Breaking and Eating

When my husband and I were building our home, we had to rent another for a few months until it was finished.

The day we looked at the house, the landlady looked at me and asked, "What are you"? My mother is from the Philippines, so I have dark skin and hair. My husband and I chalked it up to ignorance. The house was the only one within our price range, so we took it.

The day we moved in, I heard a knock on the door. I didn't answer right away and there was only one knock before it stopped. But then I heard someone rummaging around in the kitchen. When I went downstairs, my landlady was going through my cabinets like it was no big deal. I asked her why she had just walked in.

"This is my damn house, and I'll come in it whenever I want. If you don't like that I'll throw you out on your foreign ass, you hear me"? I had no idea what to say, but asked her politely to leave and not just walk into the house.

A few days later, my husband was sitting in the living room when a man opened the door and walked in! My husband jumped up and asked what he wanted. "Doris told me I could come get her A/C unit. It's upstairs in the window". My husband told the man that we lived there, not our landlady, that we would not be taking things out of the house to give to random strangers, and to never come in our home again. He left, and not twenty minutes later our landlady was calling to tell us it was HER house and HER A/C unit, and if we didn't like it, he could take his "mail-order-bride and get out".

We called the cops, and they told us to change the locks. They told our landlady she needed to give us 24 hours notice to enter the house, and she had to have good reason.

We thought the problem was solved, until we left for Thanksgiving. When we got back and opened the door, we were greeted by the smell of dead flesh. My husband walked in and found a whole turkey carcass rotting on the stove, with maggots actually crawling around on it. All our best dishes were dirty in the sink. We called the cops to figure out what we could do, and they called our landlady.

"They didn't tell me they were leaving, so I couldn't give them notice. The wife probably got deported. They have a lot more room there than I do, and I don't have all the stuff to cook like they do. They have it in MY house, anyway."

She had broken in to cook Thanksgiving dinner at OUR home, because she had seen all my nice cookware and china when she was rummaging in the house. Then she had left everything in the sink and on the counter. She had also left two garbage cans full of liquor bottles out back. The best part was that she left the oven on the ENTIRE time we were gone....about a week and a half since Thanksgiving.

Then she tried to charge us when the heating elements in the oven broke.

---Contributed by Still Can't Eat Turkey