This evening, when I got home from work, I found an envelope that was taped to the front door of the condo that we rent. Inside that envelope was a letter that stated that the property management company that we have been dealing with for the last two places we have rented [1] was no longer representing the owner of the condo, which presumably meant that the owner of the condo is now responsible for doing all the things that landlords are supposed to do. Here’s hoping that nothing breaks [2], since it is hard to imagine that maintenance will be a high priority for the owner of our condo, given the fact that we do not really know anything about the owner at all except for what we would rather not know.

It is not, after all, surprising that our longsuffering property management company decided that this situation was too much drama for them to deal with. They took on this property on the expectation of profit, finding plenty of interested tenants fairly quickly. Of course, the owner of the property had a little secret that was not revealed to them, and that was that the owner owed the condo owner’s association over $10,000, which we only found out about because my roommates and I were served with a writ of garnishment (which I had never heard of before) in order to recoup the expenses that the owner had failed to pay, presumably for improvements for the condo complex as a whole. It goes without saying that someone who is so far behind on such payments is probably not going to be a very reliable person when it comes to any sort of required repairs and maintenance that would ever be necessary here. Given my recent experiences with the unreliability of property owners in the Portland area, I am not particularly confident in this matter.

I wonder, at this point, what sort of saga my life in Portland will end up being. My living situation resembles, if it might be imagined, a sort of humorous version of the irregular living of Lydia and Wickham discussed at the end of Pride & Prejudice. I don’t know when things will settle down and become a little bit less dramatic and more stable. That said, it does not appear as if that is happening yet. I suppose I would do well to be more suspicious of the people around me; it is not an easy thing to be a person of integrity who is far less suspicious of others than others are of me, when I have more cause to be wary than most. Considering that in the last four months I have had a landlady break a lease and have been served for the debts of someone else, I wonder what sort of ways that my life can be made more complicated by the mistakes and blunders of others that I am not familiar with. Then again, I don’t think I want to know.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/’

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/pray-it-doesnt-break/