Today we saw Gorgeous Kitchen and Smells Like Bacon.

Both places were nice, but Smells Like Bacon wasn’t laid out very well and we will pass. Gorgeous Kitchen is very, very nice but Ed wants to see it again before we decide if we’re going to put in an offer. In my head, we’ve already offered – but there were a LOT of people there, and I’m not holding out hope that we’ll actually get the place. We’ll go see it again tomorrow, and another place on the North Shore that I’m curious about. I need to stop thinking about the place we didn’t get, because it’s just discouraging me and nothing else is coming close to that level of perfection.

My brain hurts.

Even though it’s been a very, very long time since I’ve been an admin assistant and I’m more or less established as totally awesome at what I do, I still get all bristly and insulted when people ask me to do things I think are too “adminy”. It’s not that I think the work is beneath me; I’m just afraid of losing the ground I’ve worked hard for and turning into the office bitch. All the weird little things usually fall on my shoulders – and if you’ll excuse the unnecessary horn tooting, I am really good at the weird little things – but the instant I start cheerfully doing everything asked of me because “you’re so much better at it than I am!”, I find myself suddenly responsible for ordering office supplies and cleaning bathrooms and scripting donut routers for helpless people who refuse to learn.

Today, for example, I came into the office to an email asking me to order pizza for the department. My hackles immediately rose and I sent off a snarling IM to the requester’s boss, reminding him that we HAVE an office assistant and she does this sort of thing. He quickly mollified me – we only asked you because you’re so good at it! – and I had to grudgingly admit he was right: I know best what the team wants and how many to order and from where and who is allergic to what and that we have to order at least 1 cheese-only for the vegetarian who hates vegetables. I don’t actually have to do the ordering at all; they just want me to organize it and get someone else to deal with it. I apologized, because there was no reason for me to be so obnoxious about it. I AM good at that sort of thing, even if I don’t want to be – and hey, I get a free lunch out of it; one that is suspiciously free of olives and feta.

I’ve only ever been asked to serve coffee in a meeting ONCE, and I almost exploded. It was during the Dark Time, when the only job I could find in Calgary was as a receptionist for a horrible little train company. It wasn’t out of line that they asked me to do it – I was the friggin’ receptionist, after all – but I resented it so much I almost walked out the door in disgust. I still have nightmares about that place, and that time in my life – I’ve done a lot since then, and I don’t like to be reminded of it.

In the meantime, free pizza! Yay!

.. then again, if I have to spend one more week in this building, I might kill everyone ELSE in two. Fuck it – there is NO WAY IN HELL I am going to wait a year or more before I move. Fuck this place; fuck it right in the left nostril.

(A car alarm went off outside for close to an hour – turned out to belong to one of the new guys in the basement. He went outside to deal with it and on his way back in, got trapped on the stoop by Drunk Betty sqwaking at him from the second floor, so loudly that I could hear her in the bedroom with the TV turned up loud enough so I could hear the movie over the car alarm. Ed finally went downstairs to get the guy to COME THE FUCK INSIDE so Drunk Betty would stop talking at him. I HATE THIS BUILDING SO HARD.)

Why do all my brilliant schemes involve self- flagellation in one form or another?

I am Stressed the Fuck Out about homes and ceilings and money and all those other awesome things that have aged me more in the last 45 days than anything done in my wild formative years. I am worried that we won’t find anything that suits us, and worried that we will end up settling for things that aren’t perfect in the name of panic and jealousy.

In my near-constant stalking of MLS for new listings, I’ve seen several places that have piqued my interest, only to note that some sneaky sumbitch is selling units in a building that won’t be completed until 2010. This annoyed me almost as much as the listings for buildings that are 55+ (but don’t mention it until you’re three paragraphs in and calling your realtor), but then I started thinking: why *can’t* we potentially buy into a place that won’t be finished until next year?

I asked around on Twitter, and several people answered my most pressing question: how do you pay for such a place? I was worried that you would be responsible for making mortgage payments on a place you don’t live in as well as paying rent, but apparently that is not so: you make a down payment, and then you wait. Once you take possession, you start paying the mortgage you’ve already obtained at a pre-approved rate for a pre-approved amount and everything is super.

