01.27.09
Posted in Comfort tagged condo drama, sucks to be you at 12:01 am by kyrias
The tenants are insisting on deducting the money from next month’s rent. Honestly, I’m not too thrilled with them. I just can’t help but think that they must have bullet-proof skin or something — I know I’d be way too ashamed to carry on the way they have been.
At the behest of my parents, I sent the condo management company an email telling them that because our tenants were seeking restitution from them, we were going get ours from them.
They sent back a politely nasty email saying that we have no right under the law, under any circumstances, to withhold our condo fee. If we tried, they will charge us a $25 late fee. She actually said, “Do so at your peril”.
As a writing aside, has anyone else actually heard someone not in a book say that before?
I shot back an email telling them that perhaps we have no right to withhold our condo fees, which honestly considering how low-handed they have been all this time, I’m not really wanting to trust her on — but it’s certainly within our rights to sue the company for their illegal actions.
We shall see how she’s going to respond.
It’s getting uglier by the second, and frankly I’m not enjoying myself here, but she’s infuriating me.
If she’s right that we have no right to withhold condo fees for any reason, then let this be a warning against living in one. I can’t get past the helplessness of having someone else decide whether or not they’re going to fix something as vital as heat.
Permalink
08.17.08
Posted in Comfort, Spirituality, culture tagged cultural shock at 4:25 pm by kyrias
Zack refused flatly to take off his shoes when entering the house.
I was going to wipe down the entire apartment with a cloth, but that statement scratched that idea out for me. I wasn’t about to wear myself out wiping down the house on my hands and knees just to have people spread more filth around immediately afterwards.
It’s perhaps just as well that Zack does not see us living together for more than two or three years.
If the rest of the house supports him in this, I’ll just buy house slippers and wear them indoors, but I’m most likely going to want to move out next year.
Which would be very unfortunate, as I really do like the apartment we’re living in right now and I do enjoy their company. But this is a deal-breaker for me and I’m not going to compromise on it for next year.
It’s a cultural thing, I suppose. I’ve poked around and did a quick Google search on what people thought on the matter.
I’m just going to state right here, if asking my guests to take off their shoes in my house is rude and makes me unfit to entertain them — then they can bloody well find other people to entertain them, because I’m not doing it. I’ll ask beforehand so I’m not smacking someone in the face with it unsuspectingly when they have hole-y socks - but if you’re not comfortable removing your shoes in my house, I’m not comfortable having you there. We can meet somewhere else if we need to.
Especially in the city, where you’re walking around on people’s urine, spit, dog excrement, discarded chewing gum and God knows what else — I would NOT want that in my home at all. Talk about revolting. It’s also, literally sickening.
Some people seem to be saying that bare feet and smelly sweaty socks are ickier — I honestly don’t know about that. Perhaps it’s because your feet are cooped up all day in shoes and that makes it likelier for them to get stuff such as athlete’s foot? Considering that the prevention measures are “keep feet dry and take shoes off so feet can breathe”, it seems highly likely.
I also like to go barefoot in the comfort of my house and I’m not going to feel comfortable if I know people have been tracking in all sorts of nasties.
Right not the floor feels slightly sticky — ick. There’s also little bits of lint and whatnot and I honestly can’t bring myself to care about it anymore — since they’re just going to track in more filth if I clean it up anyways.
For me, my home is my sanctuary, it is a place apart. Consider it semi-sacred space if you will. When I go home, I want to leave the outside, out, as much as I can.
Permalink
06.18.08
Posted in Comfort, Money tagged culture, splurge at 1:26 am by kyrias
Tired of buying white rice at $1.5 a box, Caesura and I decided to invest in another rice cooker.
I popped on Amazon to check out prices today and was horrified by what I found. The same type of rice cooker that I could’ve sworn I bought three years ago for less than $100 is now selling for near $200. Either my brain is playing some really nasty tricks on me, or inflation has gone wonkers.
I finally settled on a Zojirushi fuzzy logic rice cooker for $120.
Rice cookers essentially come in two types: the fuzzy logic type, or the on/off switch type. The on/off switch type is usually much cheaper, one of that type from the same brand is only about $40, a full 1/3 of the price of the fuzzy logic cooker.
The thing is, the on/off switch cooker does reasonably well, although most of them usually end up cooking the rice unevenly so as to leave a crust on the bottom. Also, there’s no setting to keep the rice warm. This might seem like minor quibbles, but I’ll admit to being more than a little bit picky about such things because I grew up in a household with a fuzzy logic cooker.
