The Wayfaring Wordhack

Let's take a moment to admire that beautiful, beautiful water behind my feet in the icon that accompanies this post.  Sadly, this entry will not feature any such water.

I don't need to rehash the problems we've had since living in this flat, but in case you've missed the previous rants, have memory problems, or are a masochist, you can read a smattering here and here.  Some problems are exclusive to this flat, some are tied to the building, and others to the country and its lack of infrastructure/current crisis.

Needless to say, the situation is a mess.  Somewhat like this:




That is our rooftop, where individual tanks stock water for each flat.  There is a central cistern beneath the building, which we'll come back to later.  This is the sight that greets you as soon as you climb onto the roof, and in order to access your tank, say to check the water level or admire its lack of cleanliness (we will also get back to this), you have to carefully step in those openings you see on the right.  The clearer space you see on the left is inaccessible until you have reached that gray tank in the center at the top of the photo.  Anyhow, before you get to admire that bit of ingenuity, you have to climb this sorry excuse for a ladder:






That broken rung has broken and been repaired several times since we moved in. One time, it broke beneath me. :-/.  Thankfully, I had a good grip on the uprights.

Anyhow, when we moved in, our landlord said he had paid the natour to clean our personal tank. She said she did, but did not.  Then it turns out, she cleaned "someone's tank, thinking it was ours."  Which is BS because she had to climb to the roof many times per week and move a hose between the tanks to fill them, so she knew full well which flats she was filling for.  Bon, the tank was filthy and thus remained because she never got around to doing the job before she left, leaving me, ill-equipped, the task of cleaning it during one of our waterless spells.




This is the water we flush our toilets with, the water we wash our clothes with, the water we wash our dishes, bodies, and teeth with...
...
...

My boys look happy to be on the tank because they weren't astride it for three solid houses, moving gunk with inadequate tools and no way to rinse the tank's interior.





"Gunk?" you ask.  Yes, this gunk:





Anyhow, that is all backstory to today's post.  Yesterday, our neighbor, B, whom we have given access to our tank on the roof--pumping into his tank, too,  when we fill ours--came to tell us that the main cistern was almost out of water and we had better start pumping to get it "before someone else does."  Which, you know, I don't really like the selfishness of, but B has a baby and is understandably worried about providing for his family. And he is Lebanese and knows the Lebanese mentality.

We turned on the pump, and the water pressure arriving in our tank seemed all right for a while.  When J later went back to check, the water was arriving in sporadic bursts.  This morning, the pressure was still weird.  I, who have been to the building's basement most recently, offered to go down and check on the state of things.  Imagine my shock when I saw the secondary reservoir that our landlord had promised to install! was empty and had no pump attached to it.  I feared someone had stolen the pump. 

While down there, investigating, I saw a pipe leaking precious water all over the floor.  Just great, I thought, shoddy work and now resources are going to waste.  But that amount of water did not account for all the wetness farther away.  Or the smell.  Just as I was getting ready to take a photo of some water motors, a great stream of filthy water started pouring out of a sewage pipe, right by the building's clean water cistern.  I will spare you the 50-second video I then recorded of this horror and just show you this photo instead:

As you can see from the stain down the wall and the water motors nicely lifted out of the worst of the filth, THIS IS NOT A NEW THING!  There were even stepping stones set up across the "stream" of sewage.

Did you know that there is a cholera epidemic in Lebanon right now?  And we have sewage raining down right over our cistern.  See that concrete block behind the tank just below the large taped-up pipe?  THAT is our building's cistern.  :(

We messaged our landlord, explained the problem, pointing out that as a medical doctor he should be only too aware of the health risks.  In the ensuing messaging, he admitted that the resevoir he promised to install had NEVER been set up. That green motor receiving all the splash back of sewage is the one that gets *our* water to *our* tank on the roof.

Color me disgusted.

