I haven’t been well set for writing blog posts for awhile, so my blogs been pretty damn dull: just a bunch of Daily Tweets posts, automatically generated. [Yawn.]
But tonight I need to rant.
Wednesday before last — well, actually on the Thursday morning at 3:30 AM — I woke up to a steady drip-drip-drip in my bedroom.
Same place where there’d been a lot of activity last winter due to old pipes that sprang leaks and had to be replaced. I spent a considerable part of last winter with a big damn holes in my ceiling both in my bedroom & the bathroom, with all the furniture & clutter shoved all around that I had to pick my way around even in order to climb into bed at night, until they could get the pipes replaced & the ceiling repaired & painted. Led to some moving around of furniture — my computer desk had originally been just below where the worst leaking was — fortunately with no computer on it because my laptop was nicer to use in a room where I wasn’t freezing to death because the heat in my apartment pretty much sucks in the winter….
Well, so what was in that spot now was a bookshelf. Full of books. Hadda be moved. All this stuff landed in the living room, surrounding the dining table, all over the floor. There’s also preexisting clutter that I haven’t quite gotten myself to move on. And my landlord came over in the middle of the night to tear open the ceiling to check on the pipes.
Turns out they were fine, & we eventually learned that something broke in the middle of the night in my upstairs neighbor’s toilet, and the wife got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom & found the floor full of water, & when my landlord talked with them the next day, they had a bathtub full of blankets & towels that they’d tried to mop up the mess with. So they had a miserable damn time of it too.
Except I’m probably more miserable because I still have a hole in my ceiling that’s not fixed yet. So I still have all this stuff all over the damn place.
Now tonight a new goddamn leak in another part of my apartment, in the living room right above — oh yeah, it hasta be this way — right above another goddamn bookcase full full full of books. This is apparently the same leak that I theorized might exist three weeks ago after I discovered the only printed & bound copy of my MFA thesis that I have, a corner which had been poking from the second from the top shelf, completely soaked. So the theorized leak wasn’t directly above the bookshelf, just slightly offset, as other books were not damaged. I saw no other sign of it — until tonight when I got home, a steady drip drip drip. A call to the landlord, who’s out of town & can’t get anyone over here till tomorrow.
Frak.
Okay, so:
For them to tear open ceiling to fix or replace what’s probably another old corroded pipe, I will have to: (1) remove all the books & move them & the bookshelf … (2) move the dining table.
Where to? damned if I know. My living room is already crowded from all the junk I had to move out of my bedroom because of that leak, which the ceiling has not yet been fixed so I can’t move it against that wall because the workman will need to be able to work. All the same, I will have to move all that stuff in order to move the table and bookshelf in the living room so the workman will have room to work in here.
Some of this stuff is clutter that I need & want to throw away, but guess what: I have no place to throw it away to because our damn apartment complex dumpster is already full to overflowing from nonresidents (I think) dumping stuff in it. This has been an ongoing problem: someone filling it so full, then dumping more garbage bags and boxes stacked around it that Waste Management refuses to pick it up, as they did last Thursday, and charges my landlord another $200 to come back on a second trip once he’s cleaned the mess. Looks like the landlord got his pickup to pick up the overflow so that they’ll pick up garbage this week — assuming some bastard doesn’t dump extra all around it again before Thursday comes along. I actually witnessed some guys in a pickup one night dumping two big ugly couches in the small woods just north of our complex — I wasn’t able to get their license number — but that’s part of why I think we’ve got dumpers dumping their garbage in our dumpster too, in the middle of the night so nobody catches them, either that or I have some seriously piggish neighbors….
But here it is, on average I have a maximum of one kitchen sized trash bag of trash a week: & I can’t even throw that in the dumpster because some bastard is doing what they’re doing. And they do it over & over again. So how can I throw away also the clutter I’m trying to get rid of?
Okay, so I got some books that were so badly damaged in my bedroom that they’re good for nothing — luckily, not much that I valued there — most of which are paperback, so I put ’em in bags: they can be taken to Anchorage Recycling as waste paper. But otherwise, it’s shove stuff around so that a hole can be torn in the ceiling, so that the maintenance guy has room to work, so that my entire apartment is in chaos & it’s a bitch to live in.
And Merry Frakkin Christmas to you too.
