An Open Letter to My Landlord

Dear Shawn,

This is a decent house you're renting me here. Good bit of space, huge fenced yard, quiet street, and you're not charging me more than you should for it. Good for you.

But why do you insist on leaving things that are quite clearly your responsibility as the property owner for me to take care of?

When I moved in here last summer you gave me a credit on my first month's rent because I painted the place. I only agreed to to that for two reasons. First and foremost, when it got to be one day before I was set to move in and your guy still hadn't swung a paint brush, I was nervous. Second, I did kind of like the idea that I'd be able to put some colors on the walls besides the "hospital white" that you had all over this joint before. And how many months did it take you to send someone out to fix the leaking faucet in the bathtub? Not to mention that they still haven't put that floor trim down like they were supposed to. I only asked for that to be replaced four months ago. Maybe if I'm lucky, it'll all get done when I'm ready to move out.

The heating system was acting stupid a few months back when we started to feel a nip in the air. Your solution? Call a company to come out and fix it? Oh, heavens no, why should you do that? Leave it up to me to get it done? Yeah, that's more your speed. "Just take care of it and take the $ off the rent." Yeah, no shit. You think I'm paying a dime out of my own pocket for something you should have done in the first place? You're drunk, aren't you?

And now my washing machine has gone down faster than an Atlantic City whore. I e-mailed you about this last week when it happened and your reply was that you'd have a new one here this past weekend. Yeah, it never showed up and I never heard from you. So I sent you another e-mail yesterday to which you replied today. The way it read, you were in touch with a guy selling a new one, all I needed to do was give the guy a call and he'd bring it over, set it up, and haul away the broken one. Of course, I would have to pay for it and "just take the $ off your March rent" (thanks again, buddy), but I sort of figured that was coming. So I call the guy tonight. He was cool, but it was immediately obvious that you had never even spoken to him. Apparently you saw an ad the guy had placed for his appliances and lobbed the ball back into my court. Looking up ads is easy, you didn't do shit!

I swear the only time my you actually act like a landlord is when you cash my rent checks every month. I mean, you're an okay guy, decent to talk to and you let me do pretty much whatever I want to do with the house, but c'mon, man! I think that in addition to taking the washing machine money off my next month's rent, I should add a little extra charge, you know, for the effort. You probably won't like that too much, but that's just how I roll.

Thanks again for nothing you lazy dick-knot,
P.

What To Do, What To Do....

I'm probably one of the few that likes the fact that today is Monday. While most are going back to work after having the weekend off, and hating it, I'm happily off today. I worked all weekend and now I'm enjoying the beginning of my week off from work. I took this Wednesday and Thursday off (the only days I was scheduled to work this week), so I get the whole week to myself. Well, that's not entirely true since my Chief thought it would be a great idea to send all his Sergeants to a bullshit seminar on Friday morning. I get my week off interrupted to go listen to some nonsense for a whole hour and a half - 9:30AM to 11:00AM. While some of you might say "Well that's not too bad, it's only an hour and a half," I would say that's precisely my point. I have to be bothered to go to this thing for 90 freakin' minutes and have it fuck up a completely good day off. But I get the last laugh. For 90 minutes of crap, I'll get paid the minimum 3 hours of overtime for it. Thanks for the extra cash, Chief.

Yesterday was my Dad's 75th birthday. Happy Birthday to my old man. Tonight we're going to take him out for a nice dinner and all that good stuff. I'm looking forward to it and it should be a good time. Dad is still dealing with his cancer and is still getting regular treatments and stuff, but he seems to be doing well. It's still so strange to me that when I call their house he is frequently the one answering the phone and he'll sit there and actually talk for awhile. Trust me when I tell you that my Dad has never been one to answer the phone, much less have more than a two sentence conversation on it. It was sometimes hard growing up with Dad because he was a strict disciplinarian and I was a bit of a screw up, but now that I'm (we're) older, it's been great. Here's to you, Dad, you're a great guy. You can still be a pain in the ass (apple doesn't fall from from the tree there, either), but you're a great guy. Cheers, John.

I'm apparently developing a tradition. When I was living in my brother's house last year, the washing machine took a nose dive on me. And now the same thing has happened here. Honestly, I'm pretty good at doing my laundry - I sort the clothes properly and all that stuff. I don't overload the washer trying to do a week's worth of stuff at once. But it seems that I'm cursed to have these things die out on me. I sent my landlord an e-mail about it last Wednesday when it happened and he said he'd try to have a new machine here over the weekend. Well, I just checked the calendar and it's Monday. Haven't seen or heard from him. I just sent him another e-mail asking for an update. I hope he gets it here soon. The clothes are piling up and I dread the concept of going to use the coin laundry. I'm not that much of a Telemundo fan.

I was about to launch into a rant about my landlord, but in an effort to keep my posts from looking like mini-novels, I'll save it for tomorrow. Right now, I'm going to grab myself another coffee and relax for a bit before I start tackling some chores around here.

