The Joys of Adulting

Tuesday   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

First day of summer it’s like the DC Elder gods heard us. It’s the kind of oppressive heat that starts early early in the morning and is only appropriate and pleasurable if you’re in a caftan with a good buzz anticipating a visit to a body of water within the near future.

Walking to get coffee, riding the bus to work, being outside FOR any reason that is not to travel between air-conditioned boxes is so unpleasant. I can’t even. But here it is. Season of my birth, which hey when I don’t have to worry about my appearance (by worry I mean not be a sweating nasty mess) is fiiiine. Otherwise this is when moving to Norway or Iceland or Maine seems like a swell idea. So that’s the small talk out of the way.

I feel better than yesterday. In fact I didn’t even feel bad all of yesterday, it’s rare that a single mood dominates an entire waking day in my life but I imagine that’s true for anyone. Work being slow and not keeping me occupied but at the same time requiring that I can’t tune it out to tackle other things leaves me in a weird limbo.

I started back on reading the book I’ve had (took a break over the weekend), it’s Joe Hill’s latest (the Fireman) and so far I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s end of the world stuff, one of my favorite genres. I think largely because that sort of scenario creates such a fertile landscape for the best and worst of people and resonates with my constant thoughts about focusing on things in life that really matter. Death, chaos, and hardship serve as irrefutable elements to forcing people into shedding whatever bullshit they surround themselves with and get to the core of who and what matters to them, or they unravel like poorly made dolls but it’s a thought-provoking spectacle in either case. 1984, Anthem, Oryx & Crake, Dogstars, The Stand, Hunger Games, Brave New World, The Road, The Girl With All the Gifts, Blindness, Hyperion and on and on and on.

Riding the bus to work today was the variation of experience where I am calm about being in the middle of the diverse crush of humanity. Sometimes it’s less than thrilling.

Today (Wednesday)

Things went slowly downhill yesterday. I left work on time and got home and got everything moving for my ideal evening. Sweet potatoes in the oven, cleaned up a bit, found the yoga series I wanted to start doing on YouTube, sat down on the couch to read and wait for M to get home.  He calls and let’s me know at almost 6 that he’s just leaving work… I’m disappointed but it’s not a big deal. The rain kicks in for a real show and then the fun begins. Water starts pouring through the existing hole in the ceiling and walls from our first major issue back in the first week of May.

I scramble to get the sheets and blankets off our bed. Email our HOA president. Grab pots and pans and towels. We ended up sitting on the floor picnic style to eat dinner and just chill. Nothing else happened. No yoga, no little household chores. Stupid bullshit with this condo eats up another evening.

Today we already had an appointment to have the leak source assessed and I’ve been planning to work from home. M took the day off and the damage assessment guy is early but really nice. Says to him the cause is obvious (gutter and downspout and masonry issues.) You can even see the dark streak along the building where the water has been permeating the masonry. I can’t help but feel that our condo people and insurance spent all this time delaying because they were hoping it was a cheaper problem. At this point I don’t care. It’s been almost two months. Now I have ANOTHER insurance claim open because these additional damages have to be dealt with separately. The water mitigation people came back and I have industrial fans in my room and MORE missing drywall and insulation. At least this time they were able to just tear off the pieces of nasty smelly carpet that were damaged.  Now we’re out $1000 so far in insurance deductibles.

And to top it off the tasks I’m getting into at work now are more complex. I am feeling intimidated and overwhelmed with the amount of new things to learn. I feel like I should have been a developer for the last 10 years to understand half of this. I know my current negatively swayed emotional state is not helping matters but this entire day has felt like an enormous trial.

I just want my apartment put back together. Keeping things clean an organized here lends itself to my overall feeling of sanity and control. I realize it’s fake and illusory but not having it is really making this entire shit show worse.

The State of Things…

• So I moved officially, to here.  Neither of the two most prevalent LJ export tools have worked for me. I don’t really want to move all of that noise here but a non-dubious archive would be nice.  I tried out Medium, and I guess if I were a writer/writer, other kind of writer that might work but the lack of fluidity to read the content of others and the lack of comment driven interface were… not exactly what I was looking for.  So here we are.
• I also re-skinned my writing portfolio since it lives on this platform, but the content is in desperate need of an update. Though… I need to generate more original creative content because I’m not really seeing that as a place to pimp my wares as someone with a talent for style guides, user guides and other techie instructional materials.
• Floodgate 2014 is still puttering along. At this point I am merely grateful that the damage wasn’t in a more problematic area. As I started writing this I stopped to call the insurance company because we’re still waiting on our estimate to be finalized and apparently the *awesome* owner of the unit (and the HOA Prez) has yet to respond to four phone calls requesting information about the cause of the leak, meaning our claim is stuck with the insurance company until he decides to cooperate and provide the details they need to complete the claim with the information about the source of the leak. I’m worried that this will drag on endlessly because of his horribly uncooperative demeanor, once he figured out that I was not going to allow him to estimate and repair the damages outside of the purview of insurance. Keeping in mind that he was never apologetic and has been evasive and passive aggressive as soon as I mentioned our insurance, trying to bully me into doing things his way. He also looked me in the eye after I told him that water ran *through*  my HVAC and I was concerned about damages and said that the unit was “designed to handle moisture and it shouldn’t be an issue”. The HVAC tech knew immediately that there was water, the motor had water spots and one of the electrical panels was friend. He told us it wouldn’t have lasted through the winter and the repairs put us out over $2K. I can’t imagine that the owner of the other unit would have been eager to write me a check come winter when our unit stopped working and we were stuck replacing it. Ugh.
• Prior to Floodgate 2014 was parking brake debacle 2014, which luckily resulted only in the destruction of one portion of a minivan bumper and either our safe driving records are blanketing us, or it hasn’t caught up, but we just got our annual car insurance renewal and it hasn’t gone up. So YEAH, I’ll take that very small victory.
• I renewed for pottery class, I’ve been out of the studio for over a month so hopefully I still have some basic idea of what I’m doing and I can renew my quest to make awesome mugs for people (and then move on to other specific vessels- see also, berry bowls, kittie bowls, anything larger than a medium sized bowl :P)
• I did not, as of yesterday morning, want to drag myself around the city solo to see Amanda Palmer. It’s weird because I have *no* problem doing things alone – if that was my plan. I guess I am just like a fucking tortoise sometimes when dealing with changing circumstances and situations where I had a certain idea of how things would transpire. My inability to roll quickly with the punches can be really frustrating. But I rallied and went. I was able to walk, get myself delicious ramen in a typically crowded restaurant and get in line early enough to get a ridiculously awesome seat and a free cookie while I waited outside. I enjoyed the show and walked out feeling a lot better than when I’d gone in. I have a lot of abstract observations about the crowd, but in reality I was not there for them and I think I’d rather sit on those thoughts some to let them marinate. I will say thought, that when dealing with a truly indie artist you get a lot of interesting people…