Frustration, Full Stop
The HVAC saga continues. A service tech guy came by yesterday, spent a few hours tinkering, and seems to have fixed all the issues with the actual unit but now they’ve got to rewire some stuff in the wall because my thermostat still won’t work. He took the thermostat onto the roof, connected it straight to the unit, and it powered on, so his best guess is that rewiring the thing will be the final step to getting this house some AC.
To say I’m frustrated is an understatement. My father did construction for years, so I get that things don’t always go according to plan. Sometimes some troubleshooting is necessary, I get that, but it’s just so discouraging to take so many hours off of work to come home to deal with this shit. Their cancellation of my appointment last week didn’t help my irritability, which was also made worse by the insistence of the gal I spoke with on the phone to make this next appointment. She insisted that we make an appointment for next week, and wouldn’t budge when I said their available times may not work for me, and that I would like to know their availability for the following week. She just kept repeating she would be happy to be on hold while I figure out my schedule. At this point, another week or two of no heat or AC is nothing compared to the ongoing headache my HVAC situation has been for the last year and a half. But she absolutely would not hear it, so I made an appointment next week that I will likely be rescheduling unless I find someone to be home on my behalf.
“Why don’t you have your landlady come open the door for them?” the inquiring masses demand to know. Well, the answer is multi-faceted. First, I have no desire for my landlady to show up and bitch about the state of the place and the backyard when she is such an absentee landlady. One time she found out through her son (who was here landscaping) that we had a bit of a trash/furniture pile out behind the house that we were planning to have hauled away, and she had a total conniption, and I ain’t want to deal with that if I don’t have to. Second, I trust almost no one with my animals. I can stow my cats away in the second bedroom, but one very wild Mister Simon Milkman will be at large since the attic access is through my bedroom closet. Third, I’m not technically supposed to have the dog. I haven’t notified Ellen about a single animal I’ve procured since moving in, and that wasn’t an issue with the cats, but the lease is pretty specifically anti-dog. My neighbor who rents the other unit has two dogs that haven’t been an issue, but still. I don’t need my dog to suddenly be an issue.
Anyway, it’s worth it to me to figure out a way to have someone I trust here at the house if I’m unavailable, but I’m sure tired of blowing a ton of vacation hours on this stuff. Hopefully, this will be the last of it for a while once the pipes are redone and my HVAC is restored. That said, if the plumbers don’t show up tomorrow and Ellen doesn’t tell us (again) I’m going to flip out.
On a lighter note, and yet still on theme of Things Not Working Out Great, I picked up a desiccated rabbit from the street outside of my job today. My friend Lauren, who works in the adjacent building, sent me a message about it. Now might be a good time to mention that I have recently decided that I would like to partake in the collecting and preserving of bones. I’ve had a little practice with a rat skull, and now I’ve become a fully-fledged roadkill hunter. Naturally, I’ve only seen a single dead raccoon since beginning this endeavor, and he was in the middle of a very busy street so I didn’t risk my safety to try to go back to collect him.
So when Lauren tells me there’s this desiccated rabbit right behind the building, my first thought is that I have to go get this thing. I feel very loved and seen by her for even telling me the rabbit was out there. Anyway, I swooped in quickly with an inverted grocery bag because I still haven’t made myself any kind of Roadkill Collection Kit and I wanted to be as fast and unnoticeable as possible. There weren’t a lot of people around, but being seen picking up the tattered husk of a rabbit feels iffy to me. Like, I wouldn’t blame anyone if they saw me and felt some negative feelings. I didn’t give myself any time to look closely at the rabbit or to assess whether it was worth taking home, and thus this new and exciting failure in my life: this rabbit was utter shit.
I wanted the rabbit to yield something positive, but there was no way I was going to get anything good out of it. Not only was it way more dried out than I had initially realized, but the bones were just… thrashed. Obliterated. The skull was in pieces, the mandible began to shatter as I looked at the teeth, and I couldn’t even get a femur out without it splintering. Perhaps I could have spent more time finding something salvageable, but I think setting some standards is a good first step to this new hobby. I deal in death, I skin and de-meat carcasses many hours a week for work… and I should know where to draw the line. As excited as I was about the rabbit, do I need to spend several hours processing a rabbit down to little unidentifiable bone shards? No, I don’t.
Are rhetorical questions still lazy writing? You bet your ass.
I intended to write about some thoughts I have re: flattening myself to be as unobtrusive and small as possible but I think that will need to come another time. Stay tuned.
