Lo barato sale caro.

This year's Spring Break (or SBXI for those of you who prefer facebook lingo) was supposed to be a week of relaxing, catching up on the new season of The Real Housewives of Orange County, having some landscaping done, and basically doing nothing. It was going to be glorious. But alas, it was not meant to be.

The story begins in my yard. I had a bunch of landscaping projects that needed to be done. I needed to move some rose bushes and create a new garden area. I needed trees dug up, stumps removed, a fence rebuilt, mulching done, and new plants planted. Obviously these were not tasks I myself could complete, seeing as how the maximum extent of my yard work expertise involves pulling up weeds, and I'm not even that good at doing that. The solution was to hire professionals.

I hired those professionals who came in and did excellent and excellently cheap work, so excellent and excellently cheap ($725 for all those tasks) that I hired them to pressure wash my siding. And that's when disaster struck. I won't bore you with the details, but basically, because of their pressure washing, a pipe burst and effectively destroyed half of my bathroom. The sad part is that I was home the whole time my bathroom was flooding; I just had no idea it was happening because I was watching season 6 of The West Wing and making dinner. By the time I went to my room to brush my teeth after dinner, it was too late. All I could hear was the sound of gushing water, and all I could see through the crumbling drywall were imaginary dollar signs flashing before my eyes.

I'm not really a glass-half-full kind of person. Even though my garden looks really nice and the exterior of my house is really clean, I prefer to complain and wallow. And I think I am entitled to do both, especially since this isn't the first time a pipe has burst in my house and destroyed an entire room. The last time it was my garage, though, so it didn't really disrupt my routine. I mean, there was no toilet sitting in the middle of my tub or anything like that. But having any part of your house destroyed kind of sucks all around. And I just thought of all those Japanese people who've lost everything, and now I feel like a horrible person for being annoyed that I have to use my guest bathroom for a week. Wow--this blog entry just got real.