My Realtor(tm) from 4 years ago is now a waitress at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. It's unimaginably hard to fight off the schadenfreude because all she did was sit in the builder's office and sponge up buyers like us, who walked in without a Realtor(tm). She did more work fetching our drinks than she ever did during our home purchase.

Only it's not that funny, because our homeowners' association, whose ostensible purpose is to protect my property value, was conceived by the builder who clearly never imagined that every tenth house would be abandoned.

These abandoned properties do far more to drag down property values than the height of my neighbor's swing set or the color of our crushed granite, but the HOA is powerless. Instead, they dutifully bust my balls for parking on the street, while the abandoned houses grow weeds taller than my legitimate plants.

I still think it's hilarious that the word Realtor is trademarked. Another margarita, please.