Irony is a bastard.

Frequent readers (not that there's many, if any, left due to my lack of updates in the last nearly two months) may recall that I'm in the middle of remodeling my house to sell. If you care to refresh your memory, you won't have to travel very far back in blog-time — seriously, it was just two posts ago — to catch up on the details. Go ahead, you can do it now if you want, I'll wait for you...

...Just let me know when you're finished....

...Done? Oh, sorry....

...OK, looks like most everyone is back now so let's go ahead and continue.

So back at the beginning of September I hired a Realtor to help me sell my house. I actually got a team of Realtors excited about putting my house on the market. They were impressed at the remodel's progress and we're supportive of the decorating decisions I had made. I was on cloud 9. Then they told me what they wanted to list the house for. Bye bye cloud. And, worse, bye bye breaking even. But that's the risk that comes with owning property; no guarantees you'll be able to get more for it than you paid. It was a hard pill to swallow at first, but after doing more research it was obvious that the market was taking a tumble. Part of me thinks there's some conspiracy involving real estate investors and the media to start a panic to make the headlines of "plummeting values" and "disappearing buyers" into a reality for their benefit. But that's a rant for another time. Long story short, I accepted the facts and decided to keep moving forward.

My Realtors couldn't have been nicer, we really hit it off. Due to my insane work schedule and the quickly approaching extended business trips that would keep me away from the whole process, we decided to move forward as quickly as possible. Step one: sign the contracts. Check! Step two: termite and home inspections. Well, this is where things went terribly wrong.

The morning air was surprisingly crisp the morning I put my spare house key in the key box clamped on the door handle. This was the day I would find out what needed to be repaired in order to get my home on the market and hopefully sold before my competing neighbor's home. The combination was tricker than it looked and I spent more time than I had allotted for the procedure than planned and now I was running the risk of being late to work. Mind you, I'm at work before my boss about 90% of the time, and I stay later than her about 80% of the time, but I'm still worried that she's just looking for a reason to get rid of me. But, again, that's a theory for another time.

At work, the projects kept coming fast and furious. Even the simple projects took forever because nothing is ever simple in our world. Having to play tech support for the people on my team — and other teams, too! — didn't help in my ability to keep on schedule. Or have lunch for that matter. By 5:30pm, most of the building was empty, except for me and a couple other people whose colleagues end up dumping stuff on before heading home to be with their families. Single office workers, do you know what I'm talking about? Like the expectation is that it's no big deal for us to stay late just because we aren't married or have kids, while our married counterparts get to play the "family card" whenever they don't want to stay late. Hey, married people, just because I didn't go and get some girl knocked up doesn't mean that I don't have my own shit to take care of back home. At least you aren't going it alone but rather you have a significant other (and possibly some really cheap labor in the form of kids) that can help out at the homestead while your at work procrastinating and then handing off to us on your way out the door. Those of us who are partner-free almost deserve it more simply because we don't have that extra person around. Am I alone in this? PLEASE leave a comment and tell me what you think! But I digress. So the other guy still at the office is getting ready to leave which would leave me there flying solo. My brain power is fading, as is my vision from staring at computer screens for the past 12 straight hours. His argument on why I should just go home while I'm still functional enough to drive can't be beat so I give in, set my system to start its nightly backup process and turn off the lights behind me even though they'll turn off automatically in less than two hours anyway.

The walk to my car is painfully long but only because I've been sitting so long that I've lost much feeling below the waist. The 10 yard trek feels like miles and before the feeling can completely return to my legs, I'm sitting again, hands on the steering wheel, thinking about whether or not to get take out food or just make something to eat at home. I decide on cooking then put the car in drive and navigate the reverse of my morning route. It's late enough that there's not much traffic still on the road and the drive becomes a blur as I lapse into autopilot. Before I know it I'm getting off at my exit with just 5 more minutes to go before putting my car in park, shutting off the engine, and locking the doors behind me.

The air feels crisp again, kind of like the morning's. Walking up to the door I'm briefly thrown off by the key box attached to my front door. Then I remember that it was so that my realtor and the home inspectors could get in and complete their duties while I was tied up at work. Walking in the front door I'm almost immediately thrown off again, but I'm not sure by what. Everything looks the same, where I left it in the morning, but something is definitely off. At first I chalk it up to the fact that I'm exhausted and suffering from low blood sugar from working through lunch. But no, something is definitely not quite right. It's surprisingly warm in the house, as if someone had been running the heater. Well, they would have done that as part of the inspection I suppose. I turn on the light in the corner. Adding more light in the room reveals another clue; it looks slightly hazy in here. No, wait, my eyes are just tired from all the computer work. I shrug it off and take a deep breath in anticipation of letting out a great sigh of relief of finally being home before 10pm for once. Drawing the air into my lungs I pick up on something that smells like iron and burnt plastic. This time I can't come up with a reasonable answer as why my house would smell like that and I get an instant jolt of adrenaline … something in my house is burning!! But what?!

Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened next and why irony is such a bastard. And yes, there's a chance that I'm using the word "irony" in the Morresette sense rather than the true sense. It makes for a better title so get over it already!