Idol Update!

Here's the singers I liked this week on American Idol:

Men - Chris R., Blake, Chris S, Phil, and even Sundance was much better than last week. I'm wondering about AJ's sexuality after his performance, lol.

Women - Gina, Jordin, Lakisha, Melinda, Stephanie, and Sabrina. I don't think any of these have changed from last week, lol.

I still think, overall, the women are stronger than the men. Will be interesting once we get to the top 12 or so...

Today's Forecast:

Partly rational with brief periods of coherent thought giving way to complete apathy by tonight.

Sherrie Weaver

I just finished watching Idol, and I must say...the women did a HELL of a lot better than the men last night. I can't remember more than one or two of the men that impressed me, but tonight...I counted FIVE or SIX women who all kicked some ass before taking names. Gotta support the hometown girl, Gina Glocksen. But she probably was the poorest performer of the ones I liked. Jordin, Lakisha, Melinda, Sabrina and Stephanie all brought the house down. The other women were all very forgettable. Of the men from last night, I liked the two Chris's and Blake. Will be interesting to see what the results are tomorrow night.

My bathroom is almost done. The tile was grouted today, so that's done. I figured out I did NOT get a new toilet. The idiots put my old toilet back down, so now I have to clean it! Grrrrrrrr. And the bottom shelf thingy under the cabinet below my sink still hasn't been replaced. I called the leasing office this evening when I got home, and left them a message about it. Guess they were all busy doing other things, and couldn't answer the phone. I asked them to call me about replacing it, maybe I'll get a call tomorrow. Oh, and I have new vertical blinds in my living room too. We have a sales meeting tomorrow, lunch is provided. Fortunately, it's for the salesmen, so us inside people only have to be there for about 30 minutes, lol. And it's so friggin' HOT at work, I'm considering wearing a tank top and shorts to work. This afternoon I was so hot, I thought I was going to pass out.

Well, guess I'll go read some more...

I'm getting a new bathroom!

Well sort of. I'm getting a new toilet and a new tile floor. Monday afternoon I received a call on my cell phone from my leasing office, alerting me that maintenance had been to my apartment because of water leaking from my toilet down to the bathroom below me. They said it would be installed today. I came home from work, and it's still in progress. I now have NO toilet in the bathroom, lmao, and the tile is down, but still needs to be grouted. This isn't the cheap stick-on square tiles that I had before. These are NICE ceramic tiles!! I'll take a picture of it once it's all done. It's a dark brown, but very nice looking. MUCH better than what I had before.

I also bought my very first mp3 player tonight. Best Buy had 2GB Sansa Scandisk c250's on sale for $69.99. I think I got the last one at the store by me. So I bring it home, plop down in front of the computer and start checking it out. I was determined that I would get the battery cover off, but couldn't. After 15 minutes of struggling with it, cussing a blue streak, and threatening to return it, I put my shoes on and went BACK to Best Buy to see if they could figure out how to get the battery cover off. The gal there told me the lithium battery inside it is very good, and will last for about a year. Also, each time I hook it up via the USB plug to my computer, it charges the battery, so I probably shouldn't ever need to worry about replacing it. At least not for quite a while.

Then I tried to put music on it. I couldn't get MusicMatch to recognize it! I put the cd in my computer that came with the player, read through some instructions, rebooted the computer and VOILA, it worked. I put a bunch of songs on the player, listened to part of one to make sure it worked. I didn't get as many on as I wanted, but still over 100. Most of my music on my computer is at 128 kbps, larger sized files that limit the number of songs that can be loaded on it. Maybe this weekend I'll work on converting some of my music down to 96 kbps.

I've done just fine without an mp3 player, I'm either at work or in my car or at home, and at any of those places I have access to either an online radio station or my computer or a radio. Why get an mp3 player? Well! My building at work is working to put in a fitness center, free to all tenants! Once that's open, I can go down there after work and get a workout, and I wanted an mp3 player to listen to while I do that. The fitness center was supposed to open this month, but due to the cold weather, it delayed some of the plumbing work, so now it won't be done until next month. But I wanted to pick up the mp3 player while it was on sale. I've been watching for a sale for a few weeks, didn't want to miss this one. Now I'm almost all set. I might need to look into getting an exercise outfit or two. Maybe next pay period, lol.

We also had our performance appraisals at work today. Overall, mine went very well! I got approximately a 3% pay increase retro-active to Jan 1. I'll take anything they will give me, to keep up with the cost of living. I also got a bonus of about $4400 (before taxes)!!!!!!! I might use part of that to buy a new bed, to replace the one I have now that's jabbing me with a spring and causing a pain in my ass, literally.

Watched Idol tonight, the men performed. Some were pretty good, some were ok. I have a couple that I'm starting to like, others that I'm not so hot on. Even though we can vote, I'm not going to until maybe the top 10 rounds. Going to go read for a bit before going to bed. It's so hot in our office at work, I'm digging out a summer outfit to wear to work tomorrow, lol.

Middle age is when you want to see how long your car will last...instead of how fast it will go.

I wish I'd received this poem a week or two ago:

Winter

SHIT! It's Cold!!

by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

It's going to be a looooong night...