EDIT - After I wrote the first paragraph I surfed on over to good ol' buddy Lisa's blog and realized that today is President's Day. So, yeah, most people aren't going to work today. Sad part about my job is that holidays don't matter because we never close. So I don't really pay much attention to them anymore. But tomorrow, when everyone is going back to work, I'll still be off! Boo-ya!

Peace & Chicken Grease!

Random Thursday Junk

Well this was a lovely, pain-in-the-ass, storm we had, wasn't it? I managed to slide home from work Tuesday afternoon right as it was all getting into full swing. Fortunately for me, I was off yesterday and today so I really didn't have to deal with all the bullshit. I can't stand working in severe weather. All I do is deal with knuckleheads wrecking their cars when they shouldn't have been out on the roads in the first place. But enough of me ranting about weather and idiots.

So Kolzig is out for three weeks with an injury. That blows. Brent Johnson is a decent back-up, but his play isn't always very consistent. I've seen him stand on his head and make some incredible saves, and I've seen him play like he was still sitting on the end of the bench with his helmet off. We're playing Tampa Bay tonight. We'll see how he does. I was happy to see that we signed Donald Brashear to a one year extension. I dig seeing him on the ice and even though he's far from a scoring threat, I like that he can keep the other teams honest. And by that I mean he can pummel the shit out of opposing team's goons.

I enjoy having days off from work during the week (like today). It's cool that if I need to go to the store, or anything like that, it won't be swamped with people. It's nice that I can sit here in my jammies playing loud music while everyone else I know is at work. In case anyone gives a shit, I'm jamming out to Carbon Leaf's "Learn to Fly." Good tune. Check it out. Of course, for as much as I'm digging the day off, I actually do have to go to work this afternoon. Our monthly supervisors meeting is scheduled for today. It's been scheduled on my day off for the past three months. I think the Chief hates me. I'll show him, though. I'm taking next week off. That'll teach him. Yeah, sure, whatever helps me sleep, right?

In other news, I'm going through the process of adopting a dog. Or at least I think I am. I had a "phone interview" and submitted my (4-page!) written application a couple of weeks ago. I haven't heard from anyone with the organization I'm going through, but I know they got my application because they cashed the "donation" check I enclosed with my app. According to their website, once they get my application they check my references and then they schedule a home visit. After the home visit they get together to determine if I'll be a good candidate to adopt. If I'm approved, then I meet with someone who'll match me up with available dogs they feel are best suited for me. Then I go see the dogs and see how it goes from there. It's a lot of stuff to go through (although I do kind of understand they want to screen people carefully), but I think it would be easier for me to adopt a Chinese kid. Hopefully I'll hear something from them soon. I'd hate to think that they took my money and ran, 'cause, you know, that would be wrong.

Is My Face Red?

Yeah, I'm mildly embarrassed.

OK, so here I am telling people that I'm back, I'm going to be posting stuff somewhat regularly, and what do I do? I forget my damn Blogger password. I'm not sure what happened. I have a handful of passwords that I use for things and I was convinced that I knew what I used for this. Apparently not. And God forbid you try to get your password reset. That was an ordeal. But after two days of messing around with it, I got back in. And I won't be forgetting this password anytime soon.

So I watched the Capitals lose to the Rangers last night. That kind of sucked, but I had a fantastic dinner and many drinks at Clyde's and Fado' before/after the game, so that was good. A friend from work and his wife came along and we all had a great time despite the loss. I was digging how everyone (myself included) was booing Jagr everytime he touched the puck. Welcome back to Washington Jaromir! And how about those fights? Sutherby throwing the gloves off was nice and who doesn't like a nice ass-kicking at the hands of Brashear? High-quality fisticuffs. Gotta like that.

On a related note - Hey Kim, what was it like to be on the Jumbo-Tron with your Mom? That was you, wasn't it?

Time to run to the store. Running low on coffee here at the house, which we all know is just wrong. See you tomorrow, peoples.

Back From Hiatus

At least for now.

OK, so I completely suck ass with keeping this thing current. I've sat down here numerous times thinking about something to update with and have drawn a total blank. Writer's block? I dunno. I think you have to be an actual writer before you can have that. Lack of creativity? Probably. It's not like there hasn't been stuff going on. Just being able to sit down long enough to compose thoughts to tell these little stories has become difficult for some reason. Maybe I was a little burned out. Who the hell knows?

Anyhow, I'm going to make an honest effort to get this going again. I've stored up some rants and raves and some halfway funny stories from work that should keep me in business for a little while anyway.

As I sit here and think about this, it occurs to me that I have probably lost any of the readers I once had. That kind of thing will happen when you don't throw out any fresh material. But we'll see. Maybe they're still around, lurking and what-not. And maybe, just maybe I'll score some new readers. I'd better bring my "A" game. Tune in tomorrow folks, P&S is back with a whole new season - with limited commercial interruption.