Just when the neverending saga of the leaks into my ceiling was about to end, it neverended. Tonight I came home to the above, a big blister of water that had leaked into my ceiling right in front of my bathroom. At least it doesn’t have any bookcases under it this time.

More pics after the tweets.

• RT: @Metafrantic: Interesting post about building Consensus (in fiction and RL) by @yksin http://bit.ly/bVbj7P // Thx for tweeting my post! in reply to Metafrantic #
• RT: @adndotcom: AK govt workers whose personal info was lost will get letters about what happens next. http://bit.ly/9xOCm9 // I’m waiting. #
• Yet another leak making a big water-filled blister in my ceiling. [gnashing of teeth] Will this ever end?!!! #fb #

Some more views of the big blister. Really — the damn thing was as big as the light fixture. Looks like there might be a couple smaller blisters forming up just inside the bathroom, too.

I don’t know if this is from another leaky pipe, or if the upstairs neighbor’s toilet went wonky again. I just want it oooooooover!

So I called my maintenance guy Jon to let him know I was going to drain the blister, but I still had, y’know, yet another damn leak. He said he’d stop by tomorrow to take a look, but probably wouldn’t be able to fix it until Tuesday. Okay. He suggested I also poke a hole through the ceiling proper so whatever was leaking could drain out into the bucket I have on the floor under this. Okay.

But there turned out to already be a hole.

Frakkity frak frak frak.

No, please don’t helpfully tell me to move. I hate moving. I like the location where I live, close to several bus routes & within walking distance of places I like to go. It’s also a pain to get a place in Anchorage that takes pets. And doesn’t have stupid damn carpeting.

I just want it to be ooooooooverrrrrrrr!

At least it’s not over a bookcase, at least I don’t have to shove furniture around this time. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the other maintenance guy to fix the last holes in my living room ceiling, so I can put living furniture where it belongs.

This is the second winter with leakage problems. I reckon that winterizing my apartment means: shoving my furniture into the middle of the room & laying down a lot of tarps.

Whinge.

Related posts:

1. A real post, for once, because I need to rant
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-04: Fata morgana, & new pipes
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-15: Steger Mukluks Appreciation Day

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-01: Buzzcuttedness
2. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-16: Dealing with leaks
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-12: Faux Palin, Prop 8, DADT, & fresh produce

@jamielang I totally want that 75K job you tweeted abt. yesterday. I’m sure I am much better qualified for it too. in reply to jamielang #

RT: @jamielang: @yksin you prob are more qualified but the hell if I’ll tell you about it until I’m already in that position // Drat! #

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-16: Dealing with leaks
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-11: Another leak in my ceiling, more gnashing of teeth
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-11: Crazy like a Faux News correspondent

@jansonjones OMG. I know a NASCAR dad! in reply to jansonjones #

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-11: Crazy like a Faux News correspondent
2. A real post, for once, because I need to rant
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-15: Steger Mukluks Appreciation Day

• I declare this Steger Mukluks Appreciation Day, http://mukluks.com/ : heavy snows, long cold bus stop wait — warm dry feet. #
• Per @adndotcom: Snow, snow & more snow in store for Anchorage. 2-4 inches today, more tonight, more Wed. http://bit.ly/6gAMUA #fb #
• _Another_ damn leak in my ceiling…in completely new area. No room to move stuff b/c of having moved stuff from the _other_ damn leak. #fb #
• & I’d like to take out damn garbage but damn dumpster is brimming over b/c somebody’s dumping stuff here & garbageman won’t pick up. #fb #
• RT: @shannynmoore: Anchorage Assembly ‘REORGANIZING LEADERSHIP’ proposal. Howdy! Debbie Ossiander may be losing her seat tonight! / PLEASE! #
• RT: @Mudflats: Assembly voting to change leadership passes 6-4 // Ossiander down! Who’ll be chair now? #
• RT: @shannynmoore: PAT FLYNN NEW CHAIRMAN OF THE ANCHORAGE ASSEMBLY… // Yeaaaaaaah! #fb #
• RT: @shannynmoore: MIKE GUITIERREZ vice chair of the Anchorage Assembly…suck it Eddie Burke… // You go Mike! #
• Just heard via @shannynmoore tweets: Pat Flynn new chair of Anchorage Assembly, Mike Gutierrez new vice-chair. Congrats Pat & Mike! #fb #
• From @shannynmoore : report on Anchorage Assembly FLIP of power. Thanks Shannyn for the quick report! http://bit.ly/5GYfTa #fb #
• Time to get something to eat. Then back to trying to clear room for maintenance guy to fix the new leak. Drip drip drip drip drip. #fb #

