choco_frosh | Entries tagged with apartment

St. Thomas Beckett
I currently have plumbers replacing all the water meters in the building. It has so far taken an hour and a half, with no sign of stopping. (And of course the water is shut off, to the considerable inconvenience of Me, and the even greater inconvenience of downstairs tenants, since they didn't have time to prepare, since I didn't realise that these guys were going to do All the meters.)

And that would be bad enough, except I also had plumbers in (for inspection, rather than work, admittedly) on Boxing Day, and I get to have at least two more come by next week.

whut

Homeownership is overrated.
_______

ANyway, in about an hour I'm headed out (with the last-minute substitution of New!Gf for The Teenager) to drive up to Portsmouth and do Christmas/rando gift exchange with my immediate family+partners.
Possibly the plumbers will even be done sawing through pipes by then.

So apparently today I need to
- ~~Call JP Morgan and tell him that my online sign-in isn't working and make them fix that~~, so that I can
- Download a detailed annual statement, armed with which I can
- Call the S'ville Office of the Tax Collector to persuade them that Mr. Morgan, as my mortgage holder, has in fact been paying the property taxes for which I've just received a gigantic bill.
(Guldangit, if it turns out that this is because I list my address as "Apt. 3" instead of "Apt. 2" I am going to be SO MAD at everyone.)

I also need to go running, and ideally pick up a library book.

And, y'know, work.

The odds of my actually making it to Tenebrae tonight as planned are not looking good.

ETA: My online account with JP Morgan Chase appears to have decided to let me log on again. WTH. Unfortunately, finding a statement that says "Yes, we paid your property taxes" is, at the very least, less easy than I'd hoped.
Guess we call the Office of the Tax Collector tomorrow...

Right, it's been a week, and I never posted about M's birthday. Crud, Well, while I'm waiting for the Yummy Bars to cool down enough to frost...

I can't remember most of the details of M's birthday. (I just asked E., who doesn't remember either.) In her case, that's because this was M's Official Birthday, in the same style as Queen Elizabeth II, and she also helped celebrate a couple of other times this year (hiking in NH, lemon meringue pie with M's family, socially-distanced or possibly zoomed occasion with friends. And I don't remember because that day I was mostly focused on having just driven P. to Canada, and was now trying to put in a full day at the office... So I think we had fish, or something, and she baked herself a cherry pie, because she's one of those people who will always go for pie, given the option. Possibly we sang?

The (in some ways) bigger news of that day was that it was the day when the landlord next door started putting up The Fence.

Our house's driveway, you see, abuts directly on our next door neighbor's driveway; both lead to a space at the back where the actual cars get parked.* So what we - AND the people in the apartments next door - used to do was to use each others' driveways as maneuvering space, sticking the back (or front) end of your car into what was technically the other driveway in order to get turned around.
For some bloody reason, however, the landlord of the house next door has evidently decided that their property Must Be Kept Separate, and is putting up a fence to delimit it. So far, it's just some metal posts, but chainlink or something is clearly going to follow, and in any case, there's now a post in the way when you try to back up. So using the driveway has now become a very tricky thing.

* At one point, what we were actually doing was sticking, like, two cars back there and having E. and the landlord park in the actual driveway, and then we had to stop doing that because of BS Belmont town ordinances, and now physically CAN'T do because of the fence.

Okay, as belatedly promised, I'm gonna post about Spare Oom. But to explain, at least in a way that would have made sense to an outsider - or me, five or so years ago - we're gonna have to back up.

( Read more... )

...Wow, I've been super bad about posting. Let's see if I can at least fill you in on how my various weekends went.

Aug. 24: 2House2Warm (Housewarming party: evening)

This went fine and was fun, even though we had fewer attendees than we were hoping. But we fed them food, and showed off the apartment, so that was all good...

Aug. 26: super-long super-complicated quarter peal on the bells at Advent. eep.

I eventually ducked out of doing anything more complicated than ringing the tenor behind [i.e., just keeping the measure by ringing last in every change, not trying to remember the actual method.] So we rang quite well for like 40 minutes, got snarled, got unsnarled, had somebody disagree with the conductor about the timing of a call, and probably as a result couldn't get back to rounds, so it didn't count. Bother.

Then...go eat ice cream to celebrate Kat's birthday.
Ice cream! And also talking about canals and pubs in England. Good times.

Sept. 1: Mercifully/boringly free of plans. Maybe I should go to Maine.
I did not go to Maine.
Sept. 2: Danielle's asked me to ring ANOTHER QP.
This one we actually got. First qp for me on Stedman, or indeed affected*!
Sept. 3 (Labor Day) Sadly, nothing much happened. I think I probably tried and failed to unpack stuff.

Sept. 8: Rise for Climate
OK, I had a lot of thinks and feels about this, but it basically boiled down to:
a) This was depressingly poorly-attended,
b) I'm worried that the message got diluted in this particular event, and
c) Who the hell thought that having the rally and the march separated by a three-hour teach-in was a good idea?!?

Sept. 14-16: G. is attending a wedding in Portland. I go attend Peter in Portland.
This went fine.** I drove up to Portland, got to actually see my Dad (and explain how tenoring behind works), and spent a fun afternoon with Peter wandering along the shore of the Eastern Prom. (We even got to see my brother for a hot second.*** G. picked him up a little early the next day; I drove home.

Sept. 22-3: No plans yet. Maybe go apple picking if my roommates aren't dead.
My roommates ate'nt dead, but they also did not feel like going apple-picking, and neither - sadly - did anyone else. I DID, on the other hand, spend a pleasant evening having coffee with

teenybuffalo and

nineweaving on Saturday. And also there was a lot of cooking.

In other news...
Work has been alternating between periods where I feel like I'm drowning and periods (like this) where I sit around waiting for someone to give me something to do. Possibly because it's the end of the fiscal year? Who knows.
My immediate supervisor is on a cruise in the Adriatic for practically the entire month, which makes life that extra bit weirder.

My apartment is still nice. My roommates are still nice, and still like my cooking. My room is still a total disaster area, although I got a shelving unit for my bathroom*** and partly as a result I am beginning to make some headway against the chaos.

Me: Still not 40 yet.

* i.e. where I *actually* had to remember how calls worked in the method.
** Well, aside from the bit where I postponed my drive up in order to go to a Friday-night event that it turned out wasn't actually happening (and had never been going to outside my own brain, apparently), which meant that I felt like an idiot and had to have dinner VERY late.
*** Dan is mad busy with a play, but made the time, and I finally handed off the box o' books+things from England. Somehow he has a girlfriend now. How do people even meet people?
*** I may or may not have mentioned this in the past, but one of the perks of this place is that my room comes with its own bathroom. Of course, this means I am the only one who's going to clean it, but hey.

Right, the other news. (And sorry this is late: I started this post like a week ago, and then never got around to actually posting it.)

Roommate #4 - a.k.a. the one we never see - moved out at the end of last month, so we started interviewing potential replacements. Fortunately, he was able to find several, and we now have somebody who's hoping to be at grad. school at Tufts in the Fall. She seems nice enough, although she's been here only slightly more often than her predecessor (I think a week elapsed between when she signed the paperwork and when she actually spent an actual night here), so it's hard to say for certain.

But that's not the big news.

The news is that all of this meant we met with our landlady a couple of times, and in the course of that it emerged that, contrary to what she'd said on earlier occasions, she's not going to raise our rent by much next year. Possibly even not at all.

And that, perversely, puts me in something of a dilemna. I mean, I hate moving. Likewise, it's seems relatively unlikely that I'll be able to find an apartment that I can actually afford that's as well situated as this one is. Double that if I'm trying to find a place of my own; and if not, I have to find new roommates,* which is something I view with extreme trepidation.

But in a weird way, I was looking forward to moving out. No, let me rephrase that: I want to move out. (I'm just not sure that there's going to be anything I want to move in to.)

---------------

My roommates are nice enough, but I often feel like I'm the only one who ever really cleans around here. And more than that: This apartment has been continuously occupied by an overlapping series of renters for...as least the last fifteen years. That's fifteen years since the carpeting was replaced; there may be stuff LIVING in the heating system; and let's not even talk about the back side of the fridge. Or the cracks in the flooring.
Or anything about the bathrooms.**

Plus of course all the upstairs bedrooms leak heat like anything, so that our heating bills are alarming even while I'm sleeping under a -20°-rated sleeping bag so I don't freeze.

And then there's my stuff. My roommates have plates and pans and glassware; the apartment has plates and pans and glassware; and that'd be great except that it means almost all of my kitchen stuff is in a box in the cellar somewhere. And I stress "somewhere": one of the roommates broke the one wine glass I had upstairs the other week, and now I can't even find where I put the rest of them. When I tried to locate them, I instead found a set of milk/margarita glasses that I'd forgotten I owned.
It should go without saying that this also applies to books.

So I don't know. I guess what I'm going to do (if I can get off my arse) is to look at the market and see what's out there and what I can afford. If it turns out that I can't afford anywhere where I'd want to live,*** I'll deal with this apartment for another year, save up some money, and hope serendipity happens. That's how I got into THIS apartment, after all.

*wiv' aaahlll tha' that entails.

** New!roommate has, admittedly, been working on cleaning the upstairs bathroom; but there's nothing we can really about the tiling, or the fact that getting the sink to train occasionally requires a plunger.

***I have been asking around among my coworkers a bit. Several of them rent, but mostly they moved into their current apartments years ago, and so don't really have a good sense of current market conditions. The one dude in the department who DID move recently was moving as a group with three of his friends; moreover, he says that one-bedroom apartments in his area go for $1500/month and up. And granted, that's in Newton, but still. I ran the numbers, and I can probably, technically afford that much; but there'd be no margin for error, and I wouldn't have a cent left over for savings.

By some minor miracle, I still have a bedroom rather than a swamp.

It's been raining (for those of you not in these parts) for the past 36 hours. Hard. As in, on the way back from game night last night my car was throwing up waves.
While going uphill.
The Cathedral's basement has flooded.* (Well, a bit--the choir room was merely damp in places; some of the Sunday School rooms were a bit less lucky.)

* To be fair, St. Luke's was built in the 1850s, and the undercroft was probably not really meant to be used. This explains some things about its layout...

Confidential to Squigamunk: OK, yes, technically "guano" refers only to the excrement of bats (and seabirds. And seals, for some reason.) But you offered to take up a job for my crazy business idea "selling stuff made from guano.)
And no, I do not own a pig. I was more thinking of this.

On Josh's landlord, name NOT withheld:
My landlord is called Joe. Joe is generally a very pleasant landlord: when something goes catastrophically wrong (e.g. you lock yourself out of the apartment...) he makes sure your problem gets solved (unlike some landlords I can think of. ahem.) And when something is mildly annoying, he generally also fixes it...although it make take a few months, as in the case of a refrigerator light, or the wasps' nest in the window of the back hall. But these are trifles.
Unfortunately, the same workaholic urge to improve his property that moves him to install and revarnish wood floors in this house, and that led him to build the patio out front, is now leading him to comply with fire codes by installing a second staircase to the third floor. Site for said staircase: the space previously occupied by the closet in our front room. As an additional consequence, we had to move everything out of one side of the said room, although this DID have the salutary effect of getting me to clean out my desk MORE than 48 hrs before departing for Germany. And the apartment was filled all afternoon with large Italian guys knocking holes in the walls. They'll be back on Tuesday. They might even build that staircase.

Of course, I missed most of this, since I spent most of the afternoon at the going-away party for the revvy reverend Matt Lincoln. St John's North haven is losing him for six months, as he goes on sabbatical to Iona and various other interesting parts of the world. St John's, (though actually less so this party) contains a substantial fraction of enormous, extended North Haven Italian families, who got disaffected from the Roman Catholic Church and found a spiritual home with the local Episcopalians...at least for the purpose of getting baptised and married. (But being used thus is a hazard of life for Episcopal clergy...as in the joke about the bats). But anyway. Food, folks, and silly speeches by the senior warden.

In fact, most facets of life in the New Haven area are dominated by Italians. It's not just our landlord-cum-drywall-installer: there are old Italian guys sitting outside our local grocery store talking animatedly in something that was a Sicilian dialect a century ago, and has since evolved in the classic fashion of isolated populations. The Mayor's DeStephano, the congresswoman's DeLauro, and New Haven claims to have invented pizza as we know it (and has several local restaurants who fight over who first created it, and scads whose clientele is prepared to assert that they have the best pie in town.) The culture is changing, as the Italian-speaking generation dies out and Curry places come to outnumber Pizza joints and high-end Wooster Square restaurants, but for the moment, this remains very much an Italian town.
Oh, and my sister-in-law's ex has mob connections. Distant. That's more of a West Haven thing. ;)