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mattwolff's new year's party, because it's been weirdness upon weirdness pretty much since I woke up the next morning and by now my Alleged Readers would be worrying I'd fallen under the wheels of the L or something...
Thursday morning my grandmother called just as I had finally gotten myself to sleep and ended up waking me back up again. (Turns out the reason she hadn't called for the last six years was that she didn't have the number, which Mum had finally remembered to write down in this year's holiday card... and here I thought she was ignoring us. LOL) Remainder of Thursday spent wobbling around in sleep-deprived haze.
Friday spent sleeping off Thursday, interrupted at intervals beginning at 7:30 AM by sounds of crowbars ripping off lathe and an honest-to-god jackhammer in the apartment next door where the drug-dealing-Idiot-Neighbors had been tossed out from. This had been going on earlier in the week as well; I'd assumed they were remodeling after the DDIN's had trashed the place, but the jackhammer was a new twist and rather ominous, not to mention hard to sleep through because it was rattling the windows at the head of my bed. Woke up at 7 PM, up all night achieving nothing, conked out at 10:30 AM and decided to give the rest of Saturday a miss.
Up and down several times Saturday/Sunday night, finally fell all the way asleep and wasn't able to rouse myself until nearly 4 PM, when I realized that several library books had been due back Saturday and anyway there were assorted errands to run...
The library closes at 6 PM on Sundays. Remember this fact, it's important.
We put ourselves together and wobbled downstairs about 20 after 4. Threw open the back door, and -- WHITE STUFF. EVERYWHERE. Gooey, fluffy WHITE STUFF. And gray stuff, this being a back door into a well-trafficked alley; bypassing a Mysterious Lake in our lobby, we went around to the front, which hadn't been shoveled either but was at least not filthy and slushy.
The car was parked across the street from our building's front door, peaceful under a thick blanket of snow. By this point we were already shrieking at one another about Time In Relation To Circumstances. It was now 4:30 PM because Mum had stopped to check for Saturday's forgotten mail.
Once unearthed, the car had to be freed from the mire, which was some three inches deep. Doing this by simple backing-and-gunning proved unexpectedly difficult, not to mention rubbery-smelling. Mum confessed that the snowshovel was indeed upstairs in the front hall... as it was 4:38 by now, we resolved to try pushing the car free of its drift before taking yet more time to go up for the shovel.
I am 5'3", weigh [mumble mumble] and had on a brand new coat and completely inadequate footwear. Mum is taller and 'bigger' and has winter boots. Nevertheless, since I don't drive myself (vision questions and general timidity), I was designated Pusher Of The Car. And it worked well enough, under the circumstances, although Mum was simply not getting any traction for some reason, and there was that funky smell... and as we managed to get the car some ways away from the curb I at last saw why: the front passenger-side tire was going flat. Gone flat, in fact. In between Mum's general-stress hysterics I managed to convey this to her, which briefly sobered her before hysterics about the tire situation set in.
We couldn't leave the car half-in/half-out of the parking space and blocking the street, so we decided that the best course was to get it all the way out and limp to the Citgo two blocks away to see if somebody there could get the spare on. (This is at 20 to 5 on a snowy Sunday night, recall.) Funky smell and all (which we now realized was disintegrating rubber), we made it over to Citgo... and Pimply-Faced Teen in its Stop'N'Blow inconvenience mart was not authorized to leave his security cage. 4:50 PM.
The nearest, and only, full-service station in the area, which fortunately does have Sunday hours (and is busy as hell because of that), is about a mile or so from this Citgo. Nevertheless, it was 5:30 before their service guy made it over to our call. He put on the spare, since the old tire was completely off the rim by now, and we drove over to his station and had a real tire put on...
