Hi, My name is Derek. I am good friends with Kyla, Casey and Brittny who rule over this blog. I used to be VERY good friends with them until I went to Ottawa to do my Masters in Piano Performance. I think they are all a bit bitter at me for leaving, so they may have bumped me down to just the good friends category. They have been asking me to write something for their blog for quite a while now, but I never really knew what to write about. I felt too much pressure to write something funny. They wanted me to write about this time I ran up a mountain, but I mean how interesting is that? I tried writing about it, I got as far as:
“Uhhhh..... Today I ran up a mountain. And then I ran/fell back down?”
Against my better judgement I decided not to do that one. Even though I had spent a lot of work on it. I was beginning to think this might never happen. Luckily though, a series of events transpired that was just asking to be written about, no exaggerating or hyperboles needed. Now I think my title needs a bit of explaining, I just picked that because it is a pretty awesome title. It is only one of many unusual things occurring in this post. I also want to say that everything I say here is 100 percent true! I wrote out percent instead of using the symbol because it makes it look more impressive. Same with the bold.
So this story needs a bit of boring background. Kind of like a prologue. I don’t usually read them because I keep looking forward to when the actual book starts. Or maybe that is the Forward? I’m not really sure. Anyways to make a long boring prologue a short boring prologue, when I moved to Ottawa I had a place lined up with a soon-to-be-roommate-friend for September. When he went to sign the papers he discovered there had been a mistake in the listing and it wasn’t till October, so we decided to take it anyway and use his old place from last year that was under renovation for a month. Comprenday?
I think now the best way is to do an event by event analysis just to keep things ordered and organized. Because I love things ordered and organized…(not really).
Tuesday Sept. 6th
Earlyish - My plane arrives in Ottawa and Jordan (my new roommate) texts me the address of the place we are living. He says my ‘room’ needs a bit of cleaning up. He has been warning me for a while about the condition of the place. I dismiss it, I figure I would live places no one else would dare consider so that this couldn’t be too bad. I mean, I lived in a music building at the University of Victoria for a month. Like a boss.
Late afternoonish - I get there and Jordan lets me in. It is quite dark and upon being question he says matter of factly, “Ooh theres no electricity.” Hmm...... Interesting. Good to know. We head through the hallway where there is a huge rolled up carpet taking up about 4/5ths of the hallway. For those bad at math that leaves 1/5th for walking. Equal to about one and a half size thirteen shoe widths. He takes me up a flight of stairs, it is so dark we have to use our cell phones as lights so we can see where we are going. I can see gaping holes in the walls and drywall and debris and broken glass all over the carpet floor. We get to the landing and I see a light!
“Ooh yeah theres one outlet on the 4th floor that is working so I ran an extension cord down here to a power bar.”
That is why I room with him. Ever so practical.
“Your room is over there.”
I open a door and all I see are renovating tools, sheets of drywall haphazardly strewn about the room, cans of paint, a crushed computer, a couple sets of front doors, holes in the walls, a set of blinds, and various other things whose purpose in life confused me.
“Sorry which one? This one is being used.”
“No thats the one.”
I spend a lot of time moving all the stuff into a back area of the room, which was almost like another section to the room. Actually moving is incorrect. I was throwing, hurtling, propelling, projecting, lanuching, chucking, and other words that showed up in the thesaurus. I swept out the inch or so of drywall dust and other stuff with the broken head of a broom, and moved in the mattress. Jordan looks in, “It looks like you are a crack addict.” I go to sleep.
Wednesday the 7th
9:00 - I am woken up to the sound of renovating. There are people outside my door working on the house. I go over the hilarity that ensued the night before and decide to leave my stuff packed and just live out of my suitcases. I don’t trust anything touching any of the surfaces of the room. I have just enough faith in the dresser to store my dirty clothes in it.
9:30am - I leave for school not really wanting to spend any more time than I need to at "home".
11:00pm - I return with Jordan after a long day of practicing. I don’t have any keys yet to the house, so I came back with him. I get upstairs to my room and find it locked. I had left it unlocked. Our landlord must have come by during the day and done me a ‘favor’ by locking it. I still hadn’t met him yet. I have to climb up the gazebo type thing in the front yard and climb through my 2nd story window. Once in through the window I then have to climb over all the stuff I have chucked into the back area while cleaning my room. I fall asleep feeling pretty awesome about myself. I dream about being an expert at parkour.
I will interrupt my narrative to talk about a few things.
One: the condition of the house. Not a single room is livable, no heat, pretty much no electricity, holes everywhere, electrical stuff everywhere, bits of drywall and molding everywhere, and an unpleasant smell everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I really actually mean it. The nice thing about the unpleasant smell was that there were a few of them, depending on what area of the house you were in. If you got tired of one, just move around a bit and enjoy the others. There will be pictures I assure you.
Two: we have another roommate. His name is Kaled (pronounced Kah-LEED) and has a cool Bangladeshi accent. He is middle aged and has been here right through since the beginning, no one really knows why he is still here. He is one of the most ridiculous and random people I have ever met. For example, he does not wear a towel after having a shower, he wears a veil. He also is honestly taking a pee in the bathroom right beside me with the door wide open as I write this sentence. He claims to have lost a ton of weight by eating blueberries, and he has been kicked off of facebook for creeping on underage white girls (no joke).
Thursday the 8th.
9:00am - I awake not to jackhammers today but to Mr Lee our landlord knocking on my bedroom door asking for the rent. He is quite nice, but is charging an abnormally large amount of money to stay here. $450 to be exact.
