I’m sure I’m the last person in blogland to catch this, since I’ve been a bit busy lately, but you’ve seen the Gansta Knitter video, right? Thanks for the link, Michelle.
Archives for November 2004
Flirting
I have the best readers in the whole world. The. Whole. World. Really. Your readers might be very, very good, but I have the BEST ones.
You’re right. You’re all right. No guilt. Not my fault. The dude broke into MY place, leaving doors and windows open, leaving me liable for any damage/vandalism/theft that might have arisen from other criminals taking advantage of this fact. And Ryan, well, she made the best point. What if my cats had been there, instead of at Grandma’s house?
Oooooh, I’d like ta…. Lemme at him.
I called the manager again, who said the owner was at Stanford all day having his chemo treatment. I can accept that. I’ll wait. I will talk to the owner. That’s all I really want at this point. I thought about reporting them to the Better Business Bureau, and then I decided to check them out. Turns out my threatening to do that won’t mean much to them, because they already SUCK at the BBB. It teaches me another valuable lesson: Research FIRST, not last.
Anyway. All’s well. All is, in fact, very well. I have the best bathtub in the whole world. This weekend I will finish moving out of the old place and work on unpacking (I still have a lot of that to do, believe it or not). After I do that, I can PAINT, and I’m getting more and more excited about that. I’m going to TSP. I’m going to use joint compound. I think that’s for holes in the wall. Or my knees. I’m not really sure, but I know it’s official sounding. I’m going to cover things with dropcloths just so I can say I did. Oh, yes, I’m dropcloth-ing today. Very different from drop-clothing, you know. Almost as much fun.
We have a ten mile run this Sunday, our last short run before the practice 26 miles the next weekend. Practice. Sheesh. That’s a marathon, people. That’s what I think, anyway. Call it what you want, but even with the word Practice in front of it, it’s freaking me out. And hey! Go congratulate Rebecca for finishing her marathon! Amazing girl! She IS supergirl.
That’s about all I can think of. I’m tired. (Lala’s at my house right now, manning my TiVo without me. And her blog is flirting with mine, I think. That’s adorable.) (See? Mine is flirting back.)
Happy weekend, all! MWAH!
Felony
I am terribly grumpy. And it’s not just because of who our president will continue to be. (That couldn’t be called grumpy, anyway. That’s more like shell-shocked. Despondent.) I am not feeling eloquent enough to even try to address that. Go read Lala’s take. I may be prejudiced, but I don’t think that’s why it made me feel a tiny bit better somehow.
I’m just grumpy because of a carpet cleaner. I had a company send a guy out to clean the one carpet in my old apartment. He was fine, and did an okay job. He left his file folder in my apartment, and called to ask when he could get it back. When I got the message, I was on the way to drop Bethany at the airport, and then I had to go to work. I told him I’d go to the old place at five in the morning after work, get the folder and leave it on the front porch. He could come pick it up any time after that. He said that was all right.
I got off work yesterday at five. I’d been up at that point for twenty-two hours. I got to my old apartment. Bethany had confirmed that she had seen the folder in my place when we had left, but she had assumed it was mine and hadn’t said anything about it.
The folder was nowhere to be found. I thought, huh. It must be somewhere else. I was cleaning the tub when he had me sign the charge slip: maybe he had left it in the bathroom. I checked. Nope, no file folder, but the window was open, the sill was filthy, and the screen was on upside down and partially open. I then checked the living room — the sliding glass door was unlocked, and the back gate was standing wide open.
Erg.
Now. Okay. I wasn’t technically living there anymore, and the only thing missing was his file folder. I can understand the motivation. Perhaps he was scared of getting in trouble at work if he didn’t have his files. But it was a major lapse in good judgment, since now he’s REALLY going to be in trouble.
And therein lies my Rachaelish problem. I called the cops and had them make an incident card. This is documentation, but less formal than a report. I didn’t want to press felony burglary charges against the guy, since, as stated, I could understand the motivation and no damage was done.
But what I wanted was an apology from him. (I think I was a little naive about that — someone who breaks in doesn’t normally apologize later.) And not having to pay the carpet cleaning bill would have been nice, too. I was furious that someone had entered my old home (still full of the stuff that I’m not sure what to do with) without my permission, through the bathroom window. So I called his company and told them what had happened.
