'Partment Problems

When your apartment is only slightly larger than a shoebox there are a limited number of things that can go wrong with the fixtures within. Recently though, it seems like there's a new problem every week.

Take our upstairs neighbors, for example. Never heard a peep out of them up until a few months ago. Now, every night (and only on work nights, for some reason) they are driving us up the wall. They don't usually get home until a little after midnight and then it begins- the drunken girly laughing and giggling. This usually escalates into drunken thumping, falling down and (for some reason) late-night vacuuming. Usually around 2am they've started the drunken screaming (it sounds like the killer from the Scream movies has just snuck into their room). We pound on the ceiling, to no avail (English knocking is not understood). Then they fall asleep with their phones on the floor which vibrate on our ceiling over and over through the night. We wake up in the morning and there's puke and cigarettes in the stairwell. I hate them.

Two weeks ago, Mel texted me at school to let me know that it smelled like gas in the apartment. I got my school to send the gas guy over to our apartment to check it out, but he said there was no problem. We were relieved! But then, last Saturday night, our gas powered Boiler exploded. Ash lined the wall and ceiling. Water leaked from the bottom of it all weekend and we had no hot water for two days before my school sent another guy to fix it. It's fine now.

But then came the most disturbing change of all- we have cockroaches!!! This apartment has never really been insect free- in the summer we had wasps letting themselves in to hang out, and in the fall we had a rotten stint of mosquitoes, but cockroaches is a new low.

After our weekend away in Andong we walked in to our place to find a roach crawling around in the sink. After killing it, I opened up the cupboard to get a cup and there was another one crawling on our cups!! Ahhhhh!!!! During the debate about who was going to kill this massively disgusting creature, it disappeared somewhere and now it's living free among us... walking on our faces as we sleep, I suspect.

It's a small apartment, but the location is amazing, it's free and it's functional. Actually, it's more than free- we get paid to live here thanks to Mel's housing subsidy. Mel hates it, but I've stuck up for it in the past. However, these recent developments are wearing me down. It's hard to deny that living in a cockroach nest isn't a hit to your quality of life. I can't help but think that our first 1-bedroom apartment in Canada is going to feel like a palace in comparison.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a ceiling to bang on and a cockroach to hunt down.

UPDATE: We had 2 more roaches visit our laundry room on Sunday night and on Monday morning there were three in our bathroom! Mel bought some Raid for us on her way home from work and I bought some bleach to pour down the drains. It's war, roaches!!!

UPDATE 2: We have now been roach-free for a full 24 hours! In addition to being extremely effective, the Raid has also had another pleasant side effect: spraying a whole can of it in the air yesterday has left our place smelling of the sweet floral scent of poison. Life is finally getting back on track.