 I bought a 6-pack of Dongxu-Art Black Woodless Graphite Pencils, opting to try them out rather than a more expensive (and already-known-to-me) brand.  I regret my decision.  I don't really like the way they lay the graphite down, but I have had worse.  My biggest gripe with them is how breakable they are.  I dropped one and it snapped.  Ok, I thought, that one is on me.  But yesterday, I was holding a paper against a window, and using the sunlight like a light-table to do a reverse tracing on some fancy lettering for my Jack and the Beanstalk cover. 

I was not applying excessive pressure, and the pencil just snapped in half in my hand.

:(

Not happy.

...that living in this flat is a pain.  I don't want my blog just to be about negative sorts of things, which is why I haven't moaned regularly about life in this apartment, but since we are moving away at last (well, we will move away as soon as we find an alternative), I figure it is time to talk about why.

First off all, this discontent has been going on from the very beginning, starting with the water situation; and at the time, I pointed out some positives about why I did not want to throw in the towel just yet on this address, which you can read about here.

In no particular order, the some of the problems are:

=WATER=

After 7.5 months, we have yet to have a normal, "agreeable" shower in this place.  This is due to 3  4 5 6 reasons: 

1) the water temperature.  Either your water is hot, or it is cold. Warm does not exist. Tepid is out of the question.  Our water temperature gauge does not go above 99 degrees CELSIUS! so I cannot give an exact number for the scalding water that we have had to deal with before our landlord shielded some of the captor tubes; however, the water still regularly gets up to 72 C.  

2) it takes forever for the hot water to arrive, like 15-to-20-liters-of-water-down-the-drain forever. (Which also means we never have hot water for washing our dishes unless we want to boil it.  This could be its own separate point).  We obviously do not let the water just go to waste. We keep it in buckets/bottles for flushing, watering plants, rinsing off... But the landlord says, "Water isn't expensive! It doesn't matter!"  ARGH

3) We can't use the shower in our own bathroom because some genius left a huge gap between the shower lip and the door, so water floods the bathroom while you shower no matter how many towels or sponges you try to cram into the gap to sop it all up.  So after you shower you, you have to clean the floor...

4) AFTER you have squeegied all the water down the drain because the genius masons did not plan proper slope in the Italian-style showers, and so the drain is actually a tad HIGHER than the surrounding tile, meaning it will stagnate in the shower unless you scrape it all down the drain yourself.

5) The bathroom we are forced to use smells permanently of sewage because of the plumbing system.  I do not now how much cleaner I have poured down it, just trying to disguise the reek.

6) The water pressure has a mind of its own. For some reason, in the guest bathroom, we can no longer get more than a trickle out of the sink faucet, and in the shower, when you try to put only cold water, it does the same for several minutes before finally blasting out. 

For the sake of brevity, I will not go into the hoops that we had to jump through to get water to arrive at our flat on numerous occasions because of system failure (which in many instances was landlord failure to have gotten his system straight from the get-go), the many trips to the roof to try to figure it all out, the entire day I spent sweeping goop out of the reservoir...

=ARCHITECTURAL IDIOCY=

Aside from the aforementioned poor drainage in the shower, we have windows and doors that will not open all the way because of poor placement in regards to built-in furniture, radiators, ceiling cornices, and supporting beams.  There is also no apparent switch to turn on the light on the balcony... Even the landlord couldn't figure that one out.  He has never lived here.*  Just bought the place as an investment.  Also, in order to turn on the light in the dining room, you have to go upstairs because there is not a switch downstairs...where the dining room is.

=SERVICES/EXPECTATIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH RENTAL PRICE=

This is one of the most expensive rentals we've ever lived in.  Because of that we actually expect some value for our payment, like a parking lot that isn't serving as a dump.  There is a literal dumpsite taking up a large part of the lot and a pile of sand/dirt that is now growing weeds and enough cat excrement to make one gag.

When we moved in, the elevator was working. Two days later, it stopped.  The landlord said that was too bad and if we wanted to use it, we would have to shell out the money. Um.  No.  Not OUR building.  

Also, we now have a new natour (concierge/building janitor), after 5 months of having no one, whom we pay who does NOT do his job and while the foyer occasionally looks clean, our stairs are never properly washed. 