9:15 - I have a shower, the only place in the house I take my shoes off (other than my bed) is the bathtub. And only then because I don’t want to ruin them.
9:30 - I walk back to my room and discover my door is locked again.
9:35 - I am in my room again after repeating the procedure from the night before, except this time with all the construction guys staring curiously at me.
I think I should now talk about Mr. Lee and his renovating. I really just don’t get this man. He is the one giving orders to the men as they work, and telling them exactly what they should do. He is apparently a retired architect, but I really hope he has not built many houses in his lifetime. He will put in hardwood floor in a section of a room, and then move to a different room and put up a bit of drywall. Then in that same room he will cut holes in the new drywall to do the electrical. Would not any normal person think that hardwood floor would not be the first thing to go in a room, or putting up drywall only to cut a bunch of holes in it is slightly counterintuitive? Mr. Lee doesn’t.
I shall not bore you with mindless details of the following days, as I am sure I have already done. If you are still reading then I am amazed, and it will get much more interesting from now on (I actually haven’t written it yet so I do not know for sure, I’m just saying that so you don’t stop now).
One interesting and exciting thing I discovered, when it was light, was that there are large holes leading from my room to Jordan’s room...and one not so exciting thing is that there are holes from Jordan’s room to the bathroom. I can spy on him in his sleep whenever I want to. I tell him I do every night, but I don’t think he believes me. He should, I’m not lying....
The next interesting turn of events happened on Sunday the 11th. I got home from the University at around 10 and Jordan informed me that the stove stopped working. I don’t really know how it ever was working, it seemed to be making a silent stand to the house that it could not be killed. Alas it lost. The cord had been cut at the fusebox presumably by one of the renovating guys, and our landlord had told Jordan he had no idea why and actually seemed pretty upset about it. I was still hungry though, and pasta was the only food I was keeping at the house. Cereal, milk and peanut butter were kept at the university, and that was pretty much what I was living off of (my financial situation was at an all time low, and theres a very interesting story to that. Another time, another place maybe). All we had was an electric frying pan.....
After about half an hour of trying to boil water in it the fuse went out. Everything in the kitchen downstairs (fridge, microwave and floor lamp) was getting power from 4 floors above at that one outlet, as well as the lamps in our hallway. It had been doing an admiral job, but just couldn’t hold out any longer. The only way we could coax it into working again was by unplugging the fridge and turning off all the lights, meaning our cell phone lights were back in use.
Jordan, laughing: “We better remember to plug the fridge back in when we are done!”
“Haha yeah for sure.”
We suddenly both stop laughing and look at each other as we realized the likelihood of us remembering to plug it back in was about 50/50 at best.
This whole process had taken about 20 minutes, during which the power went on and off several times. Meaning my water stayed at a nice lukewarm temperature throughout. About an hour after I had started it was finally boiling and ready. It was a very unusual experience, and not one that I ever thought I would have. Jordan made kraft dinner and sausages in there after, and we ate at around midnight while discussing how it would be possible to cook rice in an electric frying pan (For the record, we decided the only way without estimating or guessing would be to boil water in the electric frying pan and put a smaller pot with the appropriate amount of rice and water in it, and use the boiling water to heat the water in the pot and cook the rice).
Fast forward to Tuesday the 13th. Nothing interesting happens since Sunday, except for the fact that I woke up to the sound of renovators outside my window. There were two of them and they had a plain view of my entire room if they so wished. Good thing I had at least decided to wear boxers that night. But I digress, Tuesday morning! The moment you have all been waiting for, when the title actually finally makes sense.It is going to be incredibly anticlimactic, after all that waiting there is nothing I can do to make it live up to the hype.
I go to have a shower and as I shower I notice something is a little weird with the ceiling, part of it is hanging down. I just figured I hadn’t noticed it before, and you can’t really blame me. I mean, in this house I get more surprised when I see a stretch of smooth wall or ceiling than when I see gaping holes and destroyedness. In the middle of vigorously scrubbing my armpit I hear a big bang and a few small bits of debris fall down. I assumed it was the renovators getting a little out of hand with a stick of dynamite or something, I mean, who knows what they actually do around here. A few minutes later I hear a much bigger and louder bang and the ceiling starts raining down on me. My first reaction was “Stupid renovators,” my 2nd was “Earthquake?” and my third was, “Maybe I can get some money back from my rent for this.....” I was lucky I had opened the window before my shower, because a huge section of ceiling had got caught on it and the shower pole, saving my head from a 50 pound piece of drywall. My main concern was that I had just turned the shower off and I had all this stuff in my hair now. I couldn’t turn the shower back on because the roof bits were in the way. Inconvenient to say the least. There were a couple of inches of drywall and other debris on the floor and bathtub but I found my clothes and got changed. I heard Jordan from his bedroom,
“What happened?”
“The ceiling attacked me.”
“What??”
“Come look through your hole into the bathroom and see.”
Well we removed the big pieces, and then we left for the day. Jordan had cleaned up the rest (what a wonderful roommate) before I could get any pictures of it, but I have lots of other pictures here as well. Hopefully they can convey more than my words can. I re-read my descriptions of the house, and then look at the house, and fell very inadequate in my description ability. This house should win an award, there is the mysterious room connected to the kitchen, and the secret duct taped door room beyond that which I haven’t even talked about yet. Or the top floor which even I haven’t explored yet. Maybe another time.
Welcome to our home.
Our cut stove wire....left with our electric pasta maker :)
The floor after cleanup....and one of many holes in the floor.
The ceiling above the shower...the leftovers of what didn't fall on my head.
Holes between my and Jordan's rooms.
My room...note the windows which also function as my front door.
