Great idea!

My workplace is possessed by unexplainable smells. Today’s smells are raspberry tea and curry.

Homestead Kvetch

Because I have nothing better to do tonight (I do have a few things to do that are worse) here is a somewhat exhaustive list of all the things that are broken in my household. Mind you, I’m perfectly aware that these all are truly minute and inconsequential. In the aggregate, though, they make me sigh more than my due:

To begin with: my carpeting. It’s not like it’s torn to shreds or anything. But it does have the crispy, flattened, mottled brown look and feel of old roadkill. Walk on roadkill once and you can smirk and say, “ewww,” and get on with life. Walk on the same roadkill for two and a half years, though… you get the picture.

My range hood used to snow flaked paint onto my range and whatever happened to be atop it until I removed what paint was left with a scouring sponge.

My bathroom light. I’m one of those apartment-dwelling types whose bathroom doesn’t have a window to the outside world. Instead, it is possessed by a garish, 4ft. double-neon-tube light fixture that is unfortunately quite necessary for doing most things that a person is likely to want to do in there. Well, sometimes the thing doesn’t work. You flick the switch and you get… nothing. After some time I discovered that if you wiggle the switch just so in the undefined zone between on and off, most of the time you can get the lights to actually come on. But dealing with that rubik’s cube first thing in the morning can be less than stimulating.

My bathroom sink. The sink holds water, true, and that little lever that enables you to stopper the water works, too. But the knobs that permit one to turn on and off water flow… they were so old that by the time I arrived here they’d stripped bare at the contact point between plastic knob and metal fixture. So I went out and replaced them. Problem with that, they don’t seem to make knobs with built-in detents anymore: I suppose the detents reside in the fixture nowadays. So the best I could do was buy new knobs that fit and learn-by-feel just how much of a twist to give each knob to turn it off completely. You can imagine this process to be less than 100% efficient: it’s evens as to whether I’ll succeed in perfectly turning off the water, or leave it dripping just a teensy bit. The detent-less taps are always a conversation starter among guests, though.

Once upon a time, my toilet’s valve system imploded. Collapsed. Disintegrated from age. Not wanting to pester my building supervisor (a really nice guy who’s nevertheless quite busy with a full time job of his own in addition to servicing my building) I went ahead and decided to do the repair myself. Bought a new valve assembly, emptied out the reservoir tank, stripped the water cutoff valve… yep, that was old and decaying too so the moment I applied any kind of pressure upon it to try to shut it off, the metal knob came apart in my hand. It was a very wet afternoon, that, but finally I managed to brute-force shut off the water (with locking pliers as an improvised valve lever) and connect everything just so. Left for the weekend and returned next Monday to a note tacked on my door from my super, saying: “must talk to you, STAT!” Enter my apartment to discover my bathroom has been all but dismantled. Turns out my plumbing operation left a minute gap at the junction between water intake and tank reservoir, which leaked all weekend long, causing untold flooding to the apartment below mine – the one occupied by the same building supervisor I was loath to inconvenience in the first place.

He, the knowledgeable, did the job right, and brought my toilet back to almost full functionality. At the small price of, every now and then, about once or twice an hour, the system decides that it needs to refill just a tiny bit, about three seconds’ worth. It could be worse, I suppose.

I have an old central-cooling system. The AC condenser resides in a closet off my studio. During the summer months I discovered that the condenser gets in the habit of dumping some of that condensate onto the floor of my closet. It took a couple boxes of ruined magazines for me to realize the gravity of the situation. Now I have a ten gallon fishtank and a plastic bucket where the magazines used to be, and try to empty them out every few days.

One of my window screens has detached from its frame. These screens seem to be attached to their aluminum frame by pressure applied by a rubber grommet that seems to wear out with time. Once the grommet loses elasticity, it cracks and slips out. Opening this window in the fall is like putting up a neon sign inviting all the palmetto bugs in the area to come join me for dinner. So I tend to keep this window closed.

And, as of yesterday, my water heater didn’t heat. Thanks again to my super for saving the day today, though. Tomorrow I’ll be able to shave with hot water, a truly welcome indulgence.

That is all. But wait till I tell you about the car…

Busy hosting Colin’s biennial visit. Be back soon!