House Of Horrors

A couple of issues that don't seem to be big but could turn big are preventing me from fully enjoying my house. (That's not counting the issue of my girlfriend not being in the house with me. Long-distance relationships can suck sometimes.) First, a new heating system is being installed, allowing each individual apartment to have control over its own heat without affecting the rest of the house. Let's just say that the men putting this system in don't appear to be college-educated. It took five of them to bring a heavy but small green furnace shaped like a safe to the back door before they managed to completely smash the door's glass. These guys have the key to my apartment so that they can do their thing while I work. But one day last week my play aunt who lives in the building informed me that she had to pull my door closed because the men had left for the day and my back door was wide open. There's four huge holes in my newly painted walls, and it would be nice if they could plaster those over sometime soon. One of my radiators is leaking something all over my hardwood floor. I hope it's just water; there's been a noticeable gas smell ever since they fired up the heat the day before Thanksgiving, although they warned us that the odor would occur and would go away "soon." Why they're still working on shit and pounding pipes at 9 in the morning (something I wouldn't notice if I didn't have days off in the middle of the week when they work) is beyond me. If the heat's on, shouldn't their jobs be done? And the heat wasn't on when the first cold spell hit about a month ago, so not only should they be done, but they should have been done a while back. They don't put the things they move back in place in my apartment when they leave, there's still a pair of gloves in my living room that don't belong to me, and I could only laugh when I came home one day to find the overhead cord to my kitchen lights turned off but the ceiling fan cord turned on. It was 40 degrees. Today is a new kind of hell--they've had to turn the water off to the whole house while they work, and the heat is off as well, and today's high is a toasty 31. Makes me wanna rent a hotel room somewhere until this shit is over.

The second issue may turn out to be even worse. My upstairs neighbors are total strangers to me, and that's not unusual at all because I've been in the habit my whole life of coming home from school or work, locking the door, and not acknowledging the outside world until the next morning. But I don't want to know these neighbors based on what I hear from them through the walls. There's a lot of talk about kicking someone's ass or fucking someone up, and that's not just something I hear once or twice. That's a popular conversation in that household. And that's during daytime hours. What I hear at night is loud music and lots of sex, especially in the bedroom right above mine. Someone in that room loves wearing high heels, and combined with our hardwood floors, that creates a difficult sleeping situation for me. And the sex doesn't help because I don't need to be reminded that I haven't gotten any in almost a year. According to my aunt, who owns the building, the tenant is supposed to be an older woman all by herself, but she does have adult children who may or may not be employed, and that's who she thinks is also dwelling there. I don't know if the woman works at night or has no control over her kids, but this partying and sex and other loud activity doesn't typically start until after about 11P. If I'm in my living room, which is right next to the front door, I can tell that it's about to jump off because the front door starts opening and closing a lot, voices become raised like a nightclub just opened, and footsteps start running up and down the stairs. Then the music starts pumping and the bed above my bedroom starts squeaking. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the high-heeled chick in that room was pimping herself out because it really does seem like she's on an every-night schedule. And my aunt has suggested that all the foot traffic could be drug traffic, although I don't think she has any real basis for that fear. In any event, this could turn into a nasty situation because my aunt has really wanted to evict the woman for a long time since the noise and extra "tenants" were complaints before I got here. If these guys think I'm doing the complaining, since I don't know them personally, I have no idea how they will react. But I think that my living room blinds, despite the lack of sunshine in my home, will stay closed until further notice. These days, you can't be too safe.