if your answer to the question, "what is missing from the photograph below?" was "TILE, SOME MOFO'ING TILE," then you are correct!

This morning I awoke to the dog barking barking barking, and I stumbled from downstairs to find my Landlord and some other dude standing in the bathroom doorway. "Good morning," Landlord said as I collected the dog, who was sniffing his pants. "I didn't think you'd be home, Christine!"

I live here. It's 9:30 a.m. I am wearing an orange t-shirt smeared with paint that says MIAMI WHAMMY: DO IT LIKE A NATIVE! and has a 1980s rum cocktail recipe printed on it. And my name does not end in an "e".

I can't wait to move.

At least I found my landlord, unlike housemate M, who was found by the landlord when the latter threw open his bedroom door and turned on the lights. It's a scene not unlike morning my senior year of high school, when Cliff would open my door, announce "BOB and FOF*," and stand there until I dragged my grumpy, firm seventeen-year-old ass out of bed and downstairs to a bowl of dry Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

M and I tried moving upstairs to the living room, where I had hoped to zonk out to a "Top Chef" marathon, but then Landlord dictated his lackey to repair the front door. I would type quotation marks around repair, but since I'd have to do that for any verb associated with my landlord, I'm not going to. Suffice it to say that a few minutes later Landlord went out back to prune (again, imagine me making very sarcastic air quotes) the bushes, which entailed him hacking the rose bush down to a nub, stacking the chopped branches next to the naked bush, and telling me about his recent vacation to Alaska. He then turned his attention to this weird planter next to the rose bush, the one that I have challenged people to pee on while drunk, and at that moment M and I decided to escape for breakfast before Landlord discovered the boardwalk we've built in the basement.

When we returned home, we found that Landlord had removed all the tiles from the downstairs bathroom but not bothered with removing the grout, or laid down any new tile, so now the bathroom floor is stickier than a movie theater's. (I chose to show you the "flash off" photo, which lends the floor a warm glow.) Also the air conditioning was turned to 85 degrees and then off. Also there is a new FOR RENT sign taped to the phone box that is technically in our neighbor's yard. So now M has upstairs shower privileges and it looks like the phone box is for rent. Five bedrooms? In that tiny thing?

The upside to all of this is that Landlord also called me to ask if he could come over Friday morning to prime and paint the living room, which means that in addition to me not losing my deposit over the red awesomeness that is the living room, I get to sit around and watch my landlord repaint it for me. Hopefully he will also spackle all the holes we created in trying to hang up our framed Willie Nelson liner notes and the gashes created by the game shelf falling on Ryan's head during Holiday Spectacular 2005. Did I learn my lesson about painting things without permission, you ask? Yes. I did. Just as well as Ann did last year.

At one point today during breakfast I asked M what his favorite feature of the house was, and he stroked his new beard thoughtfully before answering that it had to be the giant hole in his bedroom wall, the one that he used as a trash receptacle for Dr. Pepper cans, ATM receipts, and kitty litter until it filled and he spackled over it. And I nodded, sipped the coffee he'd bought me, and imagined the day that the house implodes unto its own shittiness and all they find in the rubble is old time-y soda cans and bank statements from 2006.

Or, as they'll call it: a time capsule!




*BOB and FOF stands for "Butt on Bed, Feet on Floor," which was my father's way of cajoling me into a sitting position so that I had a greater chance of regaining consciousness and therefore catching the bus. We're big on acronyms.