Think about it: a brand spanking new building with a shiny new suite in outfitted with our choice of either “Sun Kissed Pine” or “New Hampshire Mauve” colour schemes, surrounded by people who are just as new to the building as we would be and are therefore more likely to be careful with the property and surroundings? Having a warranty? Getting some sort of tax credit or rebate or exemption for buying new? Having sex where no one has ever had sex before (except for maybe randy construction men but let’s face it that’s totally hot)?

I’m aroused with both interest AND homo-erotic fantasies.

As with all my magnificent ideas, there are pros and cons to both buying new or pre-owned; things I’m probably not even thinking of: construction delays, funding issues, things being built on Indian burial grounds, etc. None of these, as terrifying as they can be, are even remotely close to the insurmountable scale of the most staggering issue of all:

I would have to WAIT.

I *hate* waiting. I lie awake at night filled with insomnia and angst because I am not already moving into my own home. A wait of this magnitude may very well kill me right in two, and then where would we be? We can’t afford a place large enough for all my many pieces should I completely lose it while rotting away in the Ghetto of North Vancouver. A wait like this would drive me COMPLETELY INSANE and there would be not a thing I could do about it.

Which, instead of deterring me like it would a normal person, actually makes me want to try it, for science: would I be able to contain myself for that long without exploding?

Should we look into buying new? I simply don’t know.

Pros:

• New! Shiny and new!
• Warranties!
• While we wait, we’d be saving scads of money!
• We’d have more to choose from!

Cons:

• Things could go wrong
• We might agree to something we would regret but be unable to get out
• Scary; I have no idea what we’d be in for
• I WOULD HAVE TO WAIT

Oh, there is much to think about.

I can’t stop reading episode details for The Twilight Zone. It made for a spooky commute yesterday – I half expected something otherworldly to happen, like getting on to a Seabus with hundreds of copies of myself (terrifying to consider) or being told that I don’t actually exist or waking up to discover that I’m William Shatner seeing Hitler ripping wires out of the airplane wing at 20,000 feet.

There is nothing for me to say today. I am tired of being tired at our apartment and the house hunt and the rain. I tried to ask Twitter for suggestions, but everyone suggested the same thing: scooters in the rain! I haven’t been able to ride in weeks – I don’t own enough rain gear to keep me dry in storm season – so Lola is parked out back with the other 5 bikes, waiting for spring. That’s it. That is hardly an update at all, let alone an interesting one.

Do my work for me: what should I write about?

You take the good (Angry Guy is no longer heading up his department! My people are back from their trip!), you take the bad (no Q3 bonus! Christmas is canceled!), you take them both and there you have my Wednesday morning.

We moved our mattress back into the bedroom last night. I was tired and full of fury at the thought of sleeping in unholy configurations for one more night, and figured if the roof was going to fall in it would have already done so. I’m also choked at our landlord, whose helpful suggestion of “I’ll bring you a dehumidifier, that’ll fix everything” has not materialized – he was supposed to bring one over on Monday so we could start drying out the room, but he didn’t. He wanted us to dry things out for at least a couple days before he brought repair people in, so we’ll be living with a damp ceiling and no light as well as a demolished living room because the ceiling is still bleeding plaster for the unforeseeable future. Ed called him last night to find out what the deal is and got voice mail with no call back, so we are in limbo. Angry, angry limbo. Why, I’ve got half a mind to just move!

We are looking at potential homes as quickly they appear. By my calculations, we’ve seen 14 places so far with one failed attempt to buy. The pickings are fairly slim at the moment, but we’re doing what we can – we saw a place last night that was really nice inside, but way too small for us and also it did not come with the pug that lived there so why bother. We got to the building really early, and in the half hour we sat in the car waiting, I counted four people pissing on things within eyesight of the street. Inside the lobby were multiple notices about break-ins in the underground parking area and the building, and they might be moving St. Paul’s hospital into the lot across the street. All that for 816 sq ft and one bathroom? WOO! At the very least, I’m starting to feel less hopeless about the whole thing. I’m also having a great deal of fun giving nicknames to all the places we’ve seen, so I can keep them straight in my head:

