When life gives you lemons

make lemonade.

Seriously.  When Greg came home with a bag of lemons on Friday, I asked if he was sick.  Nope, just having a lemon of a day, so he decided to make lemonade (with a bit of blood orange, blackberries, and lots of sugar, of course).

That's been life around here lately.  Lots of lemons.  Most of it involves our Provo house.  I'd like to say it all started when...but there's no when.  It's been bad for a while.  Last April, we listed it to sell it to get rid of the bad.  And got nothing.  Then our contract with our realtor was up and that day we got an offer.  We then spent quite a bit of money fixing various things and paying our tenets to move out for the buyers.  Then the day of the signing, the hour we were to be free of the house , the lender pulled out(really though.  I got a call at 5 pm saying everything was fine and another at 7 saying it wasn't).   We tried with a different lender just to have the same thing happen.   I was crushed.  It was 3 days before Christmas and I still that lemon-throwing tree of a house crouching over me.

In January, we got another low offer but took it because we wanted to sell the house.  They pulled out two weeks later.  We now have a third buyer.  And things are going well.  We're supposed to close on Friday.  But I'm not holding my breath.

The thing that makes me the most upset is this though: Last year we evicted a tenet.  The day we served him the papers, he asked for our insurance information because he fell on the property a month before.  So we jumped through those hoops and our insurance said he has nothing on us, and by the way he's in jail.  I thought we'd never hear from him again, especially since he owes us quite a bit of money.  He got out in November and the first thing he did was actually sue us!  Luckily we have awesome insurance and they took care of everything.  Including settle, which was annoying because he's a crazy liar, but I thought was to be a blessing in disguise.  He was getting almost exactly the amount of money that he owed us. So I contact my eviction attorney and let him know that ex-tenet will be getting a check.  Eviction attorney talks with insurance attorney and eviction attorney works things out so that he will collect the check basically as soon as ex-tenet gets it.  In theory.  In reality, eviction attorney turned up 2 hours too late and the money was gone.  He tried getting the money from the bank account of ex-tenet but that took him 3 days to do and meth-addicts don't let large sums of money sit around in bank accounts when it could be buying them more drugs.

I got the final word today, which I already knew, the account was empty.  Eviction attorney blew it and we're out a bunch of money.  At least he's not charging us.  He knows he blew it.

I'm trying to make lemonade out of it, but I'm also just a little bit mad.  I really thought that Heavenly Father perfectly orchestrated that settlement to get us the money we needed, and the attorney failed.

Add to this starting a business.  Not me, Greg.  He's got a good product and things are going well.  But it's still stressful trying to produce and manage and sell and account and do everything.  Not me, Greg.  I just watch feeling mostly helpless

Like how artsy I am?

This kid was not allowed to help, so we played Try-to-grab-the-camera-while-Mom-takes-pictures.

.  And a lot of days things just don't work out.  And so Greg brings home a bag of lemons and we laugh about it and have some amazing, complex, and layered lemonade with dinner.

Because it's either that or cry, and I hate crying.