squished

I had been writing a post when poof, I lost power. It's back on again, but who knows for how long. If I were a lesser person, this would be really trying my patience.

Hey, wait, it is trying my patience. I guess I'm lesser.

Poor A___. He came over before we were planning to head up to campus only to find me nowhere near ready to go, stomping from room to room inspecting the leaks, and pondering whether or not I should move my bed. My mood was not swell, and possibly the resulting argument was unavoidable. I want to believe there is a good way to deal with me when I get like this, but I often suspect there isn't.

Moving anything, even contemplating moving or doing anything that involves physical strain, puts me in a foul mood. I'm not a large person and was never terribly strong. Now that I have whatever it is I have, it's just that much harder. So I'm here pondering moving shit, which would involve asking him to move it for me mostly, and thinking that I don't want to be so dependent, and thinking that if I weren't so freaked out about dependency and independence we probably could have moved in together when A___'s lease was up, which would allow us to afford to live somewhere that doesn't feature gaping moldy holes in the ceiling.

But I am very reluctant to move in with him. The reluctance alone is enough to make me think I shouldn't. I worry I'll sabotage the relationship out of fear and insecurity. Since that is the case and since there are so few decent and affordable single apartments around here, I remain in this one. But this is a catch 22, right? Because by remaining in this one, I continue to be dependent when one of the problems with this apartment manifests in a physical way.

While A___ was out (he went out shortly after we had a fight), I decided I could manage to move my bed by myself. I did. It's moved, however, after I moved it I realized three things.
One - The only placement where the bed fits and where it will be clear of the leaks requires that several other pieces of much heavier furniture be moved.
Two - I have hurt myself moving the bed (ow).
Three - There is yet another dark spot forming on the living room ceiling directly over where I have stacked my DVD player, VCR, and stereo. If that becomes an active leak, all of that will need to be moved as well.

Sometimes when I was younger, I would rearrange my furniture for a change of pace. It was a little tiring and sometimes sweaty work which I saved for when I was in some kind of manic cleaning/housekeeping burst. It was ultimately very satisfying to do this when I lived in larger quarters and had more energy at my disposal. This though, this is not fun and it is not satisfying. It is soggy, annoying, frustrating, and very tiring.

I have bad luck with water. That's what it comes down to. I used to joke that it is because I have a lack of water in my birth chart so water is like my kryptonite. In every single place I have lived, I've had some kind of destructive water related event.

Ann Arbor - at the end of my first month in my new apartment, my (then) fiance Bob and I woke one morning to the sound of water in our bedroom. It was pouring down the wall behind the bureau, soaking everything on and in it. Turns out the neighbors upstairs were leaving on a trip to Europe and had decided to wash everything at once in the small washing machine. This threw it off balance and resulted in the machine pulling out of the wall, with water gushing uncontrollably out of the pipe.

Ann Arbor - my last year there we moved to a house. I was in my basement office (it was very pink) working when I realized that I could hear water hitting cement in the unfinished part of the basement. I ran upstairs to find that although I had closed the window to Bob's office on account of a nasty rain storm, the water had filled up inside the window frame like dam. The dam had finally broken and a small spill off pond had formed under the window. In this pond, the power strip for my husband's computer floated, still plugged in and on. Before I could get back to the basement to turn off the power, something shorted and we lost Bob's brand new printer/scanner/fax machine.

Connecticut - within the first week of buying our house, we discovered the roof hadn't been finished properly and a retaining wall in the basement were cracked. We discovered this because during the first rain storm, water came in through both. The roof water ruined a sizable chunk of the ceiling and wall in my office that I had just finished painting.

Connecticut - One of my friends flushed the toilet in the guest bathroom and it got stuck. it ran all day, draining the well. It took several days to recover, during which time my siblings were down for a holiday. My brother refused to crap in the house since we were conserving flushes to one a day. He was so concerned that someone might see his waste that he decided he would shit in the woods. This did result in one of the most amusing moments of tormenting him I have ever had, but it did suck a whole lot too.

Connecticut - Very shortly after moving into my new apartment in 2000 (middle of separation and end of the semester), I got sick. I went to my doctor on a Friday afternoon, and he sent me straight to the hospital for an ultrasound. When I returned to my little apartment much later that night, I found a note from my insane landlady saying that the hot water heater had exploded in the basement and that I would not have r cornered me in the hallway with a barrage of questions about what I was doing earlier thatunning water for a day. She later evening since she swore she could hear water running in my apartment. She all but said I had somehow broken the heater. This woman eventually threw me out because of this and other imagined offenses (i.e. that I was running up and down the stairs pounding on the other tenants doors).

Connecticut - Various problems with the well in another apartment. It ran out, cracked, was contaminated, and the pump blew, all on different occasions. We also had a tenant whose dishwasher broke loose much like the washing machine at the first place in Ann Arbor. The tenant wasn't home and hot steaming water was flooding the basement and coming into the kitchen of her next door neighbor, Karen. Karen pounded on my door (why me?) and we spent the next few minutes in the basement while my landlord begged me by cell phone to just turn all of the faucets I could find until it stopped.

Connecticut - This place has just been chock full of water problems. Really it's the same problem. This place is like a sieve and my landlord and apartment manger are cheap bastards who have tried to get away with cheap quick fixes for too long.

So what's the upshot? The upshot is I have to find some way to make this tolerable so I'm not cranky with people like the nice sexy man I essentially just chased out of my apartment today for the crime of what, being too quiet? Jeez.

I am thinking of offering a barbie doll in ritual sacrifice to Tlaloc, the scary Aztec rain god (that's him up there on the left).

Sure, she's plastic and the Aztec gods are more the flesh and blood types, but she's a symbol of so much that is revered in our society. I think that it is fitting, plus, apparently Tlaloc likes the smell of burning rubber.

Rainfall data for my area (for yesterday):

	Actual	Normal	Record	Last Year
Precipitation	0.70 "	0.12 "	1.50 " ( 1944 )	0.00 "
Month-to-date precip.	7.02 "	3.13 "	--	1.36 "
Year-to-date precip.	27.41 "	22.06 "	--	20.16 "

(from wunderground.com)