2003-01-30 8:46 p.m.
A Harvest Gold Farewell
The seventh worst thing about my apartment is getting ripped out in a week and a half.
Last week was inspection time at Stately Penis Car Manor. I left a maintenance request to have them look at the many things leaking and cracking in my bathroom, and in exchange I got a call back from the contractor:
Contractor: So Tuesday we'll replace the bathtub and toilet, since you need to have those available, Wednesday we'll rip out the tile, Thursday we'll start on the vanity...
Me (picking jaw up off the floor): Sounds like you're redoing the entire bathroom.
Contractor: You have a yellow toilet, right?
Me: Yeah.
Contractor: Then yeah, you're due. I figure there's no reason to take chances.
Yippee!
The dreaded yellow toilet (along with the yellow sink and the yellow bathtub) dates from a time when people thought that avocado and harvest gold were genuinely good, non-ironic color choices for home decor. It's actually worse than harvest gold because it's a little bit brighter and yellower. (And who on earth thought a brownish-yellow was a good choice for a toilet??)
But believe it or not, the shamefully dated crapper is pretty low down on the list of things to dislike about my apartment. The six things higher on the list are:
- The heat in the summer. My apartment turns into a tiny oven that melts and curdles all within. A bottle of wine can get killed in an afternoon. Chocolate and oil need to be stored in the fridge between April and October so they don't go bad. There is, of course, no air conditioning, because no one else in my corner of the Bay Area actually
needs it. (Luckily, TheCat is true to her Texas roots and seems to actually like the heat, except on the nastiest days, when she gets put in the coolest room in the house with an open window and a fan.)
- My tiny, tiny kitchen. It has an electric cooktop built into the counter, and the big burners are in the back where I can't quite reach them. So whenever I want to fry something, only half the pan gets really hot. There are prisoners in San Quentin who get more counter space to work with than I do. And I don't even own a microwave, because there's nowhere to put it.
- Electrical outlets. Not enough of them, they're in all the wrong places, and they're not wired very well. Outlets are not supposed to cave in when you plug things into them.
- A gas wall heater with an open pilot light. TheCat loves it because she can sack out right in front of it until her fur's hot to the touch, but I worry about the carbon monoxide potential. And while they were running gas up here anyway, couldn't they have sent some over to the stove?
- The fridge, which freezes things on the top shelf of the refrigeration compartment and sometimes leaves things in the freezer a little melted around the edges. It also has a weird leak of unknown origin.
- The building's washer and dryer are three flights down. Neither works very well. And did I mention they're harvest gold?