• Awesome Townhouse We Couldn’t Buy
• Water Damage on Commercial
• Too Many Carpets
• Smokers Suck
• Almost Perfect but Not Quite
• Dank and Smelly; Do NOT Open the Dishwasher
• What the Flying Fuck There’s a Sink in the Bedroom Closet
• The One (That Turned Out To Not Be the One)
• Warehouse Sized Bedroom Fireplace Pink Kitchen
• (two week break because we thought we were done)
• Spiral Staircase of Death
• Wendy’s Parking Lot with Hidden Jesus
• Creaky Floor Child Factory
• Arched Doorway Tiny Kitchen
• Enclosed Bedroom No Pug Crime Spree Toilet Place

There are a few other places I’m curious about, too:

• Wacky Kitchen
• Here is All My Money; I’ll Take It Based on Pictures Alone
• South Vancouver is the Devil, No Matter How Many Sq Ft It Is
• Out of my Price Range But Maybe They’ll Take Less

It is a good thing I enjoy making my own fun.

The horrible blinding migraine I woke up with yesterday eventually subsided, but left me with day-long nausea that invited me, several times over, to take advantage of the available bucket and spew the contents of my soul up into it. I’m not nearly as unstable today as I was yesterday, but I can’t seem to keep anything down so I am at home, biding my time and eating crackers.

Mmm, crackers.

This day is costing me money – I’m officially out of sick days and am taking the day unpaid – but it is better than the alternative of barfing all over my desk and people. I hear they hate that.

Plus, crackers. Can’t go wrong with those.

I really don’t think this month could get any worse, but there are 13 days remaining – that’s a lot of time in which catastrophic things can happen, and I am not willing to tempt fate.

Looks like Apple is getting in on the “girls are utter morons” craze started by Ubisoft – there’s a handy list called App For Essentials – Apps for Girls that includes:

• Disney.com
• Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise
• Roiworld: Fashion Fix
• MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House)
• Kitty Chorus
• Dress Your Princess
• iPuppy World
• Disney Channel Cover Styler
• Fairy Trails

They made a mistake though – they also included Math Flash Cards in the list, which is clearly meant for boys because everyone knows girls don’t do math.

Awesome!

You know when your apartment or house gets to be such a catastrophic disaster area that you think it might just be easier to move and start all over again?

We are SO beyond that point. Seriously, if someone handed me a set of house keys and a pile of boxes, I’d be gone by the morning light.

We had an incident last night, complete with mysterious phone calls and danger – the real kind even; not the imagined sort I am so fond of.

Ed came home with the laundry and saw a fairly significant amount of water on the floor. He asked where it came from, but I didn’t know – and while we were investigating it, I found a much more disturbing mystery on the bed: where was all this water coming from, and also what the *fuck*?!

Water was pouring out of our bedroom light fixture and onto the bed. There was water all over the floor and the walls and the bed was a sodden mass of soggy linens and piece of plaster. Things were a fucking *mess*, and we stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds before springing into action: Ed called the building manager, I called Josh for manly assistance, we grabbed buckets, and started investigating.

There were a number of hugely problematic things to take in all at once:

• So much water!
• Oh shit, the bed is getting drenched
• Where is it coming from?
• Is it coming down the WALLS? How did the mirror and calendar get soaked?
• Seriously, move the fucking bed already
• It’s coming out the light fixture – water + electricity = NO GOOD AT ALL

I cleared all the blankets and pillows out of the way while Josh and Ed moved the mattress into the spare room. We laid out buckets and a tarp, and got to work while Scott the Building Guy came up to see what was going on. First problem: the water and electricity. Okay, let’s kill the power to the bedroom so we can get up there without death. Easy, right?

Our apartment building was erected in 1756 or so, and all electricity runs through ONE breaker in the suite. Turning off the power in the bedroom meant killing the entire apartment. Good job, electric people! We resigned ourselves to working in the dark (aided by Shan holding flashlights), because we couldn’t get around the power issue. Scott took down the light shade, and this led to the next problem:

The water was warm. It was more than warm; it was just this side of hot. We couldn’t figure it out – not only was there no kitchen or bathroom above us, there was NOTHING above us: the Penthouse suite doesn’t extend that far; we were below the roof. If the water was rain, why was it so hot? Scott turned off the water in the building just in case, and Josh and Ed worked to bring down the entire fixture (which was a ceiling fan and therefore complicated – Ed did far too thorough a job when installing it). Scott also punched a hole into the ceiling where some of the paint was obviously bubbling: we wanted to divert the water from over the bed and give it another way to escape.

