I'm not a-lion

I went to the National Zoo in Washington, D. C. this past weekend.

A good time. It's a zoo. There's a baby panda. It's free!

What more could you want?

Well, I, for one, could want a lion.

It would have been nice to see a lion while at the zoo. It makes perfect sense. They have two huge lion statues at their entrance. One would only expect to see a real live lion within.

Alas, free zoos must do maintenance, too. And they don't have the funding for pretty distractions. The lion display was "temporarily out of service" according to the sign.

But I did see a big Zebra, and his mammoth penis.

The sky has opened

Some of you may wonder...what next?

What happened with the bathroom ceiling?

It came out.

No, don't worry, it didn't fall on my head. Thank god! But, our landlord did come by last Monday and "fix" the leak. By "fix the leak", I mean he pulled out a chunk of our ceiling and peeled back a bit more of the paint to let it all dry out. He moved all our toiletries about, stacked our trash cans (used to catch leaking water) inside one another like some kind of modern totem pole and placed mop and broom outside the apartment in the hallway. Our bathmat seems to have disappeared during the remodeling.

Funny thing is, our landlord (I'll rename him Mr. M. The "M" stands for "Mystery Man"), Mr. M did not leave a note behind, he didn't call us with an update, and in the end I called him on Tuesday night (leaving ample time for him to call me) to find out our status on the new sunroof he installed (destalled?).


We lived like this, the ceiling wide open wondering if the hippies were peering down upon us, for a full week. Mr. M wanted to be sure everything dried out completely and keep an eye out for any further leakage.

There was no further leakage. But I'm not so sure there wasn't any peakage. (Bu-dum-bump!)

We went to D.C. this last weekend, reporting to Mr. M that there were no further rain showers in our bathroom that we noticed. He swooped in (mystery man that he is) and completed the job and by Sunday night we had a mostly repaired ceiling. (No picture available.) By mostly, I mean that for some reason he didn't cover the whole ceiling and some of the ceiling still has remnants of yellowing coffee-like stains mixed in. I think Mr. M was going for the antique look.

Not that I'm complaining! I love antiques. And, it is also very good to have a dry roof over our heads again. Thank you, Mr. M.

Now, if only someone could tell me...where is our bathmat?

Me

This is a chronicle of me.

It may seem self-obsessed. But hey, aren't we all?

Some other people are mentioned too.

Pop Pop STOP

I eat a lot of popcorn. I'm serious. A LOT. Ask anyone that's every lived with me. I eat a bowl of popcorn a day. (Pictured below is the bowl.) Lately, it's become two bowls. That's a lot of popcorn.
My friends say, "That's okay, popcorn is good for you."

My physical trainer says, "That's okay, popcorn is good for you."

My doctor says, "That's okay, popcorn is good for you."

I ask them, "Yeah, but certainly AS MUCH popcorn as I eat can't be good for you?"

To which they all reply, "It's fine." "Better than something else." "It's not going to hurt you."

How am I suppose to cut down on the eating or stop this excessive behavior if everyone's so positive about my obsession? Sure, it's cute. It's unique. It makes me ME. But, honestly, the main problem here, besides the kernels stuck in the teeth, is the GAS.

I'm a vegetarian. I already have a lot of gas. And what is popcorn, anyway, but a bunch of puffy white fiber balls just waiting to balloon out in my stomach. (I also eat way too fast for fear someone will one day share my obsession and eat more popcorn than me. This is perhaps a separate issue owing to the fact that I grew up in a family of five kids, me being on the younger end of the totem pole and having to fight dually hard for my rations. Rations being cookies, gummy bears, sinfuls, peanut brittle, "chicken" salad and of course, popcorn.)

So, please, I LOVE popcorn. But I hope that I can one day find someone who will at least say, "You know, maybe you should make smaller portions. You know, if it's just going to be you eating it."

To which, in reply, I will probably pop a third bowl of popcorn.

Anyone want to go to the movies?

Raindrops keeping falling

We have hippie neighbors. They live upstairs in the split family home. It's us and them. We live downstairs. Most everything our hippie neighbors do makes some kind of hippie-sense. Like saving every plastic container ever given to them. Taking EVERYTHING to the thrift store, or hoarding it in their house where they'll sell the parts or give them away on freecycle.com. Eating everything grown in their own garden, including the flowers of the plants which they are not sure, but they THINK is a hybrid of broccoli and celery. Or was it scallions? At any rate, all of this is fairly normal in the hippie way of life.

And it makes sense. And I get it. I'm even a little envious that I am too attached to my materialistic-comforts-of-home lifestyle to eat from my own garden. (I did try the mystery flower, though. It tasted kinda like broccoli.)

It gets to be too much for me, their neighbor, to handle at this point - I'm in the bathroom on the toilet...and I feel raindrops. Oh wait. No, that's not raindrops. That's foul coffee-colored liquid dripping from my ceiling. The drips continue for weeks. We call the landlord. He regrouts their tub. The drips start again, this time accompanied by nice huge swells in the ceiling. Just threatening to pour down on me like a looming Florida storm cloud. I call the landlord. He calls the neighbors.

This is key.

While a puss-like bulge is growing in my ceiling, the neighbors are "taking a shower," they tell Matt, the landlord, "without closing the shower curtain."

What?! Who DOES that? There is a point to the shower curtain, right? I mean, who wants to take a shower and then step out into a bath? How much mold and filth must there be on their bathroom floor and walls? I'm astounded.

Automatically, I try to equate this to hippie logic. There is none. There is no reason to subject your own floor and your neighbor's ceiling to a diluge of coffee, mildew, sewage baths. The picture you see above is about 8 hours before the bubble gave out and my nice, clean bathroom was washed in rust water. Or, at least, as I tried to salvage my bathroom, I was washed in rust water.

And then Andy came back from vacation.