Bug-killing trials, day one.

We're entering hour 37 of air conditioned bliss and have had no problems - except one.

We're not historically "air conditioning people," meaning that we agree that even in stifling heat, fans and open windows are just fine. But there are no screens in the windows, and we're now paying the price in the form of an exceptionally aggressive swarm of fruit flies.

We made two traps tonight to combat the little beasts and will report back on which one works the best.

Option one: Standard soda bottle wasp trap.

Pretty simple stuff. The bottom pool of death contains water and dish soap. At the last moment, we decided to throw in a couple teaspoons of sugar for added intrigue. The nozzle of the bottle was dipped in apple butter. Soda bottle traps are traditionally reserved for larger bugs (such as the Buick-sized flies cruising the perimeter of the living room), so we may end up putting this guy outside for bees and mosquitoes.

Option # 2: Fruit fly kryptonite.

As it turns out, fruit flies are partial to red wine. Aside from getting wasted, this smaller trap isn't as fun for the insects (read: no slip 'n' slide, no tasty apple butter), but is supposed to be a guaranteed death trap. And in my humble opinion, drowning in a silver chalice of Malbec is the classiest death this side of Isadora Duncan.

We'll see how it goes.

heat

Hit "play" and let me tell you a little story while the Specials provide the soundtrack.

It's hot in here. We're not boiling yet, but the weather reports say to expect a week of 85+ degree weather, including two upcoming consecutive days of a balmy 95 with accompanying thunderstorms. Since we found Renard the week of Valentine's Day, most of my climate memories of the joint involve multiple layers of clothing and lots of shivering. So that we're starting to sweat is a new experience.

It started in the back bedroom. Jeremiah summoned me to check out the humidity in their room. About two feet from their room, I got socked in the face with jungle-grade humidity. My room was fine. But a couple of days later, the humidity crept into my room, too. I think the roof is the culprit. It's black tar, not the nice shiny reflective silver stuff I've seen on most city buildings. And our bedrooms are right underneath. So, I'm working on a plan to get some flimsy plywood, cover it with foil, and deflect a little bit of the heat away from us.

We started running the air conditioner just to check it out. In less than five minutes the whole place was cooled down and opening any doors or windows resulted in gusts of air hotter than an oven. There has to be a catch somewhere. There's no way fate would allow the air conditioner to work efficiently. It's going to explode or something, because that's just how things work.

Anyway, just a little update. Up soon: stories of the Great Utility Closet Organization Project, more decorating, a gardening update, and plans to destroy the plague of bugs that has arrived.

Natures!

It looks small now, but this moss doubles its size every week.

Tomato plant's growth stunted by someone's affinity for eating the leaves off it.

This guy lives in our shower.

Failure.

Jeremiah's surprise birthday party

Jeremiah's birthday was a couple weeks ago, but he was out of town when it happened. So it passed kind of quietly. Little did he know that Michelle was planning a surprise party.

We're all kind of stunned that he let the morning and afternoon of the party pass so quietly, what with the rest of us cleaning and organizing the house so frantically. And by helping Brad move stuff to the basement, he was inadvertently helping us prepare.

The two of them went to dinner with Ms. Ray Ray. He didn't suspect a thing. The rest of us ran around like crazy trying to make sure we were ready.

Yeah- cannoli stuffed with cannoli. We don't mess around when it comes to dessert.

The result:

I'm not going to force anyone to watch 5 minutes of nothing, but the silent nervous giggling is pretty amusing. Skip to about 5:05 for the action.

farewell, old friend.

We finally moved the two heaviest things in the house - the filing cabinet and the fridge that has our landlord's face printed on it (?!) - to the basement.





I can't say anything nice about the filing cabinet, but the trusty mini-fridge did a bang-up job keeping our Red Bulls and beers cold when we were knocking out walls a couple months ago. Even if it did have that black sludge in the bottom of it.

early stages of soundproofing.

Jeremiah took down the lighting fixture in my room - the one they cut a giant hole in the drywall to accommodate when the walls were going up. I use lamps, though, and track lighting is on its way. So the hole really only serves as a means of letting in light and sound directly above my bed. He had a tough time getting it down and we couldn't figure out what the holdup was.

So let's play a little game - it's called Guess What's Holding This Light Fixture to the Ceiling.


Think carefully about your response, based on what you know of Renard. The way this building was constructed, it could be anything. Shady wiring, duct tape, a colony of wasps, chewing gum...

So what is it?












If you guessed "supernatural involvement," you're correct!

the duplicity of industral neighborhoods.

Yesterday as I walked the dog, I got about twenty yards from Renard's front door before coming to a vacant patch of overgrown land. It smelled strongly of honeysuckle and queen anne's lace. Having been left undisturbed for so long, it was its own tiny forest starting to spill over onto the sidewalk. If I'd been there at night, sniffling the air with my eyes closed, I would swear I was out in the country.

You can see stars from our back porch way more clearly than any neighborhood I've lived in, including my first apartment that was two blocks from a dark and quiet beach.

