Life is difficult at present

In rough order of arrival, if not annoyance:

* The owners of the unit we're renting have decided to sell it out from under us. We have a lease which is good to the middle of January next year, and the best-case scenario at this point is that the place is purchased by another investor, who is happy to keep us on as tenants. Worst-case scenario has us moving over the Christmas / New Year period.
* First "home open" for the place was last Sunday (it hasn't sold, so there's another on Sunday week).
* Monday, I had dental work done, which tends to wipe me out for the day. Just a couple of fillings, but it meant I had to take the day off on Tuesday in order to recover from everything.
* Tuesday was my day off, and I wound up needing to run all the errands I would have run on Monday (mostly grocery shopping).
* Wednesday was back at work, but we had a farewell lunch for one of our team-members who was retiring. I'm not exactly at the top of my social game at the moment (due to Factors and Reasons, including the whole "home open" and "photo shoot" and "damn it I was hoping for a nice relaxing two weeks of leave but looks like that was far too much to expect" things, because guess when all the news about the sale of the house came through?) so I was stress eating a lot. On the one hand, I didn't have a public meltdown. On the other hand, the "diet talk" node of my brain has woken up and is screaming at me.
* Thursday was our team member's final day, including farewell morning tea, so more being "on" in public around other people. Not the best experience, and more stress-eating.
* Friday was actually relatively quiet at work, and I managed to get at least some improvement in our backlog of work. The three of us who were present also cleared out about four or five years of accumulated stationery and random this-and-that from a storage cabinet (and discovered so much free space in there) - this was prompted by our new team member (who is replacing the retired one) having cleaned out the bottom drawer of her desk drawers and found a whole heap of cutlery which had apparently been abandoned there by the previous incumbent.
* Got a call last night from my father. My parents are downsizing, and they were wanting to offer me some furniture. Which at least meant I got to tell them about the whole "yeah, we might have to be moving soon ourselves" - I declined the furniture on that grounds. But then he mentioned they wanted to see me today, to talk about their wills. Now, I have largely been low-to-no contact with my family for the better part of the past twenty-five years; this is not something you do if associating with your family is a fun and pleasant thing to do. So I am not looking forward to heading to their place this morning to discuss things.
* I had a rotten night's sleep last night, not least because of anxiety, but also because it's October, the barometer is up and down like a blasted yo-yo, and that means the arthritis in my back is playing up, so I'm dealing with back pain.
* Saturday is usually my Gaming Day. I had been planning (prior to my father's call last night) to run all my various FFXIV characters through the All Saint's Wake content, and then concentrate on getting my main character through a few more bits and pieces. This is now on hold, depending on how emotionally and psychologically wrecked I am when I get home today.

So yeah, how's everyone else going?

Life is an emotional rollercoaster

Okay, so if you've read the previous entry, you'll know I've had a bit of a Week this past week. I had to go and visit with family, which I generally don't fancy, because my family is one of those ones that put the "fun" in "dysfunctional".

Well.

It turns out that part of the reason my parents were wanting to downsize is because they'd decided (after much research into retirement villages and aged care) to deal with the whole business where Australian aged care placements tend to rely on you selling the family home in order to finance your accommodation there by selling their existing place to my brother (who lives with them) and setting themselves up as tenants for life (he owns the place, they live with him). Then my brother would take out a mortgage, and give me half the value of the house. First lawyer they saw to try and set this up basically threw a wobbly at the idea and didn't set things up correctly (set up my brother as Tenant-for-Life in my parents' place, which meant if they died, he got everything, I got nothing, which was not what they wanted to happen). Second lawyer managed to get things sorted out correctly, but in the meantime the value of the house my parents currently occupy had gone up to the point where my brother couldn't have afforded the mortgage on it. So they've sold the house, they're downsizing to a three bedroom unit, they will give the place to my brother (and become his tenants for life), and then he will take out a mortgage and give me half the value of the new place.

This will be about $200,000 or thereabouts. Or in other words, enough money to get myself and my partner into the real estate market ourselves.

So, I've been knocked sideways by one of the top three Good Things in my life (the other two were meeting my partner and landing my current job), and while the money won't be coming through fast enough for us to buy the place we're currently in, it will hopefully be coming through by about January, at which point I can go find a mortgage broker, put down about a 1/3 deposit on a place for my partner and myself, and settle down to paying off the mortgage as fast as possible before I hit 70. But this means we get a chance to get off the rental treadmill at long fucking last, and have a place we can genuinely call our own.

I'm still processing things at present, but for the first time in about ... ever, I'm able to look at the future without immediately jumping to "dying destitute in a ditch" and immediately getting as depressed as all hells.