adventures in apartment hunting

Honest-to-god phone call I just made about an apartment:

Me: Yes, hello, I'm calling about the apartment?

Landlord: Yes?

Me: Um, how big is it?

LL: It's 4 1/2

Me: And what's the rent?

LL: $600

Me: Oooh, that's a bit more than I was looking for, good luck--

LL: How much you want to pay?

Me: Maybe $500?

LL: Ok, you come look, if you like you pay $500

Me: OK, well, does it have washer/dryer outlets?

LL: Yes

Me: And is it OK to have a cat?

LL: You tell me.

Me: Um, well, I like having a cat, so I think it's OK?

LL: So then it's good, just don't bother anyone, and don't let the cat outside. The cat stays inside?

Me: Yes, she's the equivalent of 100 years old and doesn't get out of bed anymore.

LL: Cats can live that long?

Me: Yep. She's no trouble, she can barely walk so I'm sure she won't be in the garden.*

LL: So then why don't you pay $600?

Me: Because my budget is $500

LL: But there's two of you. You pay $600.

Me: But one of us is a cat. The other is a human. One human. Who can only pay $500.

LL: Well, I want $600.

Me: OK, well good luck with that, thank you! (hangs up)

__________________________

* Smallest Cat does not merit a mention with landlords who appear nervous about animals. I know better. It's like saying your roommate is Hannibal Lecter. Good luck with *that*.

and the award for naffest lawn ornament ever goes to...

Foxes don't ride tricycles, and if they did, they certainly wouldn't offer lifts to raccoons. Jackass.

reasons why I need to move: #21

I am lucky in that I live in a place that allows tenants to have their own washers and dryers. If you’ve ever had to use a common laundry room, or a Laundromat, you know what a big deal this is, and it’s actually on my list of non-negotiables when apartment hunting now. Never again will I subject myself to the laundry thieves and Laundromat Nazis of the world when having your own appliances can be as easy and affordable as a trip to the Salvation Army (or Sears, if you’re a little less broke).

I love the convenience factor of having my own machines right there in my kitchen, and I love even more that my current next-door neighbour is never actually home, and my Landlady upstairs is deaf as a post, so I can run them at any time of day or night without consequence. It’s a nice bonus that with an old shelf laid on top of them, they make an excellent bar and buffet when I have a ton of people over.

If my laundry life is so great, you ask, then why do I cite this as a reason to move?

Because all my outlets and connections are actually not in my apartment. They are in Landlady’s basement, on the other side of my kitchen wall. This means that not only are they completely out of my sight and usually inaccessible if something goes wrong, but also that they are reversed: Hot is right, cold is left, up is down, and so on. Now, if I lived in a building populated by normal people, this wouldn’t be a problem: I would simply have figured it out when setting the appliances up after moving in, made sure everything was installed properly, and put it out of my mind. When I moved in, I did exactly that. The part where I went wrong was assuming that I had moved into a building populated by normal people (although in my defense it was only a few days after moving in, so I hadn’t yet been hit with the full force of my neighbours’ combined insanities, and it still seemed like a reasonable enough assumption).

Cut to one rainy afternoon, a few years later. I am home, cleaning up, and decide to put on a load of laundry. I decide to start with all my super-expensive yoga clothes and really delicate sweaters, since they all need to go in a cold-water, “hand-wash”, no-fabric-softener cycle, and if I do them first then there will be no residual softener or broken-off zipper pulls or button pieces or anything from any other load I would do that day. I take all of these pricey delicates and put them in the washer, add the soap, and press start. I then decide to do a load of dishes, but for some reason there’s no hot water coming from the kitchen sink. I turn to go check the bathroom sink and see if the problem is just in the kitchen, and that’s when I see it.

Steam. Great clouds of steam coming from the washing machine.

I panic, and stop the washer right away, praying that the door lock mechanism will let me open the door and pull my cold-only delicates out of the steaming, scalding water. It doesn’t. It’s more interested in protecting my floor from a tiny flood than in saving easily $1000 worth of clothes (acquired bit by bit over time, don’t judge) from total ruin. I look at the dials on the washing machine, and see that it is set to cold water delicates, as it should be.

I am stumped.

