We've Moved On

Yesterday was the last day we had left to clean out our old apartment for good and say adios to the building we have lived in for the last seven years.



We moved into a two-bedroom in that apartment building in 2005, and we traded up, or so we thought, to a three-bedroom in 2010.

A group of our friends had been passing that apartment down for about ten years, and we hadn't heard any horror stories, so we were initially thrilled with all the extra space, but then, oh THEN.



Let me start with the bathroom. The bathroom in the suite upstairs from us was regularly leaking water. Pockets of moisture sagged inside our bathroom ceiling and walls, stretching the paint like inflating balloons. The tub surround no longer had wall behind it because of the constant water damage, and if you pushed against it even slightly, it buckled away from the tub. Maintenance's answer to this was caulking, which only gave way within minutes, because CAULKING IS NOT GLUE MEANT FOR HOLDING WALLS TOGETHER.

As you have probably already assumed, all this leaking water and barely palliative building maintenance meant mould, which bubbled through the paint a few times after particularly bad bouts of leakage left parts of the wall soft as marshmallows. When I showed a maintenance guy how I could press my fingerprints into the wall next to the tub, he said "oh, that happens. It will dry on its own." Okay, stupid. Nobody's health or the integrity of the building is of any concern here.

At one point, we put down a plastic mat under Aidan's wheeled office chair in the room next to the bathroom, and mould bloomed up between the floor boards. That's when we noticed all the water damage seeping up — yes, UP — through the floorboards from the basement. As it did in the bathroom, it started blistering through the plaster in his office and in the hallway, and, as you can see in the following video, the hardwood started turning black with what I can only assume is rot:



Unsurprisingly, over the last two years there, I could barely function unless I was taking both antihistamines and cold medication. It was no kind of home.

We gave up near the end. When the toilet handle broke and the bathroom sink stopped holding water altogether, we didn't even tell maintenance, because if I got one more blank stare and was told that marshmallow walls, mould, and blistering plaster were normal and would clear themselves up, I was going to freak out. I just wanted to keep my head down and figure out how to find a decent place to live with three cats in a city with a vacancy rate of less that 0.6%. If this city managed the residential side of its affairs better, we would have been out of that building a long time ago.

Luckily, we did find a place, though! We ended up having to buy instead of rent, but it turned out to be a good decision. We bought a fantastic apartment in this beautiful heritage building (circa 1914) that doesn't have mould problems, or neighbours who insist on loud phone calls outside our window late every night, or unconscionable $120/month rent hikes for a place that supports a thousand health violations.

There were other reasons that apartment building was no good for us, too. I had a nervous breakdown while we lived there. We both weathered bad employment situations. I fought addictions to cigarettes and alcohol. In 2007, both the Palinode and I had surgeries, he to stop being bedridden with a back injury and I to stop having cancer, and the hospital where we were both treated was right behind our apartment building. For the last five years since, we saw that place every day, and, for the last two, we could see it right from our kitchen table.



You are probably wondering why this is the first you've heard of the state of my housing over the last two years. Truth be told, I was ashamed of it. I didn't want any of you to know that, while I was making great strides in some areas, other parts of my life were halted in such sad ways.

It's hard to move on from the bad places you are in psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually when you continue to live in the building that houses all your hard memories and has you staring over your morning coffee every day at the hospital that took your uterus.

Human beings can adjust to terrible circumstances, and we can even feel well acclimatized to them after awhile, but the feeling of acclimatization only means we feel numbed while the bad things continue to carry out their dirty work. Just because we are used to something, just because we hardly feel it anymore, doesn't mean it is any less terrible for us and who we are able to be and to become in the world.



So, yesterday was the last day we had to clean that place out and leave it behind us for good. We carried out the broken or otherwise unwanted stuff we weren't going to move into our new place, like an old office chair and that Dong Won brand tuna (the jokes just write themselves), scraped off the worst of our legacy in that apartment, and got the hell out of there.



I had to turn and take one final photo after we closed the door for the last time, because I felt a little nostalgic leaving, if only because we passed from our early thirties into solid middle age there with all of the drama our last few years have thrown together.



A lot happened in that place that changed us, grew us, made us stronger and better, even if it nearly did us in, and that final turn of the lock followed by dropping the keys under the door marked a momentous symbolic shift, one that forever barred us from going back inside those familiar halls and rooms where so much of us was spent.

We've moved on.

The Bay Has The Best Bathroom

In the mall where I work, there is this deplorable bathroom situated just inside the Bay. Whenever I enter it, I feel like I've fallen through a portal into an urban slum jungle. On one side of the bathroom doors are gleaming cosmetics counters and shelves of footwear stretching back for half a city block, and on the other side of the bathroom doors is a nasty yellow box heaving with human filth.

