2/11/01 - 1:46 am

Wow. This week SUCKED! Getting to see my sis was good, and she and I hung out nearly every day. But I HATE that house. And I hate the area around it. I like the land, the scenery. But I hate the people, and the attitudes. It is like the land that civilization forgot.

For starters, the roof of the house leaks. A LOT. I have a foot wide hole in my ceiling, from a time when it was leaking, and I made the mistake of touching it. Wet plaster, leaves, paint, and whatever else was there, came crashing down on my head, and worse, my bed. That was about 3 years ago. I put a bucket in the attic, to catch that leak. But there are still lots of others, luckily none in my room, and new ones seem to pop up every year.

Then, we don't have running water in that house, because it is in such a (to use the nice word), rural area. So we have a well, with an electric pump. It will, or used to, pump 5 gallons, then you had to stop, and wait a few minutes, before you could pump more. For those of you who are bad with measures, a typical toilet uses 3.5 gallons. A typical bath, one of mine anyway, (stop drooling at the thought of me nakie in the tub Brian), take 30-40 gallons. And that house, has no hot water heater.

So, to take a bath, one has to fill the tub up with water, then put in an immersion heater my father made. And it takes like half an hour for the water to get heated up. And if one wants to wash hair, one has to put extra water in the tub, and then after it is heated, use buckets to dip it out, and set it aside for rinsing hair. And there is no such thing as a shower, unless one wants to run the water straight from the pump, which even in the hottest days of summer, is still fairly cool, understandable considering it comes from something like 200 feet underground.

All that is when the pump is actually working. For the past year and a half, it has been broken. So, no water at all. For flushing the toilet, we bring buckets of water from the house here in DC. And there are NO baths there anymore.

So, this is where I spent the last week. O, and did I mention, no central heating? We have space heaters in every room, and a propane stove.

So, for the last week, I have had to flush the toilet with water from buckets, and since there was a limited amount of water, either not flush every time, or only go when I absolutely HAD to. And to make matters even worse, there is no running water in the sink. So to wash hands after going to the bathroom, one has to dip water out of a bucket into a bowl, and then pour a little over hands, soap hands, then pick the bowl up, and pour the rest of the water over hands to rinse them. And rinse the soap off the bowl, cos if one has soap on hands, and picks something up, soap gets on the thing one picked up.

So, why, you might ask, would I choose to spend time in this antiquated place? Because, for years, I lived there, and my room had not been cleaned the whole time I lived there. Now, stop for a moment, and think back to when you were 8. If your bedroom had not been cleaned, not even one single time, between when you were 8, and when you were 19, imagine how it might look. Very messy is the nice way to say it, a sty, a dump, hellhole, rather more honest ways to say it. Hey, in my defense, no one every taught me how to keep a room clean. And it is not an instinctive thing. It is something that has to be taught. So, for a very long time, I didn't see anything wrong with how it was. Then, when I hit teenage years, I was too busy contemplating suicide to give a damn how my room was.

Well, that is no longer the case, and so I went up to clean it. I had to go up and try and do it in one big chunk, because if I did it a little at a time, and my mother was there, she would go through the trash bags behind me, and take out things she thought needed to be saved. Hey, being a packrat is a learned behavior, and I learned it from my parents. So, I had to do it when she wasn't there, and I had to get my sister to take the trash bags and put them in the dumpster at her work. My sister lives up there, not in the same house, cos she is not my sis by blood. So, she took the trash and got rid of it for me, thereby preventing my mother from digging through it.

Now, this is all well and good you say. So things had been icky, but now they are getting cleaned. The wrongs are being righted. Correct, and yet...

I have allegies. And between the leaks, and the mess, there is quite a lot of mold and mildew and dust in the air in my room up there. So, when I am there, I can never breathe well. My nose gets all stopped up. And when I can't breathe right, I can't sleep right. So, the whole time I was up there, I didn't get more then 5 hours of sleep a night, and that was not even in one chunk, that was scattered across the night. Except for Friday night, when I finally found some antihistamines. Friday night, I managed to actually sleep for a good long while.

Also, for some reason, either physical or pschological, or some combination of the two, whenever I am up there, I get bad headaches. So I took medicine with me, but it doesn't REALLY help. And it ran out on Wednesday anyway.

And more bad things, wasps kept flying into my room from the attic, through the hole in the ceiling. And I ran out of water in buckets on Friday, and that was AFTER my sister let me fill up a couple buckets at her house on Wednesday.

So, then I called my parents to come get me, since I was out of water. My Mother was supposed to come get me, but my Father had messed up the car, and had to fix it before it could be driven the 4 hours and 200 miles roundtrip to get me. Only, no one told me, so i sat all day waiting for my Mother to show, and she never did. Finally I went to bed, and then called Saturday morning, to be told my Father was going to come up. I was in NO mood to dea with my father, but nothing I could do about it. For once the universe was on my side, And it took Ricky so long to fix the car, by the time he was done, it was too late for him to get the things he was going to do up there done, so he just let my Mother cme get me. So, I ran out of water midday Friday, but didn't get picked up until Saturday evening.

And, when I FINALLY did get back to the real world, ie: our house here in College Park, it was 12 am, and it turns out my Father had left the computer turned off nearly the whole time I was gone, which he KNOWS messes it it, and it ends up making this nasty grinding noise whenever you turn it on. It did that for a good 5 minutes, even after I rebooted, which usually fixes it. It finally stopped, a while ago.

So, this week just generally sucked. Now, I just got done eating a BIG ice cream sundae, and I am going to to take a long, hot shower, and then go sleepie in a nice clean nightie, in my nice soft bed, between nice clean sheets.