How We Move Part 2 (Beta): Looking down a well

I had a long-winded post about the next six months of our tragic saga at the Flats at Wheaton Station and then the last week or two happened. I'm scrapping that one and skipping to the good parts.

The apartment flooded again. Our kitchen sink started bubbling up again about six weeks ago. It wasn't our fault. The stuff coming through the drain was taco grease, bleachy suds, all kinds of things that we didn't put down the sink ourselves. One night it coated all of our baby dishes, requiring the first ever full sanitization from the meaty filth that covered everything. I used the same stuff I use to clean out my brewing equipment--basically a low-power OxyClean. It's entropy in a bottle.

We put in a maintenance request, asking the guy to call us before he entered the apartment so that we could come home and manage the dog and whatever. No call. I came home to a note on the door: "DOG NOT SECURE, PLZ RESCHEDULE WITH DOWNSTAIRS OFFICE." Carly was home the next day and set up another maintenance request, this time in all caps: "CALL US BEFORE YOU COME TO THE APARTMENT." No dice. Over the next few weeks we get cryptic messages about cleaning out the trap in the dishwasher, "EVERYTHING FINE." The sink belches more filth. We put in a more specific request. More cryptic messages. We are not hopeful.

The next Saturday, we roll down to Virginia for our friends' kid's third birthday party. There were many bouncy castles and cake and crap pizza (the Wolf ate it all). We retired to our friends' house to relax, drink water and hang out with everyone. We opened presents. The Wolf took a nap and when he was awake, he was the life of the party. Carly's phone rang with a call from a number we didn't recognize around 2:30PM.

Someone from our building management called and she seemed kind of rushed. Carly took the call in another room. The person explained that their people had to enter our apartment because there was water leaking from our apartment into their offices. The sink had backed up with the sink-diarrhea of all of the apartments above us. They had to tear up our carpet, there was an industrial fan in there, a guy would be over in a few days to patch it up and steam clean everything.

We took our sweet time going home. We drove the long way, got dinner, picked up some groceries. We waited until the Wolf was really tired so we could put him right to bed. The noise of the fan was likely going to be a problem. We were imagining his little fingers turned to steak tartare and planning our strategy for chairs and baby gates to block off the affected area. It went as planned. Strangely, the maintenance guys had already cleaned up the place such that it was hard to tell that it flooded, except for the massive fan blowing air under our carpet. A few days later a guy came and steam cleaned the whole apartment, as promised.

It was refreshing that they actually did what they said they would, but something felt odd. It appeared that the office only gave a shit about our maintenance issues when it affected them directly. We notified them of maintenance issues and warned them that it had happened before, and nothing got done. Water dripped into their office, they jumped to the occasion. It was clear that they only cared as far as it made their newly painted lobby look bad. The parallels to an abusive parent were glowing in my mind.

We started looking for a new apartment the day after the flood. We decided we wanted to get out of the huge apartment buildings and maybe find something with a yard or a little shared green space, at least. We found a few spots that were promising, and settled on a weird old townhouse built in the 60's. It had everything we wanted, but needs a little scrubbing and some paint. Small considerations in the grand scheme of things. We put in an application and a deposit, and it was all handshakes and plans to sign leases and sort out details. Then we went to Seattle.

I flew my mother in to take care of the Wolf for four days while Carly and I zipped off to Seattle for our friends' wedding. It was our first time away from the kid together. She'd been away from him for some business trips and other things, and I'd had a weekend or two away, but never together. This was going to be a good break. We gave Mom a short list of instructions and asked her to send photos. It was a snap. And it was! Ma loves the Wolf and they got along swimmingly. Strictly speaking, she needed the break and the time to spend with her grandson. Everything was peachy.

Then, about 7:30PM on Saturday, the fire alarms went off in our building. Mom and the Wolf had to run out through the Blitz in their bare feet to safety in the street. After about half an hour of wailing and grinding and shrieking alarms, the fire department reset everything, said "false alarm!" and everyone went back inside. Mom texted me. I told her that she should keep her shoes handy, because it could happen again. In our experience, the false alarms came in waves. And they did. The next set of false alarms started around 1:17AM and persisted in five- to ten-minute bleats until finally the fire department fixed it and went on their merry way. Ma couldn't sleep and just stayed up all night until the Wolf was ready for food and so on in the morning. Neither one of them really slept well and they both went to bed early on Sunday.

In the end, no one was hurt, but it was another nail in the coffin. The alarms went off last night at 2:00AM again, and persisted for about 45 minutes. The Wolf slept through it all, but we could tell, this morning, that he hadn't gotten much rest.