That piece of paper that says "Out" OF "Serbice" has been in that bathroom for months. Every day that I go in there, the sign is stuck to a new part of the bathroom to indicate which thing is not "serbicable". Sometimes it's a stall, sometimes it's the paper towel dispenser. This time, it was above one of the hand dryers, even though the paper towels were out and the other hand dryer was also non-functional.

I want to fix the damn sign, but then I would have to touch the sign, and, believe me, no one wants to touch anything in this bathroom, except, apparently, the people who defile it on a daily basis.

(Okay, so I do use this bathroom occasionally, but only on days when it seems to have had a recent wipe-down and someone has re-affixed the stall door locks that are constantly going missing.)

I am here to tell you that Kelly and Roy? They might love each other, and they might be smart enough to know how to scratch their names into the wall of a bathroom stall with a set of keys, but they do not know how to flush a toilet. Nor do they know how to follow simple directions:

I like the creative use of spacing, font size, and capitalization.

You will notice that all of these pictures are taken at eye-level. Because of people like Kelly and Roy, it is very important to never look down when in this particular bathroom. I always do, though, because my morbid curiosity always gets the better of me.

My favourite thing about this execrable bathroom, though? THE TAMPON MACHINE IS ALARMED. It takes a lot of self-control for me not to bash that thing in just to hear what a tampon machine alarm sounds like. And, also, would anybody even come to defend such an offensive bathroom against tampon theft? I, for one, would never use a tampon that had spent any appreciable amount of time in there, let alone steal a whole supply of them.

This is less a department store bathroom and more the death throws of a truck stop bathroom making a vain last attempt at crawling out of the gutter before it finally rolls over and heaves it's last blurp.

It's not happening.

About Being Nice, I'm Dead On About Being Nice, And Not Even The Prospect Of Filth Soup Can Taint The Niceness

I am going to draw your attention to this particular blog entry from Save Craig. Please follow his link and watch the cartoons. Too fucking funny. Head to Bitter Films for more of the same.

Web Pages That Suck is a pretty good guidebook for what not to do when designing your website.

The rarest American silver dollar was found in a box by a librarian in Maine.

The Fiery One gave me a spontaneous, no-occasion present the other day. It is this smallish, green mug. It is that great kind of green that looks a lot like the colour of mashed peas with a touch more yellow – pea-soupy green – and the finish is matte except for a shiny, rich brown rim, which I just wrapped my lips around for the first time. Gunpowder green tea is delightful in my new mug. Now wasn’t that nice of him? My day at work was long and tiresome, but my first use of this mug has turned that completely around. How right I am.

The Green Zone, a barricaded area in the middle of Baghdad where United States occupation authorities live and work, also hems in some Iraqi civilians who happen to live within the cordoned off areas.

China is amending its constitution and allowing for the ownership of private property, which is leading to the wealthy moving out of their proletarian apartments and into duplex apartments and suburban villas. It’s a housing boom for China.

Gunther von Hagens has been cleared of allegations that he illegally bought bodies from Kyrgyzstan to use in his show called “Body Worlds”.

Due to damage from over a year ago, which occurred because our upstairs neighbour forgot that she was filling her bathtub, the Fiery One and I have been informed that our whole bathtub and most of our bathroom walls have to be removed to fix it. They damage has slowly grown from its original mustiness and dripping water and presently encompasses both our bathroom and the one in the apartment below us. Now you may think back to my last entry, and how I went on about being dirty and not bathing. That is no indicative of my usual state of personal cleanliness. I like to shower each and every day. I need to shower each and every day. When the Fiery One told me about the whole bathtub removal scheme, I played it cool and even joked about it, but that was just to cover up the mild but rising panic I was experiencing. What am I going to do without even a bathtub to bathe in? Originally, this bathroom fixing only seemed to call for knocking out the walls. That I could live with. I can live without a shower for a short period, but nothing at all?! I hate baths as a sole form of self-cleaning, because they are what I call "filth soup". Baths are merely for a form of comfort and self-indulgence as far as I am concerned. Now that even the bathtub is leaving us for an indeterminate amount of time, I am anxious. I'm hoping that the bathtub only disappears for a couple of days, because bathing in the sink doesn't work well for dirty folk like me. The Fiery One is one of those people that rarely emits any kind of unpleasant odour, even after days, so he will be fine through this ordeal. I just hope he can live with me. I’m sure our love will bear us through this difficult time.

Some of Canada’s veterans from World War II live with the constant physical reminders of what their service to their country cost them, only they weren’t injured on foreign soil. They were injured on home ground and by their own military, and apologies are not enough.

Saudi women may get the vote! A new law, while not saying explicitly that women can vote, will not state that women are ineligible to vote or be elected.

Eww, gross. Some of the remains of the women from the Pickton pig farm case may have been processed and introduced into the human food supply.