Bah-Humbug

There are no Christmas decorations up. I even went so far as to unplug the tree we set up already because I’m no long in the Christmas spirit.

After coming home from dropping off my resume and filling out an application for a veterinary receptionist position I was informed about, my partner and I received not one, not two, but three certified letters from the bank to inform us of our default on the mortgage and that we are in foreclosure. My partner then spent over an hour talking to various people who all have no idea what is going on and can’t answer simple questions like where the money we were sending them and they were cashing was actually going if not towards our mortgage. One person actually transferred him to a voicemail box because she was apparently tired of “helping” him. One person was able to tell us that our loan modification was denied back in September which was news to us since we’d been in contact with the person helping us with that up until late October. And yet another person was actually able to tell us where the payments were going and explain quite a few details.

Why is it that you have to jump through so many hoops just to get a straight answer from corporations these days? Are they simply so large the right hand really has no idea what the left hand is doing? A trip to a local branch practically confirmed that. My partner asked if there was somebody who could verify we had all of our documents in order this time around and the customer service person brought out the branch manager to explain that nobody in the branch is knowledgeable in home loan modifications and that the people on the other end of the phone simply were not prepared for the current predicament. She also told us it is, plain and simple, utter chaos right now and that from what she has heard from other homeowners is that going to a Homeowner Center and talking face-to-face with somebody will get you much further than dealing with anybody over the phone, and that the closest one is in Seattle.

With the insane hurdles and the fact that yet again I’m unemployed, I don’t even know if going through the process again will be worth it. But according to the last person my partner talked to on the phone simply keeping in contact and constantly asking, “What else do you need?” will, at the very least, show that we are still interested in finding a way to keep the house… even if right now we are looking into packing up and moving into an apartment and leaving everything we’ve put into this house to make it a home behind.

So I’m seriously considering cancelling Christmas in our house. I’m not in the mood, and I can’t get over the anger, frustration and guilt I have over causing the situation we are currently in. My partner said he is tired of the stress of the uncertain outcome of our situation and simply wants to just close this chapter of our life and move on. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right about that stress, which has been eating away at me for far too long. But my problem is also the stress of having to move, relocate the chickens, go through all of our stuff to find out what we want to keep and what we have to get rid of, and how in the world am I going to keep what little sanity I have left while living in an apartment again, assuming we can find one that will allow us to have both a cat and a Great Dane. It almost seems appropriate now that our lucky bamboo is dying as our luck is running out. Bah-humbug.