Most of our neighbors have lived on this block for upwards of seven, eight years. Maybe living in an industrial neighborhood for extended periods of time forces a person to seek out greenery. I have learned that my next door neighbors are organic farmers, and they were of the opinion that I should "go meet Al." Al is something of the oracle of the neighborhood. He's the scatterbrained but lively expert on all goings-on in our neighborhood. After I met him (and was prompted to remind him my name about five times), he led us to the yard behind his house, which is bursting with greenery. There, under the big ugly slabs of concrete from the expressway, is a little community garden on a man-made hill. It was raining when I was first shown the garden, and my next door neighbor took the opportunity to produce a handful of cantaloupe seeds from his pants pocket and plant them right there.

"This little patch is empty," Al said, kicking at some tall grass with the toe of his shoe. "If you have anything to plant, go for it. Everyone'll leave it alone."

Even our landlord was just featured in a local newspaper for his efforts to organize a neighborhood-specific recycling program. He was delighted when we led him outside to show him our big DIY recycling barrels.

In short, for all the times I reference the house on Paper Street in "Fight Club" when discussing Renard's problems, it hasn't yet been my experience that we live in a typical industrial neighborhood.

But there are exceptions.

I will not write another sad-panda entry like the one from earlier in this week, because we're all staying positive. I will spare everyone the long list of offenses committed in our alley, tales of aforementioned spider invasion, or the odd occasional weird smell outside. Instead, I have to lament on what's turning out to be a big problem to me:

I can't sleep in this house. It has not been soundproofed, because it was clearly not built to be lived in.

I've never had a problem with sleep in my life. It used to be that I could sit anywhere and fall asleep within 20 minutes, and stay out for hours. I have slept through two earthquakes, the better part of a home invasion, problematic bouts of jet lag, and dozens of noisy roommates and neighbors. But Renard has proven to be a problem.

It would seem that the walls built in February provide zero reduction in noise. In my bed at night, I can clearly hear Michelle and Jeremiah speaking in hushed tones. I can hear their cats sneeze. Sometimes in that late-night haze of keen awareness, I can hear a single book being removed from a shelf and put back.

And if there's anything happening in the studio directly below my room, forget it. Paper cutters, machinery, the radio, people talking at normal volumes - anything - will wake me up. I had my suspicions this would be the case. Having a firm knowledge of the sorry state of these floors (and being able to identify what flavor shisha my roomies are smoking in their hookah in the basement while I'm in my bedroom upstairs), I had a feeling sound would be an issue.

While I could once slip into a solid ten-hour coma after five minutes of rest and unwinding, it now takes me an average of two hours to fall asleep. And if anything disturbs me, I wake up like a shot and require another hour to fall back asleep. Three days in a row, it's been people talking at completely reasonable volumes and rather late in the day, since the restless nights have been making me sleep past noon on a regular basis.

This morning, someone decided at 8:55 a.m. that since his or her constant knocking on the neighbor's door wasn't cutting any ice, he or she would knock harder, for a solid eight minutes. (Maybe it was knocking, maybe someone was using a hammer... at this point, I wouldn't bat an eye if it was an ant climbing up a wall based on what I know of the acoustics in this place.)

I'd only been back to sleep for two hours and was so crippled with exhaustion that as badly as I wanted to answer the door while dragging my baseball bat behind me, I couldn't stand up. The southern sun was blinding. An ambulance went by. Trains. Trash-pickers. I was awake and staring at my clock until the sun obscured the time... and when I finally dozed off, it was people talking and laughing in the hallway. Ugh.

I really need to find a solution. But the walls are built, my bedroom floor is finished, and I can't very well tell people to refrain from talking at 12:30 in the afternoon. But something's gotta give, because I'm turning into a zombie.

updates

Apologies for the long delay, but we've hit a couple snags. It's been a bad month.

We thought basement flooding problems would be solved with a three foot wide, fifteen foot long, three and a half foot deep trench in the studio. Sump pump was installed and secured and cemented over. It worked. The groundwater is now redirected through the foundation wall and into the empty field next door.

Now that that's out of the way, the cursed walls of Renard continued to emit moisture - only this time through the sewer and the living room ceiling. It would seem that the upstairs hot water heater has been spewing water, and the new upstairs tenants didn't stem the flow or call the landlord. I guess they didn't know it was such a dire situation. So imagine Brad's surprise this morning to come upstairs to see a lovely waterfall cascading down the living room wall.

It's a long story, but many holes were drilled to relieve the pressure of 70 gallons of water that have all this time been hanging out on top of the drywall. Lovely.

So the studio is dry... but the sewer grate spews all sorts of horror every time the water is used upstairs.

A chain of highly improbably vehicular incidents has left us minus one car and plus hundreds of dollars in parking ticket/boot fees, money that was supposed to be spent finishing the kitchen.

The landlord's younger family members are apparently still under the impression that our house is their playground, and have taken to breaking into the basement and screaming and knocking things over.

Spiders. We have spiders.

The trash-pickers and vagrants of this neighborhood are causing problems with the alley, ignoring the sign painted on our back door, and conducting all sorts of fascinating business just inches from bedroom #1.

There's nothing positive to say lately.