runswithscissors

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

People have been traipsing in and out of here during the last hour with the frequency of a cheap ham radio. The main event: the male 50% of my landlords arrived to pick up a wad of cash and attempt to make the toilet happy. This may be challenging to write about because he knows this page's URL (in the course of the $$$ part of the visit, he mentioned that his wife had read the entry of six days ago; I didn't realize, I said with pleased surprise, she stopped by my little cyber-fiefdom now and then to do some reading; "That's what it's there for, isn't it?" he replied a bit pointedly (as if I'd somehow suggested the opposite) -- er, well, yes; he apparently read that entry himself and seemed particularly, er, taken with my characterization of him as stopping by for "an infusion of cash," as well as referring to him as "the LL"; could that have had anything to do with his tone of voice, do you think? will I be paying for my cheap-ass literary flourishes with further tones of voice in the future?) so I'll keep it brief. Suffice it to say that when it came to the handyman-wrestling-with-toilet part of the program, between the two of us we produced a near-continuous stream of comedy. And -- I swear I'm not making this up -- two of my contributions led to the fixing of the problem. The details aren't important -- let's just say they were brilliant, and that the toilet tank now remains filled post-flush instead of spritzing water eternally down into the bowl.

I noticed that all through toilet/$$$$ process the construction across the street mostly took a breather, giving the impression of a tranquil neighborhood with a civilized noise level. They must have spent the landlord's visit mounting the jack-hammer attachment on the rear-end/front-end loader, because minutes after LL fled, big-time construction racket cranked itself up to tooth-rattling levels. The interesting part is seeing how much of it I actually tune out as I get doing something. We're adaptable, resilient critters, we humans. Every now and then, though, the noise stops for a few moments, I remember how good silence can feel.

A short time after the toilet's miracle cure, a young woman showed up to take the reading from the piso's water meter -- short, wearing a two-or-three-sizes-too-large winter coat, bearing an alarming resemblance to Marty Feldman. In and out, like a wild-eyed blur. After her exit, I could hear her voice at every other door she stopped in front of, calling out "La luz!!" ("the light!!"), something about her tone suggesting she might be on the verge of a major emotional event. ("Luz," BTW, gets pronounced "looth" here, so what I actually heard was a repeated cry of "La looth!!")

Not long after that, a slim, quieter, more self-composed South American guy stopped by to read the gas meter. Again, in and out. All business.

The buzzer from the building's front door has been going off every few minutes since then as people with junk mail stop by wanting to get into the building to shove, er, junk into every piso's mailbox instead of using the junk-mail box mounted outside the door. This flat's buzzer is startlingly loud and diabolically grating, a combination that can do strange things to one's nervous system after repeated unexpected blasts.

Outside: gray skies, cool temperatures, a chilly, restless breeze blowing laundry about on apartment clotheslines. Yesterday evening, after days of summerlike weather, clouds moved in, bringing autumn-like weather along. Plummeting temperatures, gusts of wind. My landlord carried an umbrella when he showed up (though not when he was rooting around in the toilet), not the normal accouterment for this time of year. It's been a strange few months, weatherwise, with far more rain than usual. According to this morning's El País, the water reserves stand at over 91%, far and away the highest figure I've seen during my time here, so that my toilet has been no threat to the supply of H20 whenever it's gone on a tank-filling bender.

The day's finale will be a visit from a locksmith to take care of a long-standing problem with the piso's industrial-strength lock. I just received a call saying they were on the way.

On to the next source of material.

6:31:33 PM

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