"Rainy days and Mondays always get me down"

I got all ready to go for a run and then got to the park and it started pouring. What luck! I guess it’s good for me to wait, as my knee is still messed up from when I went hiking last week. So, instead, I decided to have breakfast at a little restaurant near my house and catch up on work.

I'm trying to have a good attitude, but today is just a rotten day. First the health insurance, then the rain, then the cook at the restaurant decided not to show up, so no food for us.

What's really bothering me is that I'm dreading talking to my housemate about a long list of items, a string of Difficult Conversations. There’s the fact that it's the 12th and she has not paid rent yet. She has a lot (A LOT) of animals and isn’t the greatest at cleaning up after them, and so my house smells rather like a zoo. And then there’s the fact that my utility bill has gone up from something like $135 (where it's remained steady for the past year) to $214 because she does more laundry in a day than I do in a month. Seriously.

She is a great housemate for the most part. She looks after Koya when I'm gone; she isn't home much and when she is, she keeps to herself. I guess what I’m mad about is that part of it (most of it?) is my fault for not being more assertive in the beginning. It’s not that I’m conflict avoidant, because I’m not.

According to The Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument, each of us has some combination of five modes of conflict: Avoiding, Accommodating, Competing, Compromising and Collaborating and natural inclinations to use some of these modes more than others. These five modes are described as follows:

Competing: High assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to "win".
Avoiding: Low assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to "delay".
Compromising: Moderate assertiveness and moderate cooperativeness. The goal is to "find a middle ground".
Collaborating: High assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to "find a win-win situation".
Accommodating: Low assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to "yield".

My primary conflict style is Accommodating, with Compromising and Competing (ironically) as close seconds. Those with Accommodating as their primary conflict style place an emphasis on human relationships. As a downside, they can ignore their own goals and resolve conflict by giving into others. There are definite times when accommodating is important:

when maintaining the relationship outweighs other considerations
when suggestions/changes are not important to the accommodator
when time is limited or when harmony and stability are valued

However, there are situations where other, less conciliatory, modes of conflict would be more useful. I just have to bite the bullet and say something. I’m paying way too much for a mortgage for my house to smell like a zoo…