The community lighting is never on in the building (we would be willing to pay) instead we have to walk into a completely dark building every night and use our phone flashlights to climb five flights of stairs that have no windows/skylights to aid us.  These lights do work, but NO ONE can tell us how to turn them on or where, but they were mysteriously in use when our never-there-next-door-neighbor wanted to move some stuff into his daughter's apartment on the floor below.  OK, we live with this, but it is a nightmare for our guests, especially little kids who are afraid to come to our house because of the lack of light.

There is double glazing on the big windows in the dining area, and one of the outer panes was busted** when we moved in. It is taped over; it is very ugly, but it is high up and not a window we can open, so we didn't make a fuss about it.  However, the latch on the window behind our bed was broken and condemned with masking tape.  Yes, masking tape.  Not even willing to put 10-20 bucks into fixing a latch for his tenants.  Remember all the heavy winter winds I spoke about?  Tape doesn't hold up, and the window constantly blew open.  Thankfully, J brought some vices from France that we have been able to use to hold it shut in a more permanent fashion. 

=LANDLORD'S DISHONESTY=

He has repeatedly made out that he had no idea about the water situation prior to our moving in.  We have spoken to the previous tenants--he had tried to make out that they left because they went back to Korea, which is not true--and they told us that he refused to fix the water for them, forcing them to boil their water for cleaning, etc.  Yet, he keeps bringing up to us his responsiveness and his goodwill in fixing all the problems, making it sound that everything is trying to thwart him.  We continue to hold this card, letting him tout his own goodness, blah, blah, blah.

He is trying to make  has made us pay for "breaking" his "new" washing machine.  Now, when you break something as a renter, it is normal that you should pay for it. However, in our experience and in that of other Lebanese people we have talked to, when it is an appliance that is in the flat that breaks down because of normal wear, it is up to the owner to fix it.  This is why we pay higher rent.  We did not break it; we used it.  And from day one it has made a weird noise, but being unfamiliar with the machine (and seeing that it was not new), I just shrugged and kept using it.

Turns out the bearings and spider (whatever that is) were totally broken and had been on the way out for some time. 

Seeing as our landlord was obviously going to interpret the contract in such a way that we are going to have to replace his appliances one by one as they fail to function, we told him we are leaving.  He was flabbergasted and said he would pay for the machine after all; he had only been upset before because it was "new."  When J called him on that, he said it was only 3 years old, then finally said "from 2016 but there were some moments when the flat was empty so it was practically new."  The repairman said it was definitely older than 10 years.

J told him we are not trying to bargain or get something from him, so thank you very much, we will pay for the machine ourselves but we are leaving because nothing in the contract says we can't.  However, we want to go on good terms.  The landlord went away sad, but he called back the next day and offered to pay for half of the repairs (remember he was going to pay for ALL of it before) but he wants us to stay until the end of the year marked out on our contract.

We paid for the machine ourselves, did not answer his message about staying, and have continued looking for a flat.  But now sickness has once again struck the family, slowing things down. We are paid up through September, so we have time, but like I mentioned, we are traveling to France for the last 3 weeks of September. I would have liked to have everything settled by then.  :-/

I think that is enough for now. *sigh*
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* This will be our advice to him when we give him back his keys:  Live in the place yourself for a couple of weeks so you can see how uncomfortable and annoying these things are to put up with.

** An amusing what-do-you-take-me-for aside:  The break was blamed on the port blast; but there is absolutely no way, I mean NO WAY, given the distance, direction, any possible ricocheting, etc. that a projectile from the blast could have hit that window.  It is kilometers and kilometers from the site, we are hundreds of meters higher above sea-level, and the building faces the wrong way.  Just own up and say it was broken, and you don't EVER plan on fixing it. 

 And #$%^&*! for the second time.

I just typed up a loooooooong post about my current writing status and accidentally closed the window and lost the whole thing.  ::headdesk::  I need to draft in LJ and then copy-paste here.  LJ may have its issues, but it at least freaking saves the drafts (and more importantly allows you to restore them in a logical fashion!) when it says it does.

