Awake, caffeinated, and generally feeling not too shabby. I think I’m slowly catching up on some of that missed sleep. Or maybe I just slept better than usual last night. The PC is pissing me off. I got some more stuff installed, including a good codec pack so I can view and encode any movie format I care to, which is good. But now my PocketPC won’t establish a net connection on the cradle. I can connect wirelessly through the router, but for some stupid reason, even though I forwarded the proper ports, it still won’t let my PDA connect to the net without enabling WiFi. Grr. Relatively minor problem though, and everything else is going more or less smoothly, so I guess I have that to be thankful for.
We got some court documents in the mail recently, too. See, four years ago, the building management decided they needed to redo the balconies of all four buildings in my immediate area. This was no doubt spurred by a chunk of balcony falling off one of their buildings in Toronto and hitting some poor sap on the head. Naturally this meant that every balcony under their purview needed redoing, so for the next year they were a-jackhammerin’ and a-drillin’ and a-pressure-washin’ and a-pissin’ off every human being within five hundred feet, but none more than the people who lived in the buildings whose structure transmitted every single jackhammer and hammer drill sound to every corner of the building as if it were right next door. Not that there was anything actually wrong with our balconies – they were probably in better repair than most – but I guess it was all about covering their asses for the insurance company. Now, three years later, and barely a month after the annual rent increase has taken effect, they are petitioning the rental board to raise the rent above and beyond the maximum recommendations in order to pay for these “repairs.” This means that they are holding a tribunal hearing in which all tenants are invited to participate in order to try and convince the board why this is a bad idea. We received papers to this effect, which sneakily outlined how much they spent on those balconies, but utterly neglect to state how much they intend on raising the rent by. I plan on going to this thing, and I dearly hope everyone else does, too, because we need at least half of the tenants in the building to attend in order to meet the quorum requirements. If we can’t form a proper quorum, we lose our say – which I am sure is what building management is hoping for, which is why the papers we received were so vague.
Nava - Spiky tree nuts? Those sound like chestnuts, which look like little green medieval maces, and seem likely to be able to impale your scalp almost as well. You won’t catch me walking under one of those trees.
LiLi - Sounds like it’s time for a spraying.
Kai - Uh-oh. You have a Crazy Cat Lady neighbor. She wants free and undocumented kittens, and she’ll probably find them, too. Keep an eye-- er, nose out for whiffs of ammonia and the sound of numerous cats yowling coming form her general direction. This may be an indication that they have eaten her and are hungry again.
Then back home early again. This job rocks sometimes.