The final damages? At 6:20 PM we were finally free to be on our way, $108 lighter and generally incensed at the turn the day had taken. Library books now officially a second day late got dumped into the outside box. Errand #1, 'lightbulb for kitchen that's been put off for two weeks already', got squeaked in under the wire at 3 minutes to Home Despot's closing (thank god for the self-serve checkout or by then we'd have been busting a blood vessel); errand #2 turned out to have also closed at 7 when we finally made it to the store after much screaming about its location; errand #3, 'darn, I ran out of floppies a month ago and I keep forgetting to get to MicroCenter', was a lost cause from the beginning since I forgot about it again in all the stress until well after they'd have closed; and errand #4, 'groceries including bottled water which I am out of' (our tapwater is Not Fit because of our building's nasty rusty pipes), involved going to three grocery stores because the first two were out of bottled water. As usual. (You would think that they'd figure this out and give over more shelf space to the popular brands... but no, all that's ever left is the skanky house-brand that tastes worse than our tapwater.)
Staggered home at 8PM and fell asleep soon afterwards, which was a mistake because I woke back up at 2 AM and couldn't get back to sleep or get anything done. Watched crap TV all night, fell asleep at 7 when Mum went to work, woken up by phonecall at 9, fell asleep again...
And was awoken at 10:30 AM by a knock on the door followed by the rattle of keys. A by-now severely sleep-deprived mind worked out that this was something I needed to get up and see to, and that I was indeed wearing pants when it checked, so I went to look: Maintainance, working on tracing the source of Sunday's Mysterious Lake in the lobby. To a location possibly somewhere under our bathroom floor. He said he'd be back in a few hours (he proposed 1PM, I worked him round to 3) to see about the drippy toilet pipe, and I finally got him to clear off so I could get back to sleep. But, having been somewhat creeped-out by the encounter in retrospect (I don't appreciate being hit on by strange men who have the keys to my apartment and know that I'm largely alone in it during the day because I work at home; damn, I wish I'd been awake enough to lie when he asked did I live with a husband/BF, but at least I remembered to mention I did live with a Mum who would eventually be along to see if I'd been dismembered or anything while she was at work), I gave up on the sleep and ended up getting the first task for several days accomplished: the one big consolidated snowdrift of papers and notes and CDs on my desk has been sorted into a small pile of 'things I do need here for reference', a pile of scraps with web addresses to look up, and on the lower desk the paperwork pertaining to writing up and sorting out the Acknowledgements List and the attendant $$ in thegriffs_kids fund. I had just settled in to match up the emails pertaining to the latter with the master list when Maintainance returned at 1:45.
A gang of them this time.
With... implements.
Loch Lobby, it seems, had been traced to a broken pipe between our apartment and the next, and repeated efforts to reach it from the already-wrecked side had failed because the actual break was under our bathroom floor. [shock and alarm from Tenant.] They were going to try to go in through the wall of our closet. [Closet was duly emptied.] Oh, and does this closet light work? Well, then, do you have any lightbulbs...?
So at least that's one thing off my list of chores, anyhow. :)
I spent the next three hours keeping Snip out of the workmen's way as they dug around in the wall with a brazing torch and other Weapons of Mass Distraction. (Weasel the fraidycat headed under the bed at the first sign of disruption and didn't come out for hours afterward.) They ended up having to go down through the bathroom floor as well, which was alarming as all get out. Now there is a hole in the closet wall connecting through to a hole in the bathroom floor connecting into the next apartment, which has been covered over for the night with boards and filled with bricks so that the cats (read: Snip) don't wander into the next apartment or get lost down in the walls somewhere before the workmen can return at some unspecified time and repair the devastated areas. God only knows how they're going to match the bathroom tiles, I couldn't find any hex-tiles like this when I needed to fix a previous apartment some fifteen years ago.
So I expect the next couple of days, which I had wanted to spend buckling down to Actual Work starting with getting the Acknowledgements List out of the way, will instead be wasted sitting around listening for the pitter-patter of tiny workmen, since I can't hear the front door very well from my desk and it ruins my concentration to try. Not to mention the commotion when they're in the house. Gyah. So much for Grand Plans...