Related posts:

1. A real post, for once, because I need to rant
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-11: Another leak in my ceiling, more gnashing of teeth
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-03-11: Sullygate on KUDO 1080 FM

But tonight I need to rant.

Wednesday before last — well, actually on the Thursday morning at 3:30 AM — I woke up to a steady drip-drip-drip in my bedroom.

Same place where there’d been a lot of activity last winter due to old pipes that sprang leaks and had to be replaced.  I spent a considerable part of last winter with a big damn holes in my ceiling both in my bedroom & the bathroom, with all the furniture & clutter shoved all around that I had to pick my way around even in order to climb into bed at night, until they could get the pipes replaced & the ceiling repaired & painted.  Led to some moving around of furniture — my computer desk had originally been just below where the worst leaking was — fortunately with no computer on it because my laptop was nicer to use in a room where I wasn’t freezing to death because the heat in my apartment pretty much sucks in the winter….

Well, so what was in that spot now was a bookshelf.  Full of books.  Hadda be moved.  All this stuff landed in the living room, surrounding the dining table, all over the floor. There’s also preexisting clutter that I haven’t quite gotten myself to move on.  And my landlord came over in the middle of the night to tear open the ceiling to check on the pipes.

Turns out they were fine, & we eventually learned that something broke in the middle of the night in my upstairs neighbor’s toilet, and the wife got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom & found the floor full of water, & when my landlord talked with them the next day, they had a bathtub full of blankets & towels that they’d tried to mop up the mess with.  So they had a miserable damn time of it too.

Except I’m probably more miserable because I still have a hole in my ceiling that’s not fixed yet. So I still have all this stuff all over the damn place.

Now tonight a new goddamn leak in another part of my apartment, in the living room right above — oh yeah, it hasta be this way — right above another goddamn bookcase full full full of books.  This is apparently the same leak that I theorized might exist three weeks ago after I discovered the only printed & bound copy of my MFA thesis that I have, a corner which had been poking from the second from the top shelf, completely soaked.  So the theorized leak wasn’t directly above the bookshelf, just slightly offset, as other books were not damaged.  I saw no other sign of it — until tonight when I got home, a steady drip drip drip.  A call to the landlord, who’s out of town & can’t get anyone over here till tomorrow.

Frak.

Okay, so:

For them to tear open ceiling to fix or replace what’s probably another old corroded pipe, I will have to: (1) remove all the books & move them & the bookshelf … (2) move the dining table.

Where to? damned if I know. My living room is already crowded from all the junk I had to move out of my bedroom because of that leak, which the ceiling has not yet been fixed so I can’t move it against that wall because the workman will need to be able to work.  All the same, I will have to move all that stuff in order to move the table and bookshelf in the living room so the workman will have room to work in here.

Some of this stuff is clutter that I need & want to throw away, but guess what: I have no place to throw it away to because our damn apartment complex dumpster is already full to overflowing from nonresidents (I think) dumping stuff in it.  This has been an ongoing problem: someone filling it so full, then dumping more garbage bags and boxes stacked around it that Waste Management refuses to pick it up, as they did last Thursday, and charges my landlord another $200 to come back on a second trip once he’s cleaned the mess.  Looks like the landlord got his pickup to pick up the overflow so that they’ll pick up garbage this week — assuming some bastard doesn’t dump extra all around it again before Thursday comes along.  I actually witnessed some guys in a pickup one night dumping two big ugly couches in the small woods just north of our complex — I wasn’t able to get their license number — but that’s part of why I think we’ve got dumpers dumping their garbage in our dumpster too, in the middle of the night so nobody catches them, either that or I have some seriously piggish neighbors….