Before I get all irate about DW, is there something I am missing about restoring drafts?  Is there somewhere I have to go, somewhere I have to look, to find and post them?

.....
......
........


I think I just figured out a way to do it.  God help me remember to do just the right thing next time this happens to me. grrrr

I recently read a book* in which a character looks at the position of the moon in the night sky and determines the time to be around midnight.  Dear friends, having seen the moon at 10:30 a.m. today,at what would be an equivalent "4 o'clock in the afternoon" position were it the sun, I can firmly assure you that it is a much more complicated way of telling time than merely "the moon is at its apex, it is midnight."   There *are* ways of calculating the time using the moon, but they are that: Calculations.  They need more inputs than what book characters are using.

And now your turn, should you wish to share :  Do you have any Youtube (authortube) channels that you watch for craft chat that do NOT involve showing segments of the author making coffee or walking and pet and/or going about errands?  I like listening to shop talk while puttering about the house in hopes that I will be motivated to work on my books.  Also, if the YouTuber thinks they need to swear constantly to make their points, I am not interested.

Thank you.  You may return to your regularly scheduled programing.
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* This is not the first book in which I have read such a thing

My post about the song in support of parents' right to decide on their children's education is a bit long, so I did not want to add to it.  However, I was thinking about how one nation's problems seem foreign, unimportant, and impossible to address to citizens of other countries.  Especially when each of us is already under some kind of "home country" stress, more true now than ever with elections, social injustice, corruption, a virus that has shut down the world*...

Yet, haven't many horrific situations in history started in just such a way?  A blind-eye to misgovernment here, a tiny revocation of freedom there, little by little habituating people to give up without a fight? To keep our eyes on our own problems so that we cannot be bothered to help others?  For my part, I hate talking about politics.  You can count on one hand--and maybe not use all of your fingers--the posts I have made in the almost-15 years I have been blogging.  And even writing this now, I have the feeling that I am bothering people, will be taken as a fanatic.  But I realize that my head-in-the-sand approach is part of the problem. :(

In France, education was obligatory for children 6 to 16 until a year and a half ago.  Not school:  education.  However, ask the general public and they will tell you it is school that is mandatory because that is the way the media presents "back to school" every year on TV and in the papers: "L'école est obligatiore de 6 à 16 ans" and no one corrects them.  Then the government lowered the obligatory age to 3. I told our inspector I thought it was a bad idea, but I didn't protest. I didn't contact our government representatives... 

Little by little, freedom by freedom.

Now this new law is attempting to make school and not education obligatory.  So, children, three years old, are going to be forced to pass the majority of their day in a school whether the children or parents want it or not.  If your three-year-old is not ready for school, it doesn't matter.  There are already so many problems in schools that need to be addressed, and now they want to add to the load of poor teachers who are already overworked in schools that are over-populated. (A sad corollary to this is that there is plenty of room in rural schools and yet the government makes it hard for people to live in the country, preferring to have everyone in easier-to-control/observe cities.)  

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* These thoughts were prompted by a question from queenoftheskies  who asked if kids are going to school here.  The answer is, now, yes.  However, in the spring, the government sent all of them home; families had to adapt, and guess what?  Many of them loved it, loved connecting with their kids and helping with their learning.  So the number of families who decided to home-school for this school year skyrocketed, which, as you probably guessed, caused a panic in the national educational system.  So now, we are in our second lockdown but kids are required to go to school, despite the fact that teachers cannot keep them safe, meaning the families are not safe either.  On the one hand, they shut down all sorts of services, small shops, restaurants, etc. but primary schools, enormous vectors of illness, are still up and running. 

 Did you automatically read that subject line with a sarcastic tone?  You should have.

Last year, I was on the look out for a kitten or cat or adopt to help deal with the rodent invasion we were having, an invasion that had been brought into our house. I could not sleep because of the scrabbling in the walls and ceiling of our bedroom, and traps were just not cutting it. I finally got a handle on things though and stopped asking around.