Addendum: having spent a large portion of the day picking up and restraining the still-growing Snip, who now outweighs the household's adult cat by at least a pound and a half, I am forced to conclude that in retrospect we really ought to have named this tuxedo kitten "Keiko". The things you can't know when they're tiny...
mattwolff's new year's party, because it's been weirdness upon weirdness pretty much since I woke up the next morning and by now my Alleged Readers would be worrying I'd fallen under the wheels of the L or something...Thursday morning my grandmother called just as I had finally gotten myself to sleep and ended up waking me back up again. (Turns out the reason she hadn't called for the last six years was that she didn't have the number, which Mum had finally remembered to write down in this year's holiday card... and here I thought she was ignoring us. LOL) Remainder of Thursday spent wobbling around in sleep-deprived haze.
Friday spent sleeping off Thursday, interrupted at intervals beginning at 7:30 AM by sounds of crowbars ripping off lathe and an honest-to-god jackhammer in the apartment next door where the drug-dealing-Idiot-Neighbors had been tossed out from. This had been going on earlier in the week as well; I'd assumed they were remodeling after the DDIN's had trashed the place, but the jackhammer was a new twist and rather ominous, not to mention hard to sleep through because it was rattling the windows at the head of my bed. Woke up at 7 PM, up all night achieving nothing, conked out at 10:30 AM and decided to give the rest of Saturday a miss.
Up and down several times Saturday/Sunday night, finally fell all the way asleep and wasn't able to rouse myself until nearly 4 PM, when I realized that several library books had been due back Saturday and anyway there were assorted errands to run...
The library closes at 6 PM on Sundays. Remember this fact, it's important.
We put ourselves together and wobbled downstairs about 20 after 4. Threw open the back door, and -- WHITE STUFF. EVERYWHERE. Gooey, fluffy WHITE STUFF. And gray stuff, this being a back door into a well-trafficked alley; bypassing a Mysterious Lake in our lobby, we went around to the front, which hadn't been shoveled either but was at least not filthy and slushy.
The car was parked across the street from our building's front door, peaceful under a thick blanket of snow. By this point we were already shrieking at one another about Time In Relation To Circumstances. It was now 4:30 PM because Mum had stopped to check for Saturday's forgotten mail.
Once unearthed, the car had to be freed from the mire, which was some three inches deep. Doing this by simple backing-and-gunning proved unexpectedly difficult, not to mention rubbery-smelling. Mum confessed that the snowshovel was indeed upstairs in the front hall... as it was 4:38 by now, we resolved to try pushing the car free of its drift before taking yet more time to go up for the shovel.
I am 5'3", weigh [mumble mumble] and had on a brand new coat and completely inadequate footwear. Mum is taller and 'bigger' and has winter boots. Nevertheless, since I don't drive myself (vision questions and general timidity), I was designated Pusher Of The Car. And it worked well enough, under the circumstances, although Mum was simply not getting any traction for some reason, and there was that funky smell... and as we managed to get the car some ways away from the curb I at last saw why: the front passenger-side tire was going flat. Gone flat, in fact. In between Mum's general-stress hysterics I managed to convey this to her, which briefly sobered her before hysterics about the tire situation set in.
We couldn't leave the car half-in/half-out of the parking space and blocking the street, so we decided that the best course was to get it all the way out and limp to the Citgo two blocks away to see if somebody there could get the spare on. (This is at 20 to 5 on a snowy Sunday night, recall.) Funky smell and all (which we now realized was disintegrating rubber), we made it over to Citgo... and Pimply-Faced Teen in its Stop'N'Blow inconvenience mart was not authorized to leave his security cage. 4:50 PM.
The nearest, and only, full-service station in the area, which fortunately does have Sunday hours (and is busy as hell because of that), is about a mile or so from this Citgo. Nevertheless, it was 5:30 before their service guy made it over to our call. He put on the spare, since the old tire was completely off the rim by now, and we drove over to his station and had a real tire put on...
