I’ve had a bit of a time here the last few weeks, let me just say.

First the office slashed its hours to 3 and a half a day, from 9-12:30, without notifying us. Thus I missed an important UPS shipment that there was no one to sign for, as the office was now closed at 2 pm. Sigh.

The notification came a couple of days afterward. Thanks loads.

The reason for this cutback, and I have to get a picture at some point of the notice in our door, is that the rental agent/office worker has filled all the units in Seminole Woods. Huzzah! Now that we’re in leases, I guess we can all go #*@( ourselves, eh?

This is compounded by the fact that most of the new tenants are annoying white trash and some of them have loud parties or drunken fights that spill over into the hallways at all hours of the day or night. The new neighbors right by us have this happen nightly around 11 pm. I’m getting used to it, sadly.

The service cutbacks are another matter though. They’re killing me, and I’m feeling really ripped off. This is not the same building it was when we moved in; everything is shoddy and falling apart, and they’re slashing anything they can find.

Nevermind whatever we were told orally when we moved in, or that drastic cutbacks to services weren’t mentioned when our lease was up for renewal.

Case in point? Maintenance is now available 2 days a week. There doesn’t seem to be any emergency maintenance anymore.

But wait, you might reasonably ask. What happens if there’s, say, a flood over the weekend?

This happens:

See, when we moved in, there was already a single large leak in the basement. We were never told about it directly, though the then-office worker told us to put down some cardboard in our basement storage unit as it might get a bit ‘damp’

This year, as the rains picked up in fall, the one large leak turned into at least a half dozen in various sizes, and they began to creep closer to my storage room, seen open on the right.

Now there’s also water leaking out from the other storage rooms to the right of mine, and coming around to the front door of my unit, as you can see here.

You can play count the leaks here on the back wall of my unit. Keep in mind I got these pictures hours after the rain died down; it was worse in the early afternoon. Not that the office was open, by that point, to ask for any help in person.

Here you can see my stuff sitting in some building-filtered-rainwater. Nice, eh? Good thing I put most stuff in plastic tubs.

And here you can see the water pushing under the crappy rotted drywall between our unit and our neighbor’s unit, which must, judging from water flowing out the front and side, be absolutely boggy.

I’ve been told, in essence, that nothing major is planned to address this. The office assumed this state of affairs was ok, because they assumed that a: it wouldn’t get over to our storage rooms (wrong!) and b: we all surely knew about it.

Well, yes. I knew about one leak. It stayed one leak, safely away from my room, for a year.

Sigh.

So the plan is to slap some sealant, somewhere on the concrete, perhaps put in a dehumidifyer(?!) and… that’s it.

Wow.

I’m going to have to haul all these boxes upstairs, clean them off, and see about getting a real storage room now, at my own expense. Tubs are waterproof on the bottom but I hate to think of my anime dvd cases and books sitting in 100% humidity for any length of time.

Thanks loads, JSM and Seminole Woods!

Not much to see here, just three links to three weeks worth of veggies. No descriptions in the titles on these as I was rushed. Sorry. I might put them up on flickr later, as captions or whatever you call those.

Week 15
Week 16
Week 17

I will go ahead and say that the funny gnobby ridgey vegetable in Week 15 is Celeriac, which sadly I didn’t get to eat as it went bad almost instantly (perils of organic farming), but supposedly tastes like, well, celery.

The black radishy things in Week 17 are Black Japanese (or Korean?) radishes. They’re strongish and I like them a lot.

That’s it for now. Peace, veggie lovers.

Uggh.

This was a hard one.

(This week’s movie is Cat’s Eye, starring James Woods and Drew Barrymore, screenplay by Stephen King, based on some previous King stories with original content added)

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