Thessaly's Tooth

Maintenance came today and repaired a broken line in the air conditioner, which I think will put an end to our apartment’s water feature. Apparently they actually did come on Friday, but managed to work on the a/c from the outside, avoiding any conversation with me. Wonder why they’d want to do that ?!?

Andy is due home from GenCon in a few hours, I’m looking forward to hearing about it. It’s been a dull weekend without him. I opted to clean and reorganize the closets (we decided to put nonperishables in the dampness-prone closet due to the fact that the leakages appear to be with us for the forseeable future, more on this below). The weather has been looking like rain all weekend without actually raining, so I decided not to make any pilgrimages outside until church this morning.
Last weekend, we had a wet carpet again, though fortunately not the swamp we had over the July 4th weekend. I called the office on Monday and Maintenance came by that afternoon. I asked what caused the leaks, and he said a pipe that ran through the two apartments above us down to us got clogged and the water couldn’t get through, so it leaked. I asked if there was anything we could do to prevent this, and he said not really. I asked if this meant we’d have a wet carpet every two weeks, and he said “hopefully not.” Great.
So after they left I turned on the a/c, since it was rather humid out and I wanted to dry the air out a bit in here so the carpet would dry faster. The carpet seemed to be getting wetter, so I turned it off and called the office again. The woman said she’d have Maintenance come by before they left for the day–as far as I know, they haven’t been here yet. On Thursday I took a letter over to the office about the mildew we discovered (which our lease says we are supposed to do), and describing our wet carpet experiences so far, and requesting that the pipe be periodically checked and unclogged in order to prevent future wet carpets. Andy got a call while I was out. It sounded like the problem was actually fixable–what the maintenance guy had said implied it wasn’t–and they said Maintenanace would be by that day or the next, and someone would be by to check on the mildew and wetness situation the next day. A guy came by to check for wetness and spray for mildew on Friday, but so far Maintenance has apparently not graced us with their presence yet.
Today I turned on the a/c–I thought maybe they’d fixed it while I was out, and I wanted to see if it actually did leak. It does. Yuck.
So tomorrow, more tangling with the office. Or maybe I’ll think of it as tango-ing–sounds like more fun.
This is long and boring, but I don’t care. This whole leak thing has been long and boring too. Ah well, soon Andy will be home to regale me with tales of GenCon.

At the risk of seeming like some kind of Donna Reed wannabe, I’ve added a link to another site to the list. The site is about cleaning your house, for people who do not like to clean house and who are not naturally good at it. People like me, who once figured that keeping the house clean would most likely take all of my scarce spare time, so why bother doing anything at all? If you check the site out, you will notice that it is rife with acronyms. My favorite is “CHAOS” = Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome; i.e. the house is such a mess, if the doorbell rings, you stay quiet and pretend you are not home so that no one will see the place. If you check out the site, you’ll notice that the acronyms as well as other elements of the site are a little on the cutesy side; but who cares, it works. When I first moved into my own apartment, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to clean house. At home I cleaned my room maybe once every few years after plenty of parental badgering, and I had no problem with having to leap over two or three piles of stuff to get into or out of the room. In the dorms my mess was kept down to a dull roar by the presence of roommates, and I even had a few flirtations with neatnikness, but an entire apartment, albeit an efficiency apartment, proved too much for me. As the years went on I got a little better, but I just couldn’t maintain things. Stuff would just get piled up until I couldn’t take it anymore (or someone was coming over) and then I would do a huge clean, and it would stay that way for a while. My huge cleans became more frequent so that the place never got too disgusting; but still at any given time my apartment wasn’t a very comfortable place.

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Perhaps that would be a good new blog name? Things have been going swimmingly lately. The weather is good and I can sit outside and “read” for exams (otherwise known as staring into space, looking at the cat, listening to the neighbor kids, etc.). Studying is going pretty well actually. I’m re-reading some stuff that I previously read for class, including “The Politics of Ancient Israel” by Norman Gottwald and “Reading the Old Testament: An Intoduction” by Lawrence Boadt. I’ve also been compiling bibliographies on archaeological sites and looking for summaries of their histories online, to avoid having to wade through multivolume excavation reports to get the info. In our spare time we are getting the apartment in order after our various floods of the past couple of weeks, and staring down the barrel of the last of the wedding thank-you notes. I have various other projects I need to get back to, like scanning wedding pictures and such, which I’ll probably address this weekend.
It feels good to share all of this information with the world.

I’ve been pretty good about studying this week, but have more or less taken today off. I spent my time well in finally adding some more links to the page.
It’s July, and I’m wearing a sweater. What’s up with the weather?

While much of the nation is gripped by drought, our little apartment seems to be getting much more than its share of the wet stuff. Last week I was surprised by a flood in the back bathroom–naturally, beginning in the closet where we keep the cat stuff. Nothing like the odor of damp litter and Iams. Fortunately, maintenance cleared up that little problem in short order. Then last weekend I found a sodden spot in the middle of the carpeted computer room floor. Yuck. The water appeared to be coming from the closet where all of Andy’s board games were stored. I hauled all of those out and found a wet carpet, mildew on the closet walls, and a moist “Axis and Allies: Europe” box. The rest of the weekend was spent moving furniture (the carpet on the living-room side of the wall was wet too) and trying to contact somebody, anybody, from maintenance. They put in an appearance on Monday and did something to the air conditioner which I’m hoping fixed the problem, and sprayed some sort of mildew killer on the wet carpet and walls (they promised it was non-toxic, and neither we nor the cats have suffered any ill effects yet.) I’m glad the humidity has gone down around here finally–I was starting to think I should try growing gills.
Anyhow, the carpet is drying out nicely and I’m hoping for a few event-free weeks to recover from all the excitement. Incidentally, we had a good July 4th–watched the Grand Rapids official fireworks from the Bridge Street Bridge with the Pikkaarts. Very fun!