A Shitty Day Only in NYC

I had a shitty day and I mean that quite literally.

And I woke up like that because I'm just fed up with Daya's teenage angst which I get pretty much all of and it sucks and it's crappy to live with.

But she had amazing parent-teacher conferences so I'm very glad about that.
She's ok with everyone but me.

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So I woke up pissy and also hormonal and when that happens I need to watch out because it is a cascading effect.

I was going to go out painting but it's cold and I couldn't because all my fleecy underlayers were in the laundry, which has been piling up.

So I woke up early and did laundry.

Someone else was also in the laundry room and she had all the machines except the 2 I took.

First load in, fine.

Second load in, fine. Clothes, soap, baking soda... then I checked the lip of the washer as I always do for the stray sock or paper that finds it's way in there from the previous user.

There was a paper liner-looking thing, so I got a large wad of tissue from the laundry bathroom to wipe it out. There was brown goo under it.

It was poop.  Actual shit.

I freaked right the hell out.

I went upstairs and got my bleach spray and bleached it, what else could I do??

I seriously bleached it.

I ran the wash.

My clothes seemed ok except for one pair of undies that ended up in the rubber lip area and they did not smell good so I trashed them.

I REALLY smell checked the rest of the load and it did seem ok but I was so skeeved out I transferred everything to a different machine and washed it again.

Then I ran it through the dryer on high heat TWICE.

Industrial dryers get very, very hot on the high setting and I never use it but this time- yes.

That high temp heat does kill microbes. I spent a long time looking this up.

And THEN I put my candy thermometer in the laundry bag and 40 minutes after coming out of the dryer the clothing temp was 150 degrees.  So my clothes are ok, according to the internets. They smell nice and also should be as sterilized as possible from the dryer.

I wrote an email to the landlord titled Actual Sh*t in the Washer.
And followed that email up with a voicemail.

They have not responded.

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This evening I had one more load of laundry to do, towels and bathroom rugs.

So I went downstairs and used a different machine.... a lady was waiting for the dryer and we started talking.  I warned her about washer #3. She said that's the one she always uses!!

I told her about the poop and the candy thermometer.

We laughed and she decided she liked me.
So we chatted.

******

She's 77 years old and has been in her apartment here since she was 12 years old.

I confirmed my cabinets are, in fact, the original cabinets from 1950, meaning that my kitchen is not only older than me, but it is also older than my mother!!

But my neighbor Toby wins the Old Kitchen Award- she still has the original stove which has no automatic pilot light... she has to manually do it!!!

Once years ago her next door neighbor got really drunk and had the gas on too long before lighting that match and the stove exploded.

Blew a hole in the wall, she was severely burned.

The hole was big enough to walk through.

She has a painting in her apartment from the 1830s and it was - thankfully- unharmed but if that hole was a few inches larger the painting would have been ruined.

We traded stories about crappy neighbors.

She told me about crazy roommates, like her "nice Jewish girl" roommate who married a guy who wasn't circumcised and her parents made him get that done. (I asked if he had to have a bris and mohel and everyone watching....! Wouldn't that be hilarious!)  They got divorced and she ran away to San Francisco with a Black guy.

Her current upstairs neighbor is crappy, he's also a mess and regularly causes leaks in her bathroom.
She thinks it's because he is too tall for the shower and the water bounces off his head and goes everywhere.

She gets a leak from him about once a year.

He's a record producer- a bad one- he makes-- get this, I didn't even know it was a thing- foreign elevator music.

And he goes around telling people he is a CIA agent so they don't steal his stuff.

Batshit crazy.

Only in NYC.