The average Chinese household will have a fuzzy logic cooker and often also the on/off switch cooker. This is because the on/off switch cooker is often used to bake/ heat bread, re-steam pork buns, or double as a slow cooker. I know of no Chinese household that doesn’t use a fuzzy logic for rice.
Since we eat rice every day, it’s much easier to have a device where I can just pop the rice in and leave it alone while I cook the rest of the meal. Having the rice cooker keep the rice warm and edible is also a bonus in case I ever want to cook the rice before I go to work in the morning and have something to eat immediately after I get home.
I guess that the rice cooker is definitely a luxury item. The $40 dollar one would probably have sufficed for our needs — but I’ll admit to being willing to spend on the luxury of perfect, fluffy rice. I’m afraid I think that the fuzzy logic does make better rice. If it helps, I’m not the only person who thinks so.
Or maybe that’s just cognitive dissonance talking. “If I paid more than $100 for it, it damn better make tastier rice!”
Eh.
Permalink
06.11.08
Posted in Comfort, Environment, Health, Money tagged Comfort, energy consumption, ethics at 9:52 am by kyrias
After about a week of 90 degree weather and corresponding humidity percentages, we bought an air conditioner.
As we weren’t able to install it properly since the school regulations forbid the use of them, much less allowing us to screw them into the window — I get the feeling that we’re not insulating it as well as we should/could have.
I think, ultimately, we’re going to continue using the A/C because it allows us to be able to dry our clothing on the drying rack and, more importantly, it helps us to sleep at night. Since studies have shown that better sleep patterns = better productivity, and lack of it can cause health problems such as weight gain and heart problems — I think it’s a fair trade-off.
What I’m looking at right now is the possibility of getting a decent portable air conditioner. I don’t want a big hulking thing in my window constantly and it’s irritating to have it there when the night is cool enough to just have a fan pulling cool air in. Not to mention the really poor insulating job that we did on it probably means that we’re trying to cool the great outdoors; which is impossible, as everyone knows.
The problem is, on average, it seems that portable air conditioners are not as well built as the window version. They don’t cool as well or as efficiently — it’s been said on many reviewing sites that it can take the edge off a really hot day if you have no other alternative, but it doesn’t truly provide enough cooling power to be comfortable. Also, whereas one can get a decent window A/C unit for less than $200, the portable versions don’t seem to ever fall below $300.
I’m hoping that as technology improves, they will start to find some way to improve on the design so that portable A/Cs are actually viable. For now, I’m just going to have to settle with losing the view out my window and trying to insulate as much as I can so my green conscience doesn’t smack me around too much.
Permalink
06.06.08
Posted in Comfort, Environment, Health, Money tagged budgeting, Comfort, environmentally friendly at 1:21 am by kyrias
So, one of the things that I really need to figure out at some point, is at what point do drying racks break down? I did laundry today and it seems that it’s refusing to dry. With the humidity at 93% — somehow I’m not surprised that it’s not working out too well.
My bedding is starting to feel soggy, even.
My question right now is, how worth it would be it be to invest in a dehumidifier so that my drying racks actually work?
It’s a rather complicated question, as it both involves the electricity consumption of the dehumidifier, the base cost, and the comfort level of the human beings in the room.
I live on the fourth floor of a dorm which is not air-conditioned. At 93% humidity, it’s often muggy and hot. So it might potentially be worth it to get a dehumidifier so that it’s more comfortable and so that the drying racks will work. However, the Energy Star dehumidifiers run somewhere in the 250 dollar range. That’d be — 334 loads of laundry at 75 cents each to recoup the base cost, not to mention the amount of electricity that I’d be using. I’m not counting electricity right now because I don’t pay for it and I’m not counting it for later because I’m going to write it off as a cost for personal comfort. But somehow I don’t see myself doing 334 loads of laundry in the next month and a half.
I think, ultimately, because how hot we get depends a large deal on how humid it is — and since air conditioners that are energy efficient don’t work well as dehumidifiers — it might be worth it to invest in a dehumidifier once I get to Boston and then see if A/C is still necessary.
For the time being, I might just be a whore and go to Walmart, buy a dehumidifier and then return it at the end of my stay here and have overall net gain in terms of comfort and savings - but I’m not sure my conscience would be comfortable with that. I’ll have to see — we used up about $50 on laundry in the past month alone, I’m fairly certain that past a certain point I’m going to look at the numbers and decide to just be a horrible human being.
Permalink