But here it is, on average I have a maximum of one kitchen sized trash bag of trash a week: & I can’t even throw that in the dumpster because some bastard is doing what they’re doing.  And they do it over & over again.  So how can I throw away also the clutter I’m trying to get rid of?

Okay, so I got some books that were so badly damaged in my bedroom that they’re good for nothing — luckily, not much that I valued there — most of which are paperback, so I put ‘em in bags: they can be taken to Anchorage Recycling as waste paper.  But otherwise, it’s shove stuff around so that a hole can be torn in the ceiling, so that the maintenance guy has room to work, so that my entire apartment is in chaos & it’s a bitch to live in.

And Merry Frakkin Christmas to you too.

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-15: Steger Mukluks Appreciation Day
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-11: Another leak in my ceiling, more gnashing of teeth
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-12-16: Dealing with leaks

My Aussie friend Sian told me a few years back that the difference between the Aussie (& British, no doubt Commonwealth) usage whinge & the word more commonly used by Americans, whine, is that to whine is simply to complain, whereas to whinge is to complain about something that you are justified in complaining about.  Though either one can, of course, be annoying to the ears of those in proximity.  (But maybe those are just her own connotations.  Interestingly, though, turns out the two words have different etymologies, which may also be read into what follows.)

I have no idea if my recent whinges about RSIs on Twitter have been annoying to anyone.  If anything, followers of my tweets have possibly been annoyed by not knowing what in heck an RSI is.  They’re more likely to know the term carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), identified in Wikipedia as “median neuropathy at the wrist” which is

a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist, leading to paresthesias, numbness and muscle weakness in the hand. The diagnosis of CTS is often misapplied to patients who have activity-related arm pain.

I’ve never definitively been told I’ve got CTS, but then I tend to be shy of accepting diagnoses in the first place, since they are so often lead to boxing people into thinking that whatever diagnosis has been applied to them is a permanent condition of their lives.  To a lot of people, carpal tunnel syndrome leads automatically to the advice that “you need an operation on your wrist,” just as gall bladder attack means “you need to have your gall bladder removed” or depression means “you need to take antidepressants.”

Well, in some cases.  But not in others.  For me, having suffered from depression off & on all my adult life, having had the at least one gall bladder attack that landed me in the emergency room at Providence Hospital, & having suffered from RSIs — which I will now tell you (as if you haven’t already gotten it from the title of this post) stands for repetitive stress injuries or repetitive strain injuries — for about 15 years, off & on, I have in fact subjected myself to none of those treatments.

I first started having problems with RSIs around 1995, primarily because of my job, which involved not simply working on a computer all day but of doing a lot of fine-tuned mouse-work editing documents, doing document layout, creating tables & charts.  That year — I think it was summer — I was working on a particularly huge pile of tables & charts belonging to an annual report, & I was simultaneously creating some complex templates to keep the formatting standard from year to year.

It killed my hands.  Especially my right hand, which, since I’m a northpaw, is my mouse-hand.  And the pain was not only in my hand, but traveled up my arm, all the way up into my right shoulder.  It felt sometimes as if my bones had been twisted into pretzels inside my arms — a kind of pain both chronic & excruciating.

Nowadays it’s not usually so exruciating, but it’s still chronic. How else could it be, given I still work the same job?  But thanks to my ergonomic split keyboard (I was the first in my office to get one), thumb trackball, the right chair, exercises to keep my wrist open, occasional visits to a chiropractor or massage therapist, aspirin or other anti-inflammatories, & Mineral Ice — in general, I manage quite well.

But sometimes the pain flares up, and then I don’t want to write — whether with keyboard & computer, or pen & paper, it hurts.

That’s a part of why I’ve been less verbose as of lately.

Related posts:

1. Night of the butcher knife
2. The Daily Tweets, 2009-11-20: Enjoy your cookie
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is