last month or so, it rained. and the room started smelling really bad, but we didn’t correlate these two events or something odd like that. i investigated and found that the carpet in the southwest corner of my room was wet. “what is the meaning of this?!” i said, and vaccumed the carpet like 6 times after buying baking soda, glade plug-ins, and this gigantic bottle of white powder that is supposed to neutralize odors. you sprinkle it on your carpet and then you vaccum it up. it didn’t work. so i left the guts of joan’s vaccum cleaner (i figured out how to take off the drive thing and the front, and attach the handheld parts, but i never figured out how the washer part fit on…) lying around and hung out at ryan’s. joan eventually found a spot of mold on the wall and cleaned it up and after that the room didn’t smell anymore. it had also stopped raining by then. HMM.
Friday, Dec 13, 2002. it starts raining sometime in the morning. everything is normal when i leave the apt at 12:20 to take my math final. i don’t want to talk about the math final, by the way. no. don’t ask me how it went. stop it i say. then i visited alan (more on that later) and then…
- 7:38pm – EXCITING NEWS! so i walk into my apt and IT STINKS… AGAIN!!! so it’s NOT just that spot of mold that one time… there’s apparently a leak in my apartment! it was fine yesterday… it was fine this morning… but i walked into my apt and whooooo i could smell that musty stagnant moldy green and fuzzy smell. can’t you feel the sickness creeping into your lungs? so i moved joan’s desk and put my lamp on the ground and guess what? you can SEE the damp puddle in the carpet!!! YAYYYYYY!!! so i just called the resident manager, some guy named steve, and told him. he is going to call cesar (the resident contractor for the panoramic bldgs) and then cesar is supposed to call me.
- 7:50pm – cesar and two people knock on the door. they enter. they look at the dampness. they knock on the wall and converse in spanish. they tell me they’ll be right back with a vaccum and a heater. i move joan’s desk.
- 9:04pm – they come back with a big vaccum cleaner and start vaccuming. they tell me that before they can do anythign else, like change our carpet, they want to look for the source–and to do that, they’d have to cut out pieces of the wall. but maybe not. they’re going to look at the apts above us and if those are getting damp too, then they’ll cut the walls up there. but they don’t want to cut walls yet because we’re still in finals. they speculate that we’re having problems now (while this apartment didn’t last year) because that wall that used to be really close to the south wall of the gaia building isn’t there anymore, so the flaws in the work are starting to show. ughhhh.
they better change our carpet!!!!!!!