Monday, October 10, 2016

Why No Blog Post?

Sunday

The condition that I call a sh*t-storm on my personal weather map continues today with a broken toilet in the apartment above that is causing big leaks in my kitchen.

Whoever converted this building to a six-family put bathrooms over kitchens and vice versa.. My "kitchen" is a former master bedroom closet. You can see where the double doors were removed from the frame because part of the hinges remain. The upstairs tenants claim they shut the water off, but I am having to take various buckets downstairs to empty them outside.
As previously noted, my storage bin was on the verge of being emptied and all contents tossed out when I happened to go outside last Monday and see what was happening. A marathon schlepping effort saved a lot of our stuff, which is now crammed in the garage or apartment.

Monday

The leak stopped Sunday night. The walls and ceiling will be fixed once they dry out, the super says.

Since last Monday, we have had a few other surprises. One was a water shut-off notice due to non-payment by the landlord. Another was a warning that asbestos removal will be taking place over the next several weeks, so we must not enter the basement. This means no use of the laundry equipment and apparently no heat, though at the end of the process we will have new washers and dryers and a new furnace.

Other diversions: A package from Seattle led to four days of confusion and two trips to the post office because the address was wrong. My son's birthday card from his father in California is still lost in the mail. A postcard came warning some tenants they must appear in court over garage issues. 

Midway through this spate of odd occurrences I actually looked up the dates for Mercury in retrograde, which the late Pepsi Charles used to blame for things going wrong. According to dates in the Old Farmer's Almanac, it's not happening now, so there must be some other reason. Of course, the somewhat apocalyptic political season seems to indicate turbulence in the spheres, so what's a little household inconvenience thrown in? I just had to remind myself also of the utter turmoil around the world with natural disasters and displacement of families to put all this in context. As the saying goes, it could be worse. So on with the thermals and down vest, off to the laundromat, fingers crossed that bills will be paid and projects will get done fast. One of my favorite things (besides whiskers on kittens, etc.) is yard work and heaven knows in Autumn there is plenty of that to take my mind off troubles.

--Bernice

3 comments:

  1. My sympathies go out to you! As a person whose bathroom kept getting flooded from above through three landlords, I finally got the fourth one to actually fix the grout in the upstairs shower. I swear, they kept ripping pipes apart, kept putting up new drop ceiling in my bathroom over and over again. I kept telling them it was the shower. I could tell my own grout was iffy and made sure the water didn't get aimed towards it. (Yes, they fixed mine, too.) It sounds like your new landlord is going to be a bit of a headache. Maybe after the improvements are done, things will improve.

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    1. That is another problem with the upstairs neighbor. I asked them to check the grout. The broken toilet problem was solved. I was just looking up radio interference because after my new downstairs neighbor got cable, all my AM radio reception developed static. I keep one portable radio tuned to WCBS AM for news and weather and now I can't hear it. What next around here, a plague of locusts?

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  2. Although not a great solution if you don't want your computer on, that station is available online. At least that should play without interference.

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