Maintenance!

About half an hour ago, I noticed that my living room ceiling was leaking. It was not raining. Also, my apartment is on the ground floor.

I called the apartment's service center and they got a maintenance worker over surprisingly quickly (I estimate it took maybe five minutes). While he was on the way, I went upstairs and took a look at what my neighbors had sitting above my living room ceiling. I was expecting to see a broken fish tank or something of that nature, but instead, I saw a desk. A desk with some papers next to it. The papers didn't look particularly wet.

When the maintenance worker arrived, he looked at the leak, looked puzzled, looked at the dry ceiling in the adjoining bathroom, and then came back out into the living room and looked even more puzzled. After five to ten minutes of the two of us waving flashlights around and acting confused, he said he'd check the history of the apartment and have the main shift come out in the morning to figure it out.

Fortunately, he was smarter than I was, and made a more thorough inspection of my neighbors' apartment. There, he discovered water seeping out under their kitchen wall. Apparently, they had just recently drained the bathtub, and the pressure from the tubful of water was enough to force its way through the drainpipe.

Anticlimactic, but at least there probably doesn't need to be any work done in my apartment. I feel sorry for my neighbors, though.

On an unrelated note, go Lions.

Angry Day comes to a close

I was grumpy for much of today.

First off, my dad is in Maryland, visiting my mom. Nothing wrong with that, but he's also trying to get the wireless connection working on her computer. Because she has Windows 2000, she's at the mercy of the utility that came with the Belkin USB wi-fi dongle we picked up a while back, and things haven't been going well. It doesn't help that my dad has no experience with wi-fi equipment of any sort. So I spent a good amount of time today and yesterday trying to guess how to fix things over the phone, and completely failed.

Soundgarden sounds kinda like Nickelback

Soundgarden obviously has the excuse of being first, but there's a similarity if you listen hard enough. Also, a friend of mine swore today that Kid Rock used to sing for Nickelback, which, apart from the fact that it's not true, makes sense if you imagine his voice pitch-shifted down half an octave or so.

On a completely different subject, I picked up a copy of Lufia & the Fortress of Doom today. It is... unfortunately inferior to Lufia II, or at least the first half hour gave me that impression. I will have to complete the set one day, when I'm feeling less cheap.

Old things are fragile

I have an old bed. It was old when I got it. Before then, it was pretty old when my dad got it. I think it might've been new when my grandfather got it, but I'm not sure. Point is, it's at least sixty or seventy years old.

Yesterday night, as I was crawling into bed (PROTIP: crawling vertically is hard!), I heard something that sounded like a crack widening in a board. It is somewhat concerning that I would immediately leap to such a conclusion based on a brief noise, but at the time, I was more concerned about that fact that my conclusion was correct. After a brief it's-late-and-I-don't-feel-like-thinking-rationally attempt at stuffing some things under the bedframe, in the area of the crack, I finally gave up and decided that my bed was no longer capable of supporting weight.

I think it's fixable. The crack had not yet widened to the point where any wood had fallen off, and it's on the side of one of the legs, so I don't need to worry about realigning anything. I squirted a bunch of wood glue down the crack and put my Awesome Clamp on it. My guess is that when the glue dries, the bed will be stronger than it was before the crack appeared.

What mainly worries me is that the same leg cracked in a different place a couple years ago, and it also happened to do it a little while after I'd moved. Since I'm presumably going to be at least moving into a different apartment after I graduate (and probably to a different state), this is a bad omen for the Bed of Many Generations. On the other hand, I try my hardest not to believe in omens, so maybe it isn't an issue.

The lesson here is that Elmer's changed the design of their wood glue bottles, and if you don't consider that possibility, you'll end up having to ask an employee at ShopRite to find one for you. All I could do to hide my embarrassment was to think to myself, "Shut up, my bed broke and I'm tired."

...and that's how I discovered that the space in the middle of my room is just barely big enough to fit a mattress.

The cycle begins anew

Greetings.

This is my second attempt at a blog. The first attempt ended sometime a couple years ago. I started it actually quite a while ago, back when ads were mandatory on free Blogger accounts. I spent a good month or so tweaking the page layout, and made sure to post whenever something interesting happened to me. After a while, though, I found myself unable to cope with the futility of detailing my life to an uncaring abyss, and my posts devolved into cryptic half-sentences that could not have possibly made sense to anyone else. Finally, after a period of several months where I didn't post at all, I eventually decided that I loathed the entire thing and had Blogger wipe it off the face of everything.

So, hopefully, things will go better this time. Maybe I'll actually tell people that I have a blog, so at least a handful of people will be reading it, or maybe I'll just use it to cultivate spam. We'll see.

Since this is the beginning of my new blog, I feel it would be good to provide some context, so that you'll be better-equipped to understand future posts:

• I am at student a Michigan State University.
• I study computer science.
• I like pancakes.

But enough about me.