Heat

It should be an accepted fact that December, not February is the shortest month of the year. Honestly, does any span of time pass more quickly than the 31 days of the month of December?

In our grubby apartment, the new year started off with yet another problem. The person that lives in the apartment below knocked on my door one evening to tell me that something was leaking into his room below. Based on his description, a quick survey of my apartment led me to discover that almost all of my radiators were leaking, some of them quite a bit. The radiators are ancient, like the rest of the building, and the flooring is really uneven under and around them (literally in some places there are giant gaps between the floorboards, and some are so loose I'm sure they could be persuaded to lift up with very little effort), so the water was able to drip down the pipes and right through the cracks in the floor. It's very evident that there is not much insulation in our building--on a cold night if you turn the radiators off, the temperature in the apartment cools down to whatever the temp. is outside in about 20 minutes flat--so I guess there was little to stop the water from falling straight into the rooms underneath. (And the radiators are so noisy, they're always hissing or humming or making other strange sounds, that I didn't notice the dripping). A call to my leasing company brought a maintenance worker out who changed one bolt on one radiator (there are four units total in the apartment). The only change I noticed after this "improvement" was that the leak moved to the opposite side of the radiator. Now it leaks out around the knob that you use to adjust the temperature--and it leaks even when the whole blasted thing is turned off.

My apartment company is not very good with fixing problems; I'm actually amazed they showed up at all the first time (even if they didn't accomplish anything). So now I have various jars and bottles sitting around the radiators to catch the falling water. (And a towel that I change out regularly wrapped around the leaky handle.) I figure it'll just be for a few more months, so as long as the guy below me doesn't complain of any other issues downstairs, I'll just try to manage it as best as I can. My minimal efforts may not seem like much, but they are honestly more that I can expect from management.