Happy Canada Day

Okay, so the good news is that some random stumbling drunk *didn’t* find his way into our apartment and spray urine ALL OVER our bathroom (and I do mean all over — pretty gross, I know), like I had originally thought at 1:30am Friday night when I got home. The bad news? It was the toilet in the apartment directly above us that overflowed and caused all that to leak through our ceiling. How did I come to this realization? I witnessed a sudden streaming of water and urine coming through our bathroom ceiling this afternoon, causing pretty much an identical mess to what I came home to on Friday night. Therefore, I feel safe in discarding my stumbling-drunk-intruder theory, since I was pretty sure I had locked the apartment when I left for trivia on Friday night anyway (after all, I don’t recall ever *not* locking the apartment when I’ve been the last one to leave). So anyway, I called CREM (Continental Real Estate Management, our landlord) maintenance and they came out pretty quick, but the guy said I had to clean the mess up — *again* — (which wasn’t caused by me), and that there was nothing that could be done to prevent it happening again. I find that very, very odd and shady. To me it seems that as long as it is not due to the negligence of a tenant, the landlord should be responsible for disinfecting/cleaning it up and fixing the problem (maybe it’s a broken pipe or the upstairs toilet has something physically wrong with it??). I mean, it’s a health hazard, for crying out loud! Yet our lease would seem to indicate otherwise. Here’s the potentially pertinent item from our lease’s “Rules & Regulations”:
“40. Landlord or Agent shall not be liable for loss or damage to property of tenant caused by moths, termites, or other vermin, or by rain, snow or water, or stream that may leak into or flow from any part of said premises through any defects in the roof or plumbing, or from other sources.”
I wonder if they’d try to say that sewage coming through the ceiling falls under the “penumbra” (a little SCOTUS humor there) of the term “water.” But seriously, if a landlord isn’t responsible for the condition of the plumbing in their building, who is?? I’m going to stop by the CREM office tomorrow and let them know I’m not particularly happy about this situation, and see if there is any recourse we can take. I mean, sure, in the first nearly 11 months that we’ve lived here we never had anything remotely like this happen, but now it’s happened twice in the last three days. Very not cool. At the very least they should replace the water-damaged & urine-stained ceiling tiles soon, and not wait until we move out (which is a minimum of over a year away still). If CREM is unresponsive to our situation, I wonder if this story would raise any eyebrows at the State Dept. of Health…
On a far more pleasant subject, I got my Cootie Brown fix this weekend! Twice, no less. First, a bunch of us went to Bar Bleu after trivia on Friday night to check them out. And then (South African) Daniel & I went to hear them on Saturday evening at the Heister Street Stage at the Summer’s Best Music Fest downtown here in State College. They were missing their saxophonist, but I thought they still sounded great! Unfortunately it was their only gig in State College all summer long, so who knows how long it’ll be before I get to hear them live again. You really should work on gettin more shows in State College, Jacob! 😉
I also watched my first rugby game on Saturday. Before Daniel & I went to the Cootie Brown show downtown, we went to Bill Pickle’s to watch the match between the Wallabies (Australia) and the All Blacks (New Zealand). As usual, they didn’t have the Setanta Sports announcers on at Pickle’s, so it was a bit tough sometimes to figure out exactly what was going on for Nat & myself. Daniel was able to explain some of it, but there have apparently been a few new rules to go in place since he last saw a rugby game two years ago, and while he knows all the terminology and rules in Afrikaans, he’s somewhat unfamiliar with some of the rules/terms in English. But it was still fun and I really enjoyed watching it. In the end the Wallabies came from behind to shock the All Blacks 21-15. Which side was I going for? Probably the All Blacks (I own a jersey of theirs, after all), though if I ever move to Australia I might have to “see the light” and change sides that I support, hehe. 😉 I’ll definitely be back to catch more rugby, both rugby union and rugby league (for an explanation of the differences between the two, click here). In a future post I’ll talk a bit more about one of the coolest traditions in all of sport: the Haka, as performed by the All Blacks immediately prior to every international match they play. There isn’t a fight song or anything similar the world over that can top it!
Several people from Penn State Christian Grads are graduating and moving on this summer. Since several of them are moving away sometime this month, we decided it was high time to have a bit of a farewell party for them. So we got a bunch of ice cream, sprinkles, chocolate syrup and whatnot and had a fun little party before Bible study. Steve & Elizabeth even brought some “Canada cake” (complete with white frosting and a maple leaf made from red sprinkles, haha) to celebrate Canada Day, since Steve is Canadian and all. Well, I guess it’s fine for America, Jr. to have their big day a few days before we in the USA have ours. Save the best for last, right? 😉 But it was a fun time, and we’ll all be really sad to see them go. But such is the nature of being around a university, I guess. People just come and go (including me).
I don’t know if I’ll put up another post before then, so Happy Independence Day, everyone! And in less than 48 hours I’ll be watching my first-ever game in Yankee Stadium, I can’t wait! Go Twins!