We Found a Castle, Maybe

The tide of change always begins with a trick­le of a few non­con­formists and then it grows into a ver­i­ta­ble flood as increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple aban­don the con­vic­tions of the past.
–John Shel­by Spong from his book Liv­ing In Sin

The stone cas­tle sam­bear described seemed a hap­py place to live as far as shad­owkatt and I are con­cerned too, so an offer has been made. We should know by noon Wednes­day whether or not it has been accept­ed. Some hag­gling is to be expect­ed, of course. But if all goes as planned, the clos­ing will be on Feb­ru­ary 18!

Katie is not feel­ing well at all. I hon­est­ly think it’s the cumu­la­tive effect of not get­ting enough sleep Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, then let­ting her­self get dehy­drat­ed. I’m forc­ing her to drink water now. She’s cer­tain that I’m tor­tur­ing her—she’s hit that point where she’s not thirsty and just wants to sleep. Hav­ing been there, I know damned well that the sleep won’t do any good because she must get rehy­drat­ed. She’s also insist­ing that she’s cold, and it’s 71 degrees in here! She’s all bun­dled up now, and I already checked to make sure that she does­n’t have a fever.

Speak­ing of warmth, we haven’t been able to get tru­ly hot water in a while, and we nev­er have enough of the sor­ta-hot water for more than one show­er with­in a few hours. That does­n’t begin to account for laun­dry and wash­ing and dish­es and so on, either. I final­ly remem­ber to call the apart­ment office today, and was told, “Every­body com­plains about that every win­ter.” SO WHY DON’T THEY FIX IT?

The water heater is in a mechan­i­cal clos­et off the porch. The clos­et is unheated/uninsulated and the water heater isn’t insu­lat­ed. The same unit heats the house and the water. She said that because we’re run­ning the heater, there’s less heat going to the water heater. That might make sense IF we were run­ning the heater, but we’ve hard­ly done that all win­ter. So she final­ly sent some­one to turn up the tem­per­a­ture on the water heater, while warn­ing me that our util­i­ty bill would go up. I don’t care, as long as I can actu­al­ly get a hot bath/shower!

That reminds me—curiousmay9 said there’s enough room in the util­i­ty room at the cas­tle for anoth­er water heater. We’ll like­ly add one because we all like our hot water.

I don’t sup­pose any of you have the Nor­ton Anthol­o­gy of World Lit­er­a­ture vol­umes A, B, and C lay­ing around, do you?