Gratitude Monday: domestic bliss

There is nothing like getting estimates from contractors to put one in one’s place. In the universe of plumbers, electricians and handymen, you are but a speck in the tail of an asteroid. This might explain why so many idiosyncrasies are to be found around my house.

Of course, it may also be that the previous owners were just too cheap to invest so much as $1.98 in upkeep.

However, having been here going past six months, I’ve started tackling some of the oddities. Which is to say, I’ve started getting quotes from electricians. And last week I had a team of them in to deal with the cockeyed wiring upstairs.

I am grateful to report that the ceiling light/fans in the back bedrooms are now operated via wall switches in the respective rooms, instead of both of them being controlled by a switch in the hall closet. And the hall bathroom fan is now on a switch separate from the light switch. So I can brush my teeth at night without having to listen to the bleeding fan.

The electricians were professional, polite and personable. I had a nice chat when time came to settle up—yes, of course credit cards okay; you want those miles, right? (Turns out he’d used one of his to buy an $8600 fishing boat and got something like $250 cash back. So then we chatted about fishing, and birds.) And then I was ready to move my sleeping arrangements to one of the back bedrooms, which overlook a bunch of greenery, as opposed to the master bedroom, which is smack on the cluster parking lot.

It turns out that some of the residents here, and their friends, are night crawlers; they use the parking lot as a gathering place, smoking and joking as late as midnight. Then there’s the woman across the way, who holds hours-long mobile phone conversations starting as early as 2200, but often going past 0230. She invariably puts her mobile phone on speaker so everyone can hear both sides of the call.

I’ve contacted the cluster president, and the condo management association, but no one wants to do anything about it. And repeatedly reminding the Night Crawlers under my window that these are all bedrooms only scatters them at the moment. The next night, or the next, they’re back. I don’t know why they don’t have these gatherings in their actual residences, but it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that if their housemates don’t want this crap in their living room, neither do their neighbors.

Anyhow, on Saturday evening, friends showed up to move my rather cumbersome mattress and box spring—two guys took less than five minutes to do it. And that night I had the first night of unstressful sleep since about April, when the weather warmed up. Window open, just the crickets and other non-human night critters for a lullabye. And when I woke up, my view was of the birds at the feeders below me.

So today I’m grateful for competent electricians and strong friends, and for the expectation of good sleep.

Now—plumbers. I’ll need a plumber next.