Grateful On One Hand, Struggling For Patience On The Other

We have been living in our current accommodation for the past over ten years and it is no secret to anyone reading this blog....well, anyone who knows anything at all about us....that we are anxious to leave this place.  I am grateful to God and to our many encouraging friends who have given us the strength to remain here as long as we have, particularly over the past two years as we have watched the premises turning more and more into tenement quality housing.  I am very grateful for having had the stability of living in one place for so long....despite missing the end of our "Adventures in Constantly Moving", and as I have posted before, I do hope we can get one more adventure in before we get too totally old to be able to have adventures....however this evening as I looked out our windows the curtain of reality, which I have mostly been able to keep pulled sufficiently closed as one of my coping mechanisms, was lifted for just long enough to survey the property as it truly has become.  It makes my heart sad.

I looked out over the parking lot at the broken deck boards and sagging steps at various units that have been that way for many a month now with no attempts by the maintenance department to repair, the goose poo all over the sidewalks, (NOT the fault of our housing facility as the geese legally have all the rights as a protected species, but knowing that doesn't make living here any easier or less embarrassing), the cracked siding, the various window dressings dangling askew in most of the suites now, the teeny newcomer boys peeing happily day after day in the puddles behind our car in the parking lot, the filthy old mattresses and other furniture brought in to the garbage bin by the facility bobcat, items that are too often abandoned by tenants who have moved on but didn't bother to remove their ancient furniture from their suites, and these items have yet, after several days, to be picked up by maintenance on the larger CAT bucket and hoisted into the bin, an old suitcase and two large bags of old clothes left sitting beside a car in the lot across from us for the past few days, pieces of siding that have detached in strong wind storms, some of them have been hanging off the buildings for months, the sagging kitchen windows whose systems continue to fail and are no longer able to be raised and lowered either at all, or at best can only be kept open by sticking a board under them to keep them from falling out and breaking the glass, the plumbing repair job in our own suite that has left us with a large, poorly mudded and never repainted area of our kitchen ceiling that has been like that for nearly a year, the ruined linoleum in our kitchen that isn't going to be replaced, the toys and bicycles scattered for days over the lawns and parking lot.....oh, it is so depressing.  It isn't like the grounds maintenance crew doesn't see all the garbage and mess scattered hither and yon, but either they have no reason to care or they are just so understaffed and busy (?) that they can't get to cleaning the messes up .  As I watch them "working" a lot of days I feel like I would enjoy lighting a bomb  under their behinds to get them moving.  Until a couple of years ago things around here were not wonderful, but they were never THIS bad.  Either the property will be up for sale soon and that is why so little is being done, or we are all going to be evicted sometime in the near future so that these buildings can be torn down and cheap apartment buildings put up in their place.  I can "feel" it coming. This is a prime piece of residential real estate that could be better utilized for city taxes and rental companies as a development of three or four story apartment buildings.  

Anyway....that is my little confession this evening....I am not feeling upset, or stressed, or freaking out about where we find ourselves living at this age and stage of life. I am simply sad that things around here have come to this.  I am not frantic to get out of here right now because I know we are meant to stay a bit longer for a number of good reasons.  I am simply very, very sad to see how the place is being let go to wrack and ruin.   I feel like the whole complex is crumbling around me.