it's been a week since i ordered the those nylon hose adapters and carpenter ant baits, neither of which have arrived yet. to add insult to injury, both orders were still pending, not even shipped out. i contacted QC supply first regarding the hose adapters, as they seemed to be the more legitimate outfit. i called their number and spoke with somebody right away. they're based in nebraska and i've never with anyone from there before; i was trying to see if i could hear an accent but woman i spoke to had none. she looked over my order and said the delay was because they only had 3 adapters and was waiting for a 4th from their distributor before shipping out. she said she'd split the order at no cost, sending out the 3 adapters now (arriving next monday) and wait for the 4th to arrive at some later date.
as for the ant bait, i ordered from pestrong.com. there was something kind of sketchy about their website from the start. based in georgia, i tried calling their number but kept getting disconnected for some reason. i noticed they had a live chat option, so i gave that a try, but it was offline, so i basically filled out a form asking for a status update on my order. i then tried calling again; this time i managed to get through, but it was an automated verizon voice message saying that number can't accept anymore calls. feeling like maybe i got scammed, i went to paypal, which was how i paid for the order, and started filling out a form to register a complaint and maybe get my money back. i went back to pestrong.com's website to look for the order number and that's when i saw the status had been updated to shipped (since yesterday). i cancelled out the complaint form. i also got an e-mail from pestrong.com, from a kevin lee (too many kevins in my life), replying to my live chat inquiry, told me the order had been shipped (arriving saturday).
when i got up this morning i went outside to water the back and fron yard, because i wasn't able to do it yesterday evening. afterwards i went down into the basement and found a few boxes for kevin's move. i told him those were for him, he didn't seem to understand, until i told him it was for moving. he probably hasn't done a lot of moving in his lifetime. "that's this weekend," he said, like somehow he can gaslight me into forgetting when he's moving out. "no, you're moving out friday," i replied. he paused. "friday might not be good, i have a meeting," he told me. when i asked him when the meeting was, he said 11am to 12pm. "we'll move after your meeting," i informed him.
actually, kevin could've moved out as early as yesterday. the student staying in the room he'll be moving into left to go back to china yesterday morning. i hear bits and pieces about his itinerary, first to georgia where he has to stay overnight, then maybe a few more connecting flights before he finally arrives in china. i'm also not sure about this, but my mother said the ticket price was $4000. when i told her the school pays for the airfare, it made more sense. but the bedroom was empty so my father called me to help him clean up the room, move some furnitures, and install window AC's in the bedrooms.
when my father and i went into the apartment, the one remaining graduate student (living in the smaller center bedroom) was cooking in the kitchen. he looked awful, hair disheveled, hadn't shaved in a while, beard growing out in dirty clumps. quite frankly, he looked homeless, and seemed like he hadn't been outside in a while. he was due to leave at the end of july but has decided to extend his stay until october.
the empty bedroom for the most part was relatively tidy, but the previous tenant left a lot of stuff behind, things he thought too precious to toss out, but things we saw as trash. after clearing the clutter, we installed the AC's. the one in the common area by the stairwell, they said it broke over the weekend, and sure enough, it wasn't running. the compressor was going but the fan was dead, that one will need to be replaced. as for the two bedrooms, my father and i went down into the basement and climbed up two flights of windy narrow stairs to bring them up. the larger bedroom (the one kevin will be staying in) has two windows so putting a window unit AC isn't a big deal. the smaller bedroom though, it only has one window, and the student living there seemed to regret complaining about the heat because now his only window was blocked by the AC.
after that we took apart the smaller twin bed1 and moved it to the cafe basement - bed frame, box spring, mattress. we then moved the full-size bed back to it's original corner (by the southern facing AC window).
i got there at 11:50am and wasn't done until nearly 3 hours later at 2:45pm. i hadn't eaten anything yet all day but my father gave me some leftover barbecue to take back home. i didn't eat that however, but instead had a greek yogurt and a peach.
i had some leftover cold barbecue for dinner while watching becky, the 2020 film about a little girl fighting against a group of neo-nazi home invaders that escaped from prison. the movie is probably best known for kevin james' turn as a white supremacist ring leader, completed with swastika and aryan tattoos. the film is surprisingly graphically violent for a movie with a little girl as the protagonist, in hindsight not the best movie to watch while eating barbecue.
i never used facebook marketplace before, but my father's always telling me about seeing interesting stuff advertised on there. my poison for cheap used items is craig's list, but the marketplace seems very similar. and because it's facebook and everyone's supposedly vetted, it seems a lot safer somehow. yesterday my father was telling me about somebody selling a bunch of red olive barrels. those are the ones we like best because they can be used as catch basins. out of curiosity, i logged into my own facebook account and found the listing. a woman in dedham selling them for $75 a piece. i got in touch with her, not really expecting her to respond, but she got back to me almost immediately. she said she'd be available thursday morning between 10:30am-11am. i told her that was fine. she asked me to message her thursday for confirmation. so hopefully everything works out okay.
i tossed out the trash, trying to compress one of the garbage bags with my fist, until i realized there were pieces of table top glass poking out. i was lucky i didn't accidentally slice open my hand. i still have some large pieces i need to take care of, take it out back and smash it into smaller pieces, making sure not to spray glass shards everywhere.
3 more days! |
kevin prepared for bed around 12:30am, lights out by 1am. i finally prepared for bed at 2am, in which time i found kevin fumbling at the bathroom doorknob trying to get him. he's never looked to see if anybody is already inside, always just assumes its empty. at this point there's no reason to complain about it. i got out as quickly as i could to allow him to the use the bathroom before i went back inside to finish up and take a shower. for some reason he decided to stay up late again, his bedroom lights all open, the electric tea kettle reboiling a pot of water.
1 the reason why there are two beds in this large bedroom is because there were two students sharing the room. normally it's just one person per room, but because the 2nd student couldn't find anywhere else to live and both of them knew each other, they decided they could share a single room, dorm style (which is very common in china, even amongst graduate students, although these were undergraduates). rent was increased slightly to take into account the additional person (though it barely covered the cost of the skyrocketing winter heating bill). one had a larger full size bed while the other had a twin bed. one was dirty, the other was clean. after much delay, they finally left, one leaving earlier than the other.