Merry Christmas, sort of (Part 1)

So, I truly hope that everyone is having a great holiday.  At the very least, I hope it's been much better than ours has been (but I'll get to that).  It's been a wild ride but at the very least Steve and I are getting through it. 

So Christmas Eve morning, I wake up running the mental list of all I needed to do before my in-laws get come over for Christmas dinner.  I'm thinking I need to sweep one last time, head to Ikea to pick up the extra folding chairs, water the Christmas tree, put pictures in those three ornaments Mami sent me two years ago but still don't have pictures in them, put the nice table cloth on the table, head up to Hollywood to pick up the Colombian food, check the church schedule to figure out if they is caroling before midnight mass.  I'm thinking, dinner starts at 5:30, I have Plenty of time.  And then I actually get out of bed and find Steve in the living room.

So what was Steve doing?  He was in the dining room trying to figure out why there was water coming into our dining room from the ceiling.  My first thought, "crap, it's raining again and it's raining so hard it's coming in" (well, we know it wasn't that PG-rated but, oh well). I step out onto the patio into the most beautiful day I've seen in about a week.  I was seriously confused.  I am thinking to myself, "WTH, how is it raining in my condo if it's all kinds of sunshiney outside?" Then Steve notices that water was coming in through our living room onto our couch.  We move the couch, put towels down, and try to figure out what the heck is going on.  Our neighbors upstairs had moved out a few weeks ago and the owner has been in and out trying to sell the place.  Steve had told me before I had woken up, he had already tried up there but there was no one there.  That's the moment, that water starts pouring through our dining room light fixture onto the table.  I freak.  I call the upstairs owner and then I run upstairs and start pounding on the upstairs front door.  Not surprisingly, the other upstairs neighbor opens up and asks me what I was doing.  I explained and he suggested I try the realtor.  I run to the front of the complex to get his number.  I call him and he says he's on his way.  As I am walking back to the front door I find the upstairs owner pulling weeds from the perimeter of the property.  We get into her unit to find her living room and dining room flooded.  She opens her balcony door and starts sweeping all the water off of her balcony (and onto our patio).  I ask her what she thinks she's doing.  She yells at me wondering what I think she should do.  TURN OFF THE WATER.  She stops sweeping water onto our patio and turns off the water to her washing machine, which turns out is overflowing.  By the time I head downstairs and out onto the patio, she decides to continue to sweep the water onto our patio.  We try to get all of our plants, furniture, stuff out of the way of the sheets of water coming down on us from above because she would rather damage more of our property instead of using the shop vac her realtor is hooking up and starting up

And so began our holiday morning.  Just thinking about it is exhausting.  I need to go recharge.  Eat a snack.  I'll finish our Christmas saga a bit later.