Atlas shrugged and said "Bite Me"

If you look to the right you'll see, right under the spot where I gave up my anonymity, that I live in an apartment with creaky wooden floors and the occasional leak. And here's the thing: I don't mind that the floors creak in the winter and the summer and all the indistinguishable seasons in between. I don't mind that my air conditioning has picked the two hottest weeks known to man, two consecutive years in a row, to pack up and leave for greener pastures. I don't even mind that I had to move the bag of cat food out of the wee midget closet under the kitchen window to a more secure area because some toothy woodland-turned-urban creature ate an actual hole in the floorboard and started stealing the tuna-flavored nuggets from the extra large bag I buy for The Demonspawn. And just let it be known that while my cats may be lazy-ass indoor felines, they don't play with folk who steal their tuna nuggets which should sort of explain the dry hardened rodent foot I found under the kitchen rug a few weeks ago but I really just don't like to think too hard about that. Because it's not really the severed foot that bothers me it's the fact that I sure as hell haven't found the owner of that severed foot so on one hand I've got a pissed off footless rodent gimping around and on the other I've got a dead rodent decomposing in some unknown apartment locale and I'm not entirely sure which is worse.

What this all comes down to is earlier this evening as I was standing in my bathroom, patiently drying my hair. This isn't a normal occurrence because it takes a damn long time to get all of it dry which should hopefully explain to my fellow coworkers why I roll into work with wet hair every day. It's not that I don't like drying my hair it's that I like sleeping way more and when it's down to having pretty hair and sleeping I'm probably going to pick sleeping. So as I'm drying my hair I feel a big fat drop of water go plop! right there on my arm. No big deal, right? I mean, I just got out of the shower so there's bound to be stray droplets of moisture, like, accumulating on, like, shower curtains, right?

I continue with the hair drying because there's nothing worse than half dried hair. It's like eating a half cooked biscuit, all yummy and crunchy on the outside but disturbingly gummy and doughy in the center. No good. But then I feel another cold plop! and I start to get a little concerned. Because it's a way bigger droplet than anything my hair could have produced and the shower curtain doesn't seem to be producing attacking water molecules so I raise my gaze heavenwards, towards the bathroom ceiling, the ceiling which is now sporting a decidedly unflattering crack right down the middle. And it's then that the vague thoughts I'd had about the bath mat being wet first thing in the morning, you know, before I'd even had a shower, start to congeal into one big coherent thought and I realize I'm staring at the multitude of little bitty water droplets that kind of roll together into the big mama drop and look, there it goes, PLOP, right on my pink bath mat.

And for whatever reason this annoys me more than the rodent friend, the fickle a/c and the creaky floors. It even annoys me more than the two gunshots I heard last week because I'm prepared for those. I mean, hello, I live downtown. Plus it's summertime and folk get all crazy-like when it's hot outside. Someone goes and pisses you off, what are you going to do? Let them get away with it? HELL NO! Shoot his ass! This is a viable solution!

But back to the leaky ceiling: Yeah, I'm pretty damn annoyed about that.