Bad Karma: Part 1 - Garden of Eden

I've been in the good ol' US of A for the past four weeks, but I'm back in Germany now, and the Fassmeister is off on a different adventure. It's been a busy couple of weeks. Now that I'm back, I'll get back to the blogging. As I mentioned before, we've moved into our house. Well, the house we've moved into has, to put lightly, bad karma. Each one of these items most people would chalk up to either back luck, timing, carelessness, or purely a European oddity. The sum, however, can only be described as bad karma. I will identify each ominous event in the following blog entries....

We should have know from the start. The day we showed up to sign the lease, the landlord was going through the checkout with the previous tenant. Now, my German is not great, but the phrase "Zwei Tousend!" was mentioned several times in disgust by the outgoing tenant. Apparently, the poor guy had his wife and child leave to return to Scandinavia because they hated Germany so much. Well, in his heart break, he did a less than stellar job of taking care of the grounds, something the Germans can't stand. You must take care of the gardens, of course.

Supposedly the gardener the landlord has chosen to hire is going to charge her $2000 Euro to make the area look acceptable. Personally, I think one guy working for a day could do the job, but, hey, it's not my money. Apparently, she wanted to get the poor Nordsee monger to pay for this, and he refused.

Well, since this was such a big deal to her, we made sure to tell her that she can only expect the area to be as good when we leave, as when we got it. I certainly am not going to spend time "fixing" someone else's mistakes just to find out my repairs are not up to snuff either. I need a calibration point. This is totally unacceptable to der Hauswirt, so she was going to pay the gardener to get it to a "clean slate" look for us, so we can start anew. Since the previous tenant is unwilling to pay for this, she would have to. Last I heard, her and the gardener are in negotiations. The Fassmeister and I are quite satisfied with the current look. Stuff is overgrown, and the privacy is nice.