The final damages? At 6:20 PM we were finally free to be on our way, $108 lighter and generally incensed at the turn the day had taken. Library books now officially a second day late got dumped into the outside box. Errand #1, 'lightbulb for kitchen that's been put off for two weeks already', got squeaked in under the wire at 3 minutes to Home Despot's closing (thank god for the self-serve checkout or by then we'd have been busting a blood vessel); errand #2 turned out to have also closed at 7 when we finally made it to the store after much screaming about its location; errand #3, 'darn, I ran out of floppies a month ago and I keep forgetting to get to MicroCenter', was a lost cause from the beginning since I forgot about it again in all the stress until well after they'd have closed; and errand #4, 'groceries including bottled water which I am out of' (our tapwater is Not Fit because of our building's nasty rusty pipes), involved going to three grocery stores because the first two were out of bottled water. As usual. (You would think that they'd figure this out and give over more shelf space to the popular brands... but no, all that's ever left is the skanky house-brand that tastes worse than our tapwater.)
Staggered home at 8PM and fell asleep soon afterwards, which was a mistake because I woke back up at 2 AM and couldn't get back to sleep or get anything done. Watched crap TV all night, fell asleep at 7 when Mum went to work, woken up by phonecall at 9, fell asleep again...
And was awoken at 10:30 AM by a knock on the door followed by the rattle of keys. A by-now severely sleep-deprived mind worked out that this was something I needed to get up and see to, and that I was indeed wearing pants when it checked, so I went to look: Maintainance, working on tracing the source of Sunday's Mysterious Lake in the lobby. To a location possibly somewhere under our bathroom floor. He said he'd be back in a few hours (he proposed 1PM, I worked him round to 3) to see about the drippy toilet pipe, and I finally got him to clear off so I could get back to sleep. But, having been somewhat creeped-out by the encounter in retrospect (I don't appreciate being hit on by strange men who have the keys to my apartment and know that I'm largely alone in it during the day because I work at home; damn, I wish I'd been awake enough to lie when he asked did I live with a husband/BF, but at least I remembered to mention I did live with a Mum who would eventually be along to see if I'd been dismembered or anything while she was at work), I gave up on the sleep and ended up getting the first task for several days accomplished: the one big consolidated snowdrift of papers and notes and CDs on my desk has been sorted into a small pile of 'things I do need here for reference', a pile of scraps with web addresses to look up, and on the lower desk the paperwork pertaining to writing up and sorting out the Acknowledgements List and the attendant $$ in the
griffs_kids fund. I had just settled in to match up the emails pertaining to the latter with the master list when Maintainance returned at 1:45.A gang of them this time.
With... implements.
Loch Lobby, it seems, had been traced to a broken pipe between our apartment and the next, and repeated efforts to reach it from the already-wrecked side had failed because the actual break was under our bathroom floor. [shock and alarm from Tenant.] They were going to try to go in through the wall of our closet. [Closet was duly emptied.] Oh, and does this closet light work? Well, then, do you have any lightbulbs...?
So at least that's one thing off my list of chores, anyhow. :)
I spent the next three hours keeping Snip out of the workmen's way as they dug around in the wall with a brazing torch and other Weapons of Mass Distraction. (Weasel the fraidycat headed under the bed at the first sign of disruption and didn't come out for hours afterward.) They ended up having to go down through the bathroom floor as well, which was alarming as all get out. Now there is a hole in the closet wall connecting through to a hole in the bathroom floor connecting into the next apartment, which has been covered over for the night with boards and filled with bricks so that the cats (read: Snip) don't wander into the next apartment or get lost down in the walls somewhere before the workmen can return at some unspecified time and repair the devastated areas. God only knows how they're going to match the bathroom tiles, I couldn't find any hex-tiles like this when I needed to fix a previous apartment some fifteen years ago.
So I expect the next couple of days, which I had wanted to spend buckling down to Actual Work starting with getting the Acknowledgements List out of the way, will instead be wasted sitting around listening for the pitter-patter of tiny workmen, since I can't hear the front door very well from my desk and it ruins my concentration to try. Not to mention the commotion when they're in the house. Gyah. So much for Grand Plans...
Addendum: having spent a large portion of the day picking up and restraining the still-growing Snip, who now outweighs the household's adult cat by at least a pound and a half, I am forced to conclude that in retrospect we really ought to have named this tuxedo kitten "Keiko". The things you can't know when they're tiny...