I was watching the Grammy's, and all of a sudden I heard a whooshing sound like running water coming from the bathroom. I thought, "Oh goody, the pipes finally un-froze!" If only I were so lucky! A pipe BURST, and was seeping water into my bathroom from under the sink. I started throwing down every towel I could find, hand towels, bathtowels, a sheet, a blanket even, to try and stop the advancement of water. Half the floor was covered in wet towels, and water was coming into the bathroom below me too.

I called maintenance right away once I saw the water on the floor. While I was waiting for a callback, the man who lives below me came up and knocked on my door, wondering what was going on. We talked for a few minutes, then he went down to call maintenance himself, so they knew both bathroom were affected. He got a callback from maintenance, he would be here in 30 minutes or so. I found out later, the maintenance guy had JUST gotten home from another call when he got paged for our problem. So he had to put his shoes back on and drive all the way back here.

Turns out a pipe in the wall behind the sink burst, and that was causing the leak. He had to shut off the water to the whole building for about 45 minutes or so, until he could cut out the section of pipe and weld a new piece in. He left about 11:30pm. Now I have a mess to clean up, sopping wet towels that need to be washed and stuff thrown out from under the sink cause the water was making the bottom of the cabinet wet too. That stuff is strewn out in the hallway right now, need to get it out of the way. Plus all the water, despite my efforts to soak it up, still leaked under the wall next to the sink and got the carpeting wet in the 2nd bedroom. So once I figured that was probably happening, I had to move the stuff I had in that corner of the room.

Tomorrow first thing, Jack from maintenance (who I've talked with almost daily this past week, lol) will be here with a painter to fix the drywall under the sink. Also, the carpeting people are being called to be here first thing to soak up as much water as they can from the carpeting. From what I hear, the man downstairs from me had a LOT of water in his bathroom. I probably would have too, but I soaked most of it up.

The good news is that none of my pipes are currently frozen! But the bathrooms a mess, so I can't use it yet. I was trying to get some dishes washed this evening, I have all the towels that need to be washed and dried...gonna be a long night.

Drip...drip...drip...drip...

That's all I'm hearing right now as I type this at 7:32AM. I have a drip in my bathroom from the bathroom upstairs. Maintenance has been called, I'm just waiting for them to show up.

Let me start back at the beginning. We have had zero or sub-zero temperatures at night for the past week. My one bathroom is on a north outside wall, with little protection. I have left the sink faucets dripping to try to keep the pipes there from freezing. Last week about Wednesday or so, my hot water pipe to the shower in that bathroom froze. This didn't cause me any great concern, because I have a second full bathroom in my apartment. And there's nothing that can be done except wait until it warms up. Well, it hasn't, LOL.

The next thing to freeze was my toilet; That happened on Saturday. Again, no great concern because I still have the other bathroom. I can get by with one bathroom. Last night, however, I came home to the frozen toilet "overflowing" with water, that had backed up into the toilet. I immediately got the first thing I could think of that would fit in the toilet bowl to scoop out water. A red Solo cup. I started scooping it out into the sink, but the water level wasn't going down. WTF? So start furiously scooping water from the toilet into the shower, since I didn't have to be so careful with the water placement. Finally, the water level started going down to a normal level, but my hand was now frozen, since the water was ice cold. I ran the hot water in the sink to warm my hand up again, and the toilet started filling right back up again. WTF? I shut the water off to the sink, and again started scooping like mad from the toilet to the shower.

I dried my hand off, grabbed the phone and called the office to have maintenance come, because I didn't want to stand there all night bailing out the toilet. While I was on the phone with the office, I noticed the toilet wasn't filling back up. How observant I am! The toilet was filling up because I was running water in the sink! They suggested I shut the water off completely to my bathroom, using the shut-off valve under the toilet. Maintenance came about 10 minutes later, they tried to rod the toilet to make sure it wasn't a blockage, and when that wasn't the problem, we agreed it was the frozen pipe and they'd come back tomorrow (meaning today) to look at it. Although I tried to make the guy understand there's nothing they can do unless they want to tear all the walls apart and rip all the siding off the building. It's gonna be like this until it warms up. He leaves with the assurance that someone would be back to look at it today.

Fast forward to this morning. I wake up, take my shower, and as I go to take a pair of pants out of the dryer, I notice a drip...drip...drip...drip...coming from the bathroom. I turn the light on, and there is a steady drip of water coming from around the light/vent in the ceiling. *Sigh* I cuss a few times, then I call the office so I can get a message to maintenance about the drip. Then I call work to leave a message for my boss, letting him know I'll be out this morning because of this leak from upstairs.

While I was typing all this, my phone rang, it was maintenance, asking what kind of leak it was. Was it a "gush" or a "drip", that sort of thing, trying to determine how bad of an emergency this is. I said, "It's not a gush, it's a steady drip coming from the bathroom upstairs into my bathroom." The guy on the phone said they'd have someone there as soon as they could. I wonder how long that will be? I'll keep you posted...


Update at 11:30, while my car is warming up...Maintenance was here at about 9am, they went upstairs and determined the drip is from a backup in the bathtub above me. That may be caused by the freezing temperatures, I'm not sure. They said once the water goes away upstairs, so will my drip. So in the meantime I have a couple towels on the floor to catch the drip (and they're probably soaked by now). Nothing more I can do here, so I'm going to brave the snowy streets and try to go to work.