How We Move, Part 1: Standing on a Precipice

I was offered my current job about a week before the Wolf was born. Just when we started thinking about what it meant--that we would have to give up NYC and move to another city, another state, another neighborhood, another job search--BOOM! We had a baby. As it turned out, the timing was excellent. When the kid came early, it made the process of moving a little easier. The maternity leave would be a good breaking point for jobs and the City and everything. In August, we got in the car and came down to DC to look for places to live.

We had done our research online to the best extent we could. We emailed and called a lot of potentials. We narrowed it down to a stripe of Maryland just north of the District. We confirmed appointments. When we got here, we instantly discovered the market was different. We're in the South now. People, real estate agents even, don't feel particularly pressured to show up on time. One guy didn't even know who to call to get keys. The other ones, well, when we did see them it looked like they didn't really work much. It was a little odd, and our two-day rush to find a place to live was less than satisfying. But we found our current apartment, and everything seemed fine.

The staff was friendly, the online reviews weren't terrible (despite the stabbing that happened some months prior). We couldn't see the specific apartment we wanted to rent, but we saw a similar one and it was good enough. We signed a lease. No security deposit needed and they waived the amenities and pet fees. We were given a move-in date that worked out well for everyone. When we signed the lease, the building was owned and managed by Archstone.

We moved in in early October. Some of those exploits are catalogued elsewhere. A few weeks later, we were notified that the building would soon be sold to Avalon and new management would be coming in. Great, we thought. Avalon's a pretty good company, they'll probably clean up some of the edges around here. We never met the new management.

The building was flipped to Borger, another massive real estate management company, within a month. I don't think we ever made a rent payment to Avalon. Borger was it's own kind of fun. The staff seemed like they were third-stringers. There was one exuberant manager lady, the rest were the late shift at Burger King on a turnpike travel plaza: they just didn't give a fuck. One girl wouldn't even smile at you when she looked at you and didn't bother to register anything you said about the locks on the doors not working, or that you got a notification there was a package for you at the front desk. She barely even apologized when I found her sleeping in the lobby when she was supposed to be answering phones.

But it was looking up. They slowly got their shit together. They got this cool electronic tracking system for packages and so on, and they were starting to paint lines in the parking deck and get parking spaces organized and had a few community events so you could get to know your neighbors. And riiiiight about then, the building was sold to Gables. That lazy girl found out that she was losing her job from me--she didn't even bother to read her email. I found out from a flyer stuck in my door. She probably put it there.

It was only a stutter-stop it seemed. The new management took a month or so to get everything sorted out, and then it was just about as good as Borger was when they left. They scrapped the assigned parking space thing in favor of people just paying more for the spots they wanted and the rest of us had free-for all. Then it got really. Fucking. Cold.

The way our building is designed, the hallways and most of the stairwells are open to the air. It's somewhere between an apartment building and an outdoor outlet mall. It seemed a bit odd when we moved in, but the occasional breeze down the hallway felt good. You could turn the corner and see if it was raining or whatever and go back and get your umbrella. People would smoke on the balconies and chat. It's kind of homey. It's like a little neighborhood. 

But that also means that all the main water pipes for water supply and drains and whatnot are not really insulated from the world. In fact, they're basically exposed. And that means they freeze easier. Oh, and the hot water heaters and so on? Those are in little utility rooms on the external walls of the building. So yeah, they freeze too.

The funny thing about hot water heaters is that they're insulated in such a fashion as to keep the heat in, and the outside parts stay relatively cool. In fact, they react to cold just like anything else. Worse, maybe, if the fittings are the wrong kind of metal, or if they're on a long, flat wall with a lot of wind along that corridor, then they will lose heat in a magnificent fashion. If you run your hot water regularly, like take a shower and do the dishes every day, there's a kind of equilibrium that keeps this from happening except in extreme cases. Well, we had some extreme cases. In three days this winter, the two hot water heaters in the two apartments above us failed and gushed water down our bedroom wall and into the rental offices, below.

The call with the emergency maintenance line was comical. It was like I was talking to a robot. I might have been, but I think it was a human reading a script because there were some "ums" and specific rephrasing of things I had said that were not in line with a computer. In any case, when I said, "Call everybody, there's water gushing down the side of my apartment," they didn't get it and I was just about to call the fire department when the alarms started going off anyway.