With the fan down and the wires recapped without anyone being electrocuted, we turned the power back on so we didn’t have to deal with a suddenly defrosted freezer on top of everything else. It was time to figure out what happened, so Shan and I went all CSI on this shit: why was the water warm, and where did the water on the walls and floor come from?

I don’t get to use the phrase “arterial spray” in my day to day life nearly enough, but I got to use it last night. Shan deduced that if the fan and light were ON when the leak started, it would account for the water being shot out in a radial pattern, depositing water along the mirror, calendar, and floor AND why the water was so warm. I took a flash light and followed the trajectory of the water droplets, and sure enough: there was a distinct pattern. The arterial spray of the water was the same height of the drops on the mirror, and from there extended into a perfect arc along the door and onto the floor. Since the fan was on, the light was also on – and this would easily account for the warm temperature of the water (it had been sitting in the light shade for god knows how long, being warmed by the light and electricity). Mystery solved! Shan and I are awesome.

Okay, so we determined that the water wasn’t coming from any invisible pipes on our roof so it was most likely rain. Scott went onto the roof to investigate, and shortly after we heard a startling WOOOOOSH – a great deal of water was pouring out from somewhere. It sounded like a fucking waterfall; it was so loud. We thought the rain had picked up to Calgary intensity, but a glance outside told us that the rain had momentarily stopped – so what the fuck?

Scott came storming (no pun intended) back downstairs, looking both angry and triumphant: he had solved the how. He held up a single beer can – an empty Molson Cold Shot – that someone upstairs had pushed into the rain pipe for fun and profit. With the drain blocked, the water backed up onto the roof and eventually started seeping into the cracks in our ceiling and onto our furniture.

So! Our house is a complete fucking disaster: the bedroom is inhabitable until it dries out, at which point repair men will come and cut a bigger hole into the ceiling to clean it out (mold is bad) and patch it all back up again. They’ll do the same to the living room, which also started leaking last night due to the rogue beer can. Our mattress is propped up on its side in the spare room, because there isn’t anywhere large enough for us to lay it down. Ed is sleeping on the spare bed, and I’m on the couch in the middle of the living room (because it had to be moved because of the first leak). You can’t move anywhere in our house at all without tripping over something that shouldn’t be there, and for once it isn’t due to sheer laziness on our part: things are fucked up in here.

Also, because I slept on the couch last night, I woke up with the worst headache I’ve ever had – it made me vomit several times and black out in a puddle of tears and intense pain.

NOVEMBER IS AWESOME !!!!

For my own amusement and because Kelli asked, here is a complete list of things that are currently wrong with our apartment:

• The living room ceiling is rotting above our couch
• The bedroom is useless for the next week, possibly two, while strange men cut holes in our ceiling and possibly fondle my unmentionables
• The ceiling fan we bought and installed is fucked up and unusable
• Our landlord is going to set up a dehumidifier in there and give us $25 to cover the added power cost (woo!)
• The toilet handle broke off; we’ve been using a bungee cord to flush for the last month
• The Chlamydia Sisters below us
• The Idiots Upstairs (version 3.0)
• Josh and Shan are moving out on Saturday
• Every single electric outlet in the apartment runs off one circuit

.. on the upside, our living room walls are a lovely shade of green and it smells like cookies in here.

They’re not DEAD – I did see one of them yesterday – but either the police or our ineffective landlord got through to them, because they haven’t made a peep since last Monday. I kind of like it like this: eerie yet livable.

My karmic how-do-you-do for not particularly caring and/or joking about their apparently suicide pact came this afternoon, in the form of a piece of plaster falling on my head. Our ceiling is leaking again, and bubbles of wet are growing at an alarming rate. We’ve moved the couch (and found a lot of fun stuff in the process, including porn and long-lost trinkets) out of the way and will place an emergency bucket under the hole, but there isn’t a hell of a lot we can do except watch it get fixed – again – and hope that we’re not here for the start of NEXT year’s rainy season, when this’ll all start all over again.

The sky falling onto my head interrupted my afternoon plans of no-pants Mario playing, dagnabbit.