Until I remember hearing people walking around in the basement the day before, coming very close to my kitchen wall, and hearing squeaky pipes.

Luckily, Landlady was home, and let me into the basement right away so I could check things out. Sure enough, the pipes from my washing machine had been un-reversed, so that Hot was left and Cold was right, only this made Hot come out of Cold on my side of the wall. A little bit of chatting to Landlady revealed that she had had her laundry appliances moved up into her kitchen from the basement the previous day, and that she had saved money by having Crusty Old Guy from across the street come do it rather than hiring someone after her own son had refused to do it for her. Clearly, Crusty Old Guy had somehow mistaken my connections for Landlady’s, undone them, found his mistake when trying to move Landlady’s appliances without success, and gone ahead and reconnected mine without checking that they were done as he’d found them.

It was an innocent (but slightly stupid) mistake, and I suppose Crusty Old Guy meant well when he reconnected my machines. But that doesn’t take away my paranoia every time I hear voices behind that wall (and paranoia is exactly what you need if you think you’re hearing voices), and it doesn’t stop me from always checking the water temperature going into the washer as soon as I start a load now. Call me high-maintenance, call me picky and ungrateful and demanding, but I’d kind of like the extra luxury of knowing that when I set my washing machine to cold, cold will come out every time, without fail. I’d like it if my washer/dryer connections were actually in my apartment as originally advertised. I’d really like it if I didn’t have to worry about hearing voices anymore, too.

reasons why I need to move: #85

Last week, I turned on the kitchen faucet to do some dishes, and at that moment heard the long beep of death from my microwave.

The coincidence was unsettling, but for all the screwy things in my apartment, the water and the electricity are by and large separated properly, so I grabbed an extension cord and tested my microwave in another outlet on a different circuit, and sure enough, it worked. I reasonably enough assumed that the fuse that had been there for at least twenty years had finally blown, so I replaced it. When the new fuse also blew as soon as I put it into the fuse box, I decided that this was officially a problem for an electrician, and advised my landlady.

Landlady took down a variety of days and times I would be available to hang out and wait for the electrician, and promptly called. Who she called, though, turned out not to be an electrician, but the crusty old guy who lives across the street. Crusty Old Guy came by, went through the same checks I did, and also told Landlady that this was officially a problem for an electrician, so we went through the whole exercise again, and an actual, legitimate, certified electrician was called in.

Cut to this morning, 7am. My alarm goes off, earlier than it has for months, and I reluctantly roll my ass out of bed, cursing Big Nameless Electrician Company that has promised to send an electrician at some point today, anytime between 7am and 7pm. I have a shower and make some coffee, and start doing whatever I can to keep myself awake and busy for possibly the next twelve hours. At 9:30, there is a knock at my door.

It is the best-looking electrician I have ever seen.

Young, fit, tan, blond, broad shoulders, strong arms. Much, much nicer on the eyes than Crusty Old Guy and his nasty, saggy sweatpants. Also he speaks actual French, rather than the Fritalian dialect common in my neighborhood, so I can actually follow every word he's saying, which is a definite bonus if I have to deal with a stranger in my house at a time of day where the idea of social interaction is downright offensive to me.

Cute Electrician does his thing and has the problem sorted in under an hour, and leaves me with a bunch of free fuses he had kicking around in his truck. Just as he is finishing up, there comes another knock at my door. It is Landlady, come to see how Cute Electrician is doing. He tells her he's finished and he was about to come up so she can sign the invoice. Landlady then tells Cute Electrician that he can always stay downstairs and make out with me rather than make her sign an invoice.

Yes.

Landlady tried to pimp me out rather than pay the electrician.

This is like the bad old days when Landlady would sit on the balcony and call out to passing men that there was an unmarried woman living in the building (which stopped as soon as she realized that A: I have a boyfriend, and B: There are really no eligible bachelors that walk down our street, only decrepit old men, drug dealers, and middle-aged married shits taking their kids to the park), only so much worse and so much creepier because it was in my house, and related to money.

reasons why I need to move: #73

I caught my landlady trying to break in through my living room window.

That's right.

She wanted to say hello.

Yes.

Rather than calling me on the phone, or knocking on the door, she decided to come bang on my windows, and when I didn't answer, she started trying to open the windows from outside.

