Because life is fair, and karma sees to the balance of experience in the universe, today was an incredible crap-ass day.

My judge is off for the rest of the week starting today, so I expected my work to be very light. I didn’t think I’d have to float anywhere or cover other courtrooms, since half the courthouse was also dark, so we had more clerks than judges available. Mr. W suggested we both take the afternoon off to go real estate hunting with our realtor, which was a great idea. We finally get to look “for real” now, since his financing came through last week. But this morning, not only was I reassigned to a busy criminal calendar courtroom, but I was reassigned to a busy criminal calendar courtroom that had the calendar from hell. Despite my explaining my desire to have the afternoon off to my supervisors, they still refused to move any other floaters around to help me out. We finally compromised by my promising to work through lunch, leave in the afternoon after making sure the courtroom was covered in case anything came up, and coming back in the evening after my appointments and working as late as it took to finish my work before leaving for the night. The morning’s workload was so famously horrid that another bailiff came by, saw me, and asked, “What happened? You drew the short straw this morning?”
“No,” I clarified, “The short straw was forcibly jammed up my ass this morning. I didn’t draw it.” I’d never used the f-word so much at work before. The bright spot was that another judge-less coworker floating next door helped me do 2 cases that got delayed into the afternoon, so that I could take off at 1:30p.

We looked at 1 house in Brea (eh…), 6-7 houses in Mission Viejo (my city of choice), and 1 house in Huntington Beach. Mr. W was already in love with the Huntington Beach house from seeing it online and despite my beef with a house that’s 14 years older than me, only 1 story, under 1700 square feet, and in an old neighborhood, Mr. W would not let me veto the property. We got into bickers about this house and he’d said multiple times that he was going to forego it since I apparently hated it so much, but the next day it was always back on the table as if we’d never had the discussion. After visiting the house itself, I had to admit that it was fully upgraded and done so impressively, and the neighborhood, although old, is not as slummy as previously viewed Huntington Beach neighborhoods that had scared me to the point I knew I’d be afraid to go to the mailbox by myself. But I still preferred the newer, bigger, more modern homes and floorplans.

So we decided to leave it to the hands of fate. We would put an offer down on his #1 choice, the Huntington Beach house, on my #1 choice, a Mission Viejo house, and a third offer down on another Mission Viejo house that was his #2 and my #3 choice. I love my #1 Mission Viejo house. I loved it the instant I walked in. I love the outside, the inside, the light and bright floorplan and the cute manicured backyard with a dropoff view (no residences behind us). Plus, it’s 24 years newer than the Huntington Beach house and $10K less on asking price. It’s 2 stories, has a full bed/bath downstairs, and both upstairs bedrooms are master suites. How can you go wrong?!

Our appointments went on till past 6pm, and I was weak and unenthused by the end of the trip because I had consumed zero calories the whole day. The morning at work was so insane that I never ate a solid molecule of food, never drank a liquid molecule of beverage, and never went to the bathroom. My first bite of food didn’t happen till Mr. W bought me a chicken chipotle wrap after we got back to work. I got my food to go, went upstairs back to the courtroom, ate real quick, and went right back to entering and processing the morning’s criminal cases. I left work a little past 8p.

I popped into my coworker’s house to check on her cats but she’d beaten me there after driving back from Vegas, so I just gave her her housekeys back and handed her a wedding invitation. Then I came home and highlighted my hair. I got a scare initially since the highlighting foam stripped my hair color so dramatically that instead of leaving it on for the recommended 10-30 minutes, I panicked at 5 minutes and washed it out. The instructions said that the color of hair after taking the highlighting solution out isn’t the final color, and that the final color would be shampooed in later, but I didn’t trust it. I ended up stripey, but it did come out much better than it’d originally looked. I think I washed it out too early; only the top of my head took. But that was okay, since the bottom half of my hair still had the lighter coloring in it, so what I did (inadvertently) was blend the top to the bottom. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Based on today, tomorrow should be great.