Fire alarms were a common thing for us until sometime late this spring. When water pressure drops in a system, the system thinks the sprinklers are on, and that means FIRE so the computer calls the fire department. Our fire alarms are deafening. Which is good, I guess, if you want to avoid fire. But if it's a false alarm because the system is shit, or if someone burned their dinner, or a water line exploded... well, that's just annoying. It would happen all hours of the day, any day, for any reason. Sometimes you'd see the exploded water lines blasting rooster tails into the street. Other times, it was a lot of tired, pissed-off looking firemen asking, "where the hell is the super?" We never knew. The management company changed too often. The contact number in the little book the fireman had was two companies ago. When it warmed up, they mostly stopped. I think someone compartmentalized the system so that the whole building wouldn't shriek. I know that alarms have gone off in the building because the magnets on the fire doors let go and I have to push through them to get to my apartment.

Strangely, the Wolf would just sleep through all of this. While Carly and the dogs and I would suffer through the sound that makes your skull vibrate, rattling you down to your gonads, frantically putting on shoes and leashes and grabbing umbrellas to go stand out in the parking lot, the Wolf just yawned.

FOMO

It has been a few days since I actually deactivated my Facebook account and I already feel the itch. I even considered reactivating my Twitter account--anything to be connected. It's a weird feeling, the Fear Of Missing Out.

As a kid I wasn't terribly social. I made friends and spent time with people because I wanted to, but if my friends weren't around I wasn't usually too upset. Things hit a head when I was a teenager, but that's when everything king of explodes. In early high school I conceived of having friends as a sort of game with particular goals and it didn't really work out because not many people actually conceive of social interactions that way (they still act like it's some kind of competitive sport, but that's another problem). Despite that, I kept a couple of friends for life. Recently, we've communicated primarily through Facebook because it is easy and we get to share pictures of our kids.

Later, in college I figured out a little bit of who I was, and after I scraped off some of my intentional weirdness, I fell in with a group of oddballs and misfits and managed to eke out a role as a strange sort of spiritual leader, which is strange for an atheist. Mostly I tried to make connections between people, help folks sort through their personal delusions, and drag people into the world who had been hiding. In addition to this I had a romantic relationship that was akin to being in a small boat in a massive storm where each of us were the storm, the boat, and the waves that tended to make me intolerable at times. In the end, I kept a few very good people around and kept in touch with many others through the internet, primarily Facebook (including the ex who was the storm and waves and boat and me).

Then I took a detour to Europe and met some people who I generally just watched, voyeur-like, through Facebook, more as an anchor for my ancient wanderlust than anything. Still, the interactions I had with those folks were always a charm and would brighten my day.

Next, I wound up in law school and gathered nervous lawyers-on-the-hoof, some who became my wife and others remained good friends. In one case, I took my arrogance online and (wrongfully) bitched about a peer, was outed by a mutual friend, and made to apologize at length. We're now better internet friends, she (the victim of my mock outrage) and I. Our kids were born around the same time.

Now, I've been working for the government for a few years and lived in the NYC area for a bit and I've cobbled together a massive, crazy, diverse group of friends. I am linked to many of them through Facebook and other things, though I have to keep my co-workers cordoned off in some section in case I whine about work. I learned eventually that I just shouldn't talk about work on the internet (a lesson only partially learned, and poorly, as evidenced by this post) more due to the chance that I might be in a Senate confirmation hearing sometime in my life and I don't want something specific and untoward dragged out in front of C-Span and everyone because I had a bad day and felt like typing about it.

I went through Facebook a while ago--maybe a year--and just started "unfollowing" people who I didn't agree with or didn't care for all that much--old high school friends, some co-workers, relatives, etc. I cut my Facebook feed down to about 30 people I actually cared to hear about on a regular basis. Some of those others would comment on my stuff and I might look at their feed, but unless the sight of their name gave me a bit of a warm feeling or tickle or grin, I didn't follow them again.

After I started using Facebook again, I fell into the old social media routines and I found that I didn't really like who I was on the internet, and, for the most part, I didn't like the people I followed (which included my closest friends and relatives). So I quit. I don't want it anymore.

But I do! I watched the movie "Frank," over the weekend and there was a social media component of the script that was very important. Little tweets (fake?) would flash across the screen to inform some of the plot and the exposure of the characters was crucial to the ultimate development. In the morning, on NPR someone referenced news in a Tweet. I started following the story of game vlogger Anita Sarkeesian, and much of the information related to that was contained in Twitter. I thought, "I should reactivate my Twitter account!" And then I didn't. I needed to write something, so I wrote here. Got it out.