The manager was horrible. I really think she could have made it all go away by saying, “I’m so sorry. We’ll figure out what went wrong, and we’ll get back to you. I’m sure there’s an explanation. But in the meantime, I’m so sorry.”
Instead, she said, “So what you’re saying to meeeee…. [Long, acrid pause.] Lemme get this straight. Someone broke into your house. And the only thing stolen was the file folder YOU say he left in your house.”
“HE said he left it in my house.”
“Whatever. What makes you think it was our employee?”
Golly, I don’t know. It’s true, there might be a horrible Oakland criminal on the loose who ransacks homes for cruddy-looking old file folders. Terrifying, isn’t it? Fer fuck’s sake. I believe that’s just about what I told her, too (although I didn’t swear). She said the owner would call me. He never did.
The cleaner dude, however, did call me. And that just made it worse. I answered, mistake number one. I should have let it go to voice mail. Mistake number two, I asked to know what he had been thinking, breaking into my home. He pled his innocence so well that I actually almost fell for it. He sounded so sad and offended that I would consider him able to commit such a crime that I got off the phone and drove to my old place to see if the files had fallen behind the bookcase. Of course, they hadn’t. Then I just felt stupid. And taken.
But now my main problem is guilt. And while I know you’ll all sigh and send me comments telling me I’ve done the right thing, really I’m not sure that I have. There was no damage to my place. He probably considered it vacant. He took nothing but his own property. Had he called me and said that it was imperative that he get his files back or his boss would kill him, I can see myself telling him to try to break in. Now he might lose his job, and I’m picturing him with four small kids in dirty clothes, and a crying wife who has to now work 19-hour days instead of the 14-hour ones she’s been doing recently. Plus, he’s sober and this will depress him enough to fall off the wagon onto a four-day binge. And his sick mother needs the operation he’s been saving for. And his brother just died, leaving him responsible for his widow and nine more children.
You know, something like that.
It galls me that he lied to me, baldly, on the phone. It pisses me off that he broke into my place. But in the larger scheme, this doesn’t really matter, and perhaps I just made someone’s life really rough, for very little reason, because I was too tired to really think it through before making phone calls. I think that’s what’s eating me up.
Bah. Blerg. Ne’er a dull moment, nosireejimbobarooney. Bleha. (Try it, it’s much more effective than a simple bleah.) Now, to get in my (MY) bathtub and swim off the grumps. My house! Oh! Yay!
Oh, my gosh. Those comments! This: Thank you. Really. From my heart, thank you. Oh, I’m HAPPY. Hey, did I tell you? I have a HOME!
Huge happy sigh.
And now, more pictures! Bethany‘s in town for the weekend (all right, my weekend, since I suppose Tuesday doesn’t usually count as such), and she’s in my tub right now. Surprised? Bathany never misses an opportunity. We’ve been running around all day and I’ve been a grump from HELL. I *love* being in my new place. But I *hate* all that crap and literal dirt that is still left in the old apartment. I used Beth for good ole slave labor today, so she deserves the bath. After she gets out, I’ll jump in and then take her to the airport before I go to work. There’s still junk at the old place, but it’ll get sorted yet, right? Right?
All righty. Here’s moving day:
Yes, that’s the Desk of Doom standing up behind us. The best thing I’ve done in a long time was hiring those movers. They actually got the desk out of the bedroom and into the front yard, where it’s still sitting with a tacky “Free” sign flapping from it in the wind. I couldn’t watch them move it out the front door — I was positive it was going to kill someone.
My first bubble bath:
The tile is real, but kind of dirty looking. They’re 2X2 white tiles with white grout, and some of them are dark with what looks like car grease. I’ve scrubbed with the regular cleansers, and I just bought some industrial peel-the-inside-of-your-nose-off stuff that I’ll try later, when I’ve fully unpacked and feel up to the challenge. That bath, though? Sublime. Really. Insane. The shower? Not so great. I’ve changed the shower head and that helps, but the pressure just isn’t good enough to get a good flow of water. Eh. I like baths better anyway.
Something else I had to be philosophical about was this: I propped up a shelf in the bathroom temporarily and then heard a great crash. It had fallen right on the toilet tank cover and whacked a great chunk of porcelain off the corner. I know it’s fixable, or I could just buy a new cover, but jaiz. I would have liked to have waited more than an hour and a half to break something in my own home.
So then, looking from the bathroom through the living room toward the bedroom:
And out the front windows:
Standing in that spot, the kitchen is to your right. Here’s one shot:
And looking back toward the living room:
The flowers are from Lala. They made me feel much better about the cracked porcelain. And the toilet tank that ran (I fixed it with Paton’s Classic Merino, orange). And the heater that’s off for safety. And the living room windows that don’t open. Lordy. But do you hear me complaining? Nope. You won’t, either. I’m so frikken lucky that I’ve been afforded (used loosely here) this opportunity that if you DO hear me complaining, report me to the Cry Me A River Police. Really. Remind me of this then, okay? (I’m also lucky I have friends like the Dude, who fixed the toilet, my shower, my outside light, and rigged my Tivo to talk to my fabulous new DVD player (also from Lala — tell me I ain’t spoiled to hell).
Goodness! I started this post this afternoon — it’s now almost four in the morning and I still can’t remember half the things I was going to write about. Not even a quarter of them. Random snippets: I’m on the freeway, but semi-trucks aren’t allowed on this section of it, so the traffic only goes whooshwhooshwhoosh soothingly, along with the occasional scream of a motorcycle going by at the speed of light. My next-door neighbor is nice. I don’t like my upstairs neighbor’s boyfriend who parks in my spot. There’s a hibiscus outside my door. I keep getting my junk drawer mixed up with my cutlery drawer. The bedroom gets warm in the afternoon sun. It is quiet. Opening your own door and inviting someone in is infinitely more enjoyable than opening someone else’s door to do the same thing. Plus, some people get annoyed when you just open their doors like that.
Egad, I’m sleepified.
In!
Hi, there! I missed you! I couldn’t wait to tell y’all about it, but I just now got me some DSL back. Let me catch you up with a lil photo-blog, okay?
The ex-owner got his shit out on Friday. I got the call when I woke up that the key was in hiding, and I should high-tail it over to make sure nothing was vastly wrong in the place, so I had no time to collect anyone to go with me to open the door for the first time. I got in the car and drove over, nervous as hell.
I found the key.
I gave a hop and carried myself across the threshold. The only other thing I carried was this:
It’s my unfinished novel, all 500+ pages of it. I wanted to honor the fact that this will be my home while I finish this book, and we came in together. Yep.
So. We’re in. This is how I feel.
Pretty mushy, huh? Yeah, you’re right. I was all sappy’n’stuff. I took a walk through, all on my own, in my new home. MY NEW HOME. (I’m still not over it.)
I called Marama to thank her for being the one person who did the absolute most for me through all this house-buying stuff. If she hadn’t believed in me like she did, if she hadn’t encouraged me to keep going with it on an absolutely daily basis, I would have given up. And look at me now!
Then my peeps started coming over. First, my La arrived, bearing flowers and dogs. (Oh, my god, read her “update (annotated)” entry about my move. I rolled.) Here she is, trying to open the wee bottle of champah-nya that I brought with me — we never did pop that sucker. I suppose we could have smashed the bottle on the balcony, like they do on ship prows, but then I’d just have to clean it up.
Then my girls arrived, sisters Christy and Bethany.
We had to celebrate my favorite part of my new abode:
Have I mentioned how I feel about my clawfoot bathtub? This is how I feel about my clawfoot bathtub:
This is how Harriet feels about hardwood floors. I feel the same way. I would have done the same thing, but I had company over:
Okay. There. I wanted to get these posted. In the next post I’ll give you pics of what it looks like now. I’ve still got a ton of boxes to unpack, but it does feel like a home now. And better yet, it feels like my home. That’s just CRAYZEE. Really.
You did it! All those crossed needles! All those wonderful, loving thoughts! You did it! You were right there with me! If I owe you an email, I’ll hit you back soon, but know that I love and adore all y’all. THANK YOU!