the tornado warning sounds everyday at noon

things I was told and should have believed but didn't:



1. "It's much to hot to go jogging in Arizona in July... at any time of day."


2. "Wisconsin is humid."


The fact is, both are true.

The one about Arizona I learned the hard way.

Wisconsin taught me by making the linoleum floors feign mild flooding:
"What is this phenomenon? Is something leaking?"
"No, all the floors are like that."


Does anyone else make this mistake or am I just prone to skepticism?

misfits

To be honest, it took me a little too long to realize our apartment wasn't livable anymore.

And that was even after the sewage pipes backed up and flooded the kitchen, bathroom, and the small extra room in under 10 minutes.

Come to find out, the reason our bathroom had been periodically flooding (clean water those times... don't worry), and water kept trickling down from the apartment above us was tree roots.

Apparently these tree roots were old "friends" to our landlords who were twice informed about the flooding bathroom and of our suspicions that something was greatly amiss.

Their teenage sons did a tolerable job of removing the carpet and vacuuming up the sewage water with an old Shopvac, but sadly lacked the judgement to refrain from placing soggy boxes and contaminated objects on our previously (and quite luckily) unscathed bed saying they needed to, "get them out of the way".

In the end, it was kind family members, whether it be a kind word over the phone, or giving us a place to stay for month before we make the move we were actually planning on making, that made it possible for me to fully comprehend the sanitation craziness of it all without completely losing my cool...

heck...

I might still be living there if it weren't for you all!

So, here's to first apartments and impositions upon the ones you love!

And to the festering sewage (that I'm sure the appropriate disaster clean-up crew will never see) I can only emphatically say, "See you, suckers!"

mael·strom

-noun

1. a large, powerful, or violent whirlpool.

2. a restless, disordered, or tumultuous state of affairs: the maelstrom of early morning traffic.