I have been watching people and how they interact with their media a lot lately because I've been trying to figure out if I'm right or wrong to break away from it. The modern world is increasingly defined by the internet, and people just don't communicate the old ways. More and more people are dropping land lines (I did almost 10 years ago), cable (6 or 7 years) and I can't remember the last time I actually sent a full letter through the mail. Most of my physical mailings are birthday cards or shipping mix-CDs to friends. And now, I've even had someone tell me they don't have a CD player anymore. How will we make mixtapes???

All my observations show that there's no right or wrong to the internet and Facebook and everything, but that it does bring out the really bad in some people. I don't want to be one of those, so I'm backing away from it. When I find a stream of social media that fits my personal preferences, I'll dig back in. For now, there's this blog, Google+ and Instagram. Those do what I want them to do, so I keep them.

I'm just dreading the conversation in a few years, "Wolfie, put your phone away while we eat." "But Mom does it!"

That reminds me, I need to quit LinkedIn.

What's a book?

Just deactivated my Facebook profile. I hope I can manage it forever. I had to stay up late to make the decision because it feels like the kind of decision best made when it is really dark out. When there are no distractions. When it's just you and the internet. I couldn't bring myself to delete the profile because I might need it to communicate with people someday. But I'm going to wait and see how long before that actually might happen. The last time I just stopped checking it for a while. I thought I'd ease back in by just posting photos, but I started wondering what people said about my photos. Did they like them? Did my mom comment? I needed to see. Then I started responding to comments. Then I posted a few comments on other peoples' profiles. And Liked their statuses. And I saw more ads in my feed. And I started checking it several times a day. And then I got into some silly comment flame with a couple of people and I couldn't figure out why I was even bothering. It was a fight in a small, dark room and no one spoke the same language. I quit. Some fights are best not fought. So that's it. Bye bye Facebook.

Return to Sender

OK, we'll try this again. Despite many illusions, parenting is quite a bit of work and it often drains out all of the energy and time I would otherwise spend bawling my eyes out on the internet. But alas, I have found need of the discipline of writing so I will try to dive into this blog again.

We'll start with updates and try to figure out if these will lead into any further posts.

First, the kid is now over a year old. I guess that tomorrow he'll be 14 months old. I've tried hard to avoid measuring his time in months, but people keep asking. I usually respond to questions about the Wolf's age by saying simply, "he turned one in July." When people follow up by asking if he's 14 months or whatever, I end up breaking down and acknowledging the math, but I do still hate that means of measurement. He's one. It's cool.

And it is really cool! Aside from the occasional awful night where teething pain keeps him up, screaming and us contemplating escape all night, this child is wonderful. He's happy, inquisitive, playful, cuddly, and growing. He's trying to figure out how to walk and talk and at the moment he's finding the best means of crawling somewhere and bringing the box with you at the same time. We just got back from the Maryland State Fair which was more fun than expected and we found that the kid has an insatiable appetite for pit beef and he loves owls. Frightening, evil owls.

Family is good. Since we last checked in, Carly has started her new job and loves it. She's basically the super version of the thing she did in Brooklyn. She's also a proper federal employee now, so there's that extra sense of security and benefits. She travels a lot for work, though, so for about three or four days every month or so, I'm a single dad. It's cool. Wolf and I just go and cruise the mall for chicks. We usually just end up with Legos.

My job continues to be an interesting romp through the weird and wild ends of immigration law, and I've been quite busy working on special projects and training the newbies. This last week, two of my new trainees were actually people who trained me in the past. One of them was one of my instructors as BASIC training in Dallas six years ago; the other was the person who trained me in on children's citizenship applications in NYC before she bugged out to Baltimore. I have some reservations about working with a former co-worker again. It took me a while to dig out of the backlog she left and other colleagues have indicated that her practices haven't improved. But we'll see how it goes. The government is the government is the government.

I've been playing a lot of different computer games over the last few months. In the first quarter of the year, I was treating Skyrim like it was my second job. Then I dove into playing the electronic version of Magic: the Gathering and more recently have picked up a couple of cheap games on Steam and also, Diablo III. My friends and I got burned out from playing D&D over the internet (first by a text-based collaborative workspace [Google Wave], then over voice chat [Ventrilo] using an ad hoc server program designed for rpgs on the internet, then using video chat via Google+) and have descended to the world of MMO style games. Or at least cooperative online multiplayer games. Therefore, Diablo III.

This fall will be eaten by a bunch of travel for work and for arguable pleasure. The pleasure travel is mostly for weddings. One is in Seattle, which is a new city for Carly and me, and we're going to leave the Wolf behind for that trip. That will be our first (well-deserved) trip away from the kid, so it will be an actual vacation, despite the wedding we plan to attend.

Be back in a few days. In the meantime, enjoy this: