Right when I was about ready to write an entry about how I have a nasty habit of dating assholes, it seems to have all been a bump in the road again. There are very good reasons that I’m no longer a trusting person, though. I’m not proud of them, but there are reasons.
Dealt with some extremely pleasant insurance people yesterday who came to assess the flood damage to my apartment. There’s not a lot of damage, really, but it’s still going to take some work to fix it all, including repainting, fixing the kitchen floor, pulling off baseboards and the end of my kitchen cabinets, and possibly sanding down the areas of my floor that have risen as a result of the water. Which means I actually have to clean my apartment.
I’ve never really gotten into the whole spring cleaning thing. I know it’s something I should do, but mostly I just rearrange the mess and I’m done with it. I don’t live dirty, but I live messy. But this year it’s out of my hands, it’ll have to be different. And I have to admit, when I finished with my kitchen on Friday night and it was sparkling and immaculate with my fresh tulips on the kitchen table… well, it actually made me really happy.
You’re still not going to get me to make my bed right, though, no sirree.
I leave work an hour early because of a headache so bad all I want to do is curl up in a dark room and die. I walk into my apartment and a musty, humid smell hits me almost immediately. I drop my bags on the kitchen table and go looking for the source. Then notice that some of the things by my kitchen table have been moved. Someone has been in my apartment. I leave immediately and go down to find the caretakers, who are not home. I come back upstairs and carefully search my apartment. And find some dark streaks on my wall, running down to some now-wet boxes that I had packed to put into the storage.
Still have no idea what’s going on, but the picture is beginning to form: a hot water pipe bursts in the apartment above me, leaking down into my apartment. The caretakers come into my apartment to look for damage, but don’t find it because the water has leaked into boxes and isn’t immediately obvious. The humidity is probably so much less than in the apartment where the break took place that it’s hardly even noticeable.
I leave a note on the caretaker’s door, and receive a call a couple hours later from the caretaker’s brother, who tells me there was a flood but is of little more use than that. He doesn’t seem to understand that I’m saying there is damage to my apartment. He says he’ll get the caretaker to call me when he gets home from work.
It’s 1:30 in the morning now, and I’m certainly not expecting a call until tomorrow, if he even gets the message at all. Spent two hours cleaning the kitchen and looking for more hidden damage. I hardly even know where to look without knowing exactly what happened upstairs. My living room and hallway are a mess because I don’t want to clean up the areas where the water certainly leaked in without the caretaker having seen it first. There are streaks on the wall, which are easily taken care of, but there’s also floor damage. What really gets me is that they didn’t so much as leave me a note to say something had happened, I had to piece it together for myself.
I’m tired. I’m cranky. But strangely enough, my headache’s gone.