So, today has not been great. Did I tell you all that we ended up buying the house we were looking at? We closed last Friday, Aug. 31st. We bought a bunch of stuff, painted over the long weekend (amyth visited and helped out with a TON of stuff, packing and painting and looking after Rose, yay amyth!), all was going well. Thursday morning I ran over to the house to pick up a few things and noticed a crack in one of the bedroom ceilings that I hadn't noticed before. It was big but didn't necessarily look immediately worrisome, especially after I mentioned it to Mark and he said he'd seen it too while painting, and we wondered how we had missed it earlier, but weren't overly concerned. On Friday Mark went to the house and called me at work to tell me, uh, that crack has gotten a LOT bigger since he last saw it on Monday. So I made some calls, he made some calls, turns out our home warranty doesn't cover anything "foundational" but our home insurance was going to send out someone to look at it on Monday or Tuesday. We went over together on Friday night and holy crap, it was looking really bad. I worried about it all night and slept pretty badly.

This morning? It collapsed.

And in other house news: the washer & dryer that we bought and had delivered today don't really fit in the space (they're right by the back door and make going in and out rather awkward), the house is apparently much closer to the train tracks than we had thought (you can hear the train quite well from outside, though I think it's probably OK from inside), and the lawnmower M just bought today doesn't work for shit on weeds, of which we have plenty.

Oh, and he's going to Germany next weekend for a job interview. So I'll be solo parenting a four-month-old for five days, in the midst of packing/moving/fixing the new house, and then if he gets the job, we might be moving to Germany in a couple of months anyway.

I knew having a kid would make my life kind of chaotic, but I admit I didn't have quite this level of chaos in mind...

Holy shit, Kate! Wasn't the house inspected before you guys bought it?

You'd think foundation issues would've turned up.

That's too much!

Oh Kate, that is a lot of bad and hard all at once. I hope you get some good and easy to balance it out.

Too much chaos, Kate.

Good lord, Kate. I don't even know where you go from there, except to just live through it. Which you shall, with aplomb, at least a little. I just wish I could magic away the stress and anxiety.

My sister has totally fallen in love with this Kluwe dude: [link] -- sarameg's not the only one who didn't expect a football player to be saying anything eloquent, I guess. Tsk, tsk.

Thanks for the sympathy, guys. Expect a lot more whining along these lines in the days to come.

Holy shit, Kate! Wasn't the house inspected before you guys bought it?

Of course it was inspected, and I tagged along and asked a bunch of questions and it seemed to me the guy did a pretty thorough job, but apparently, what the fuck do I know? There was no crack in the ceiling at the time, so whatever caused it might not have been visible when he inspected it. Also, of course, he had me sign a contract that stipulated that we couldn't hold him liable for anything he didn't find that later turned out to be wrong. Not that I want to start suing people -- that's pretty much the last thing I want to do, except pay thousands of dollars to fix the damn thing myself.

Oh man, Kate. What a fucking mess! I hope you can laugh through it at some point. Because holy shit.

Geez Kate. Good grief.

Has the sale gone through already? Because I think you can do something about it if it hasn't.

Oh, no, Kate. How much of the ceiling collapsed? There have been a lot of foundation failures around the country because of the weather extremes -- having the soil get very dry and then very wet tends to move the foundation. Still, I would have thought there would be signs around the foundation. Even though he's not liable, the inspector may feel guilty enough to come back and help you figure out what went wrong.