friend.

Anyway, I'm probably over-dramatizing at the moment, as I'm still rather exhausted, and my brain is trying oh so hard to get out of the fog it's in.  Ok, I'm a logistics and detail-oriented person, but my brain seriously felt like it was going to explode yesterday.  The balance of things that I had to think about was mildly ridiculous.  Haha...good times :P.  But yes, it's over...I feel some sense of a void, not having this immense thing to think about in the future.  A number of other things, even LAUP and the summer program seem miniscule in comparison.

Ok...time to take a day or two to recuperate, and then move the brain onto the next thing...

Made my month!  I went to Kevin's (Blue) IV celebration event tonight.  When we got there, we were hanging out and of course, I went and spent most of my time playing with Joshua (Blue).  He's really talking all the time now and in complete sentences.  And at age 3, it's just such cute conversation.  So here goes the conversation:

Me: Hi Joshua!
Joshua: Hi Auntie Jess!
Me: So what's new?
Joshua: I watched Veggietales yesterday!
Me: Which one?
Joshua: Daniel and the Lions...Daniel got thrown in with the lions, and then God made them nice.
Me: Oh, I see...that's really cool.  You know Joshua...I've missed you a lot.
Joshua: I've really missed you too Auntie Jess... (followed by a big hug)

I was falling over by the cuteness of his last line :).  And then proceeded to be his jumping assistant for the next hour :D.