Now, in my defense, I was in the bathroom and therefore not available to immediately go running to the window to chat, but for all she knew I could have been out, which is what scares me about this. Obviously I came out of the bathroom as soon as I was done, and from where I was in the hallway I could see out but no one can see in, and I wasn't sure I was seeing correctly, so I quickly put on some shoes and ran outside. Lo and behold, there she is, my landlady, bent over in my window, with the screen already open, hard at work on the inside glass window, right there on the street for any criminally-minded douchebag kid (which my neighbourhood is overrun with) to see exactly how to go about breaking into my place, and to realize that if an 82-year-old woman who is half blind with cataracts can figure it out, then so can they.

everybody poops

Dear Smallest Cat:

It's true that everybody poops. Nobody else takes it out of the litter box and chases it around the house, though. Freak.

Sincerely,
The Human.

is this what the Boy Scouts are referring to?

I’m biking back from a friend’s place one night a couple of weeks ago, and it’s nearly 11 at night, and it’s a beautiful clear warm night with just a bit of a cool breeze, the kind of night that’s perfect for fireworks, and I’m at the start of a decent ride as this friend lives a good 15km away from me, but it’s a nice 15km right through the heart of the city, and I’m biking along with the iPod going, cursing the neighbourhood I’m in for its notorious potholes and being glad that I spent the money on a suspension post for my seat, when all of a sudden I hear a low kind of thunk and feel the back end of my bike go all wobbly.

The last time that happened, in that neighbourhood, I’d snapped a spoke, and the best solution was to just unhook my back brakes and ride slowly and carefully home, and pray that my bike guy hadn’t fallen off the radar as he’s prone to doing sometimes, so of course I stop and dismount and check out the back wheel. Spoke by spoke. Twice.

No broken spoke.

I try again from the other side of the wheel, because in my deranged little head that’s somehow going to make a difference, and realize that the problem is not a spoke, but a bolt. Specifically, the bolt that holds my mud guard and milk crate rack to the frame, and without which biking another 12km along quasi-paved city streets with a loaded milk crate could spell disaster if the ends of the rack or the mudguard slip inside the frame and jam up the spokes, sprockets, or chain. My first instinct is to just go buy a bolt (or even a screw) and ask at the store if I can borrow a tool to fix it, but also, it’s 11 at night and I’m in an area that the only thing really happening at that time is maybe some online marital infidelity, so that’s out. My next thought is that it’s not that far a walk to the nearest metro station, and I can always just haul the bike home by metro and fix it in the morning, but it is in fact a fireworks night (and perfect weather for it too – sigh) so bikes are barred from the metro. That leaves me with option three: Tear my bag apart looking for anything that might be in any way useful to me in this situation, just as a temporary fix, so I do not have to walk my tired ass all the way home, pushing my bike, in shoes so old there are actual holes in the bottoms (shut up, I love them and you will have to pry them from my cold, dead feet before I give them up).

So this is what I do, right there, on the sidewalk. I tear apart my bag. Carefully, of course, because the last time my bag got taken apart on the sidewalk while looking for something it cost me an iPod (and that’s another story in itself). I find all kinds of things in my bag: A book, a clean shirt, an apple, soy milk, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, clean underwear, a gazillion flyers and receipts, two dead turtle lights, tampons, condoms, 58 cents, three kinds of lip gloss (for the record, I was only cat sitting at my friend’s house. Ugly Cat. Remember her?) – apparently I am ready for anything. Except this. And then, way, way down at the bottom, one solitary, skinny, ouchless hair elastic. How the heck I found that all the way down in a bottom corner of my bag under all that other crap, I have no idea, but it turned out to be the perfect temporary solution.

Now, if ever you are in this situation, please learn from my next mistake.

This:


Is not the correct way to use a hair elastic to solve this problem. This will get you all of about 5km closer to home before everything falls lose and you end up with the mud guard, rack, and a hair elastic jamming in your sprockets and chain, and if your luck is like mine, that’ll happen in the middle of a busy intersection full of drunk drivers. You want to be doing this instead:


See how the elastic wraps around both parts of the frame, rather than just the upper bit? That held the rest of the way home and all the next day before I got off my ass and fixed it properly.