Well, just after Christmas, some kind soul decided to dump three cats out in our little hamlet of three houses. Aside from our three-legged rescue cat from Mayotte, there are no cats here. No one at the other two farms wants cats around, and because a) I had wanted a cat to help with rodents, b) I don't like to think of abandoned animals trying to fend for themselves, we set out food.

Yes, I would have been happy to have a cat or two; on a farm they can be really useful.  It would have been nice had they not been feral and if we would have been ASKED first.

So, one of the three is completely wild, a big black tom, and we hardly catch a glimpse of him, thinking he has disappeared only to see him again. The second is a young male, who with lots of coaxing has finally become friendly enough that we will be able to take him and get him fixed (gotta call the vet!). The third was a pregnant female! And of course she is still wild and fearful and will not let us near her. We were planning on catching her and fixing her, too, but now she is pregnant AGAIN.

So now we have Bengali, the nice male, and three little kittens who have been abandoned so the mom (Grisou) can eat for her next litter. Oy oy oy. Naturally, since Grisou is afraid of us, her kittens are little wild things, too. :(

We cannot financially see to castrating and spaying all of them, even if we can catch them. I have no idea what we are going to do. :-/

Here is a crappy phone photo of them that I was able to get before they realized I was there and fled to the four corners of the hamlet:


The mom is the gray and white blob on the left with a black kitten hiding her face, then two black and white kittens, far right, with Bengali almost front and center.

When you ask the parents of a newborn if you can come by and meet the baby, please, come by and meet the baby.

Because even if I don't clean my house from top to bottom, I do make an effort to tidy it for you.

I do either bake something or go buy something to make sure I don't welcome you empty-handed.

And you know what else? I miss out on my nap.

I am tired and I have hormone things going on as I recover from 9 months of pregnancy and the whole rollercoaster of giving birth.  So maybe I'm a little bit sensitive here. But seriously. If you say you are coming:  Come.

(Twice now, we've had no shows. Once, the people just seemingly forgot.  The second time, the couple did call to cancel 30 min before they were supposed to show.)

Not a fun morning; an admin morning.

I had to renew my passport and after toting a God-awful passport photo for the past ten years, I was determined to have a better one this time around. So, J and I spent HOURS on it. No, not trying to make me look better or Photoshop me...just to do the shot, select one, make website formatting tools play nice, and get our printer to work. After wasting sheets of photo paper and buckets of ink, I showed up to my appt with several options, size-wise.  Only to be told that they would not accept my background, which was white with a faint bluish cast, even though the "rules" state that off-white is fine. Argh. So I had to go across the street and have another taken, in which I look just as tired as the whole process makes me feel and all washed out to boot, thanks to wearing a white blouse.  

I was asked to bring along "proof" of my citizenship, just in case. And spent more HOURS looking for said proof yesterday, only not to be asked for anything at all. ( I had sorted all these papers into a special pile, and then, in the move-house frenzy, packed them, instead of refiling them.)

Thank goodness I only have to do this every ten years.

And the lesson of the day: Stick to my guns and only take a taxi with a meter. On the way to the consulate, I ended up accepting a ride with no meter, agreeing to pay 40 LE because J told me that was a good rate.  On the way back, we held out for a meter and only paid 20. o.O

Second lesson: If there are no signs saying which line you should be in, ask. Even if there is only one line.  I stood in the "wrong" line for 30 minutes. I actually had a feeling it was the wrong line but did not make a move earlier because I was waiting on J and didn't want to go inside without him since a) I had his passport, b) phones have to be off once inside. When the time for my appt arrived, however, and I was only five steps closer (out of about 30 more) to the door, I did jump the line and got to go directly inside.  I did not appreciate the slight smirk of the man at the barrier which seemed to say that he knew I was in the wrong place and could have done something about it.

I did get to see something unusual on the taxi ride this morning: A motorcycle passenger sitting sidesaddle, his ankle swathed in bandages, carrying his own foldable wheelchair.