I want to be here, I want to be gone

Our landlord sent the man we thought was one of his contractors, actually turns out to be a friend of his who knows something about construction, to the apartment to caulk the windows this morning. This was the agreed-on first half of the deal when he agreed to replace the windows: caulk them as a temporary measure against the weather, then replace when it was less snowy and rainy. Now it's what he says will fix the windows: caulk them, stuff a little insulation at the tops of a couple (which made me intensely uncomfortable; I would have put down dropcloths if I'd known he was going to walk around the apartment with a hank of the stuff), and then put screws in the frames of the most drafty, that'll hold them. We let him caulk the windows, because if it helps at all with the cold, it is better in the meantime than not. We were very careful not to say, "Thank you for fixing the problem." We said, "Thank you for trying this. We'll see if it helps." And tonight I will take temperature readings in all the rooms as usual and see if it does. In the meantime, I hope the city's letter to our landlord is in the mail.

This was around eight in the morning and I'd gotten approximately two hours of sleep, so as soon as he was gone and adrian_turtle had left to catch her train, I went back to my five-blanket, Doppel-Abbie-containing bed. And then unfortunately slept until one o'clock, which completely kicks in the knees this schedule I'd evolved over the last week and was coming, in a Stockholm-morning kind of way, to see had its benefits. I dreamed about renting a room in a hotel where something like the assassination of the Romanovs had gone down, only it was classical Greek royalty: a brother and a sister of the royal line and their advisor. Their shadows were still faintly seeped into the wall, like a frieze in water stains. The brother had been killed elsewhere and laid out on the bed; she stabbed herself, collapsing across him; the advisor had hanged himself and I found him the worst shadow to see, dangling like a spindle. (I noticed in the dream that their deaths reversed the usual pattern in Greek tragedies, where hanging is a death for women and heroes die by the sword.) There were no hauntings in the traditional sense, no voices, no faces, the hotel wasn't always carrying guests dead or raving out in the morning, but I remember once it rained in one corner of the room and once I heard a sheep bleating. Some of this must have been talking about Jill Paton Walsh and Gillian Bradshaw and Mary Renault with Adrian before bed last night, but I can guess the rest.

And the rental manager from the agency which found us this apartment just called me on a kind of customer service follow-up, so excuse me while I attend to that.

P.S. Last night I played pinball with derspatchel! He bought a Zizzle machine ("like the shetland pony of pinball machines") from a guy in Davis Square who was moving to San Francisco and couldn't take his miniature Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, although he was very definitely not leaving his full-sized Junk Yard; we moved it in the back of a friend's van and assembled it in the living room with tricia868's Allen key and I ate some kind of dandan noodle-like dish that was too hot for Tricia and two donuts from Lyndell's (the maximum possible I think I can safely metabolize at one time) and played several rounds for the first time in decades. I was of the firm belief that I was terrible at pinball. I don't know whether this was true or just Tiny Wittgenstein. I'm still not sure how I would tell. I don't think it matters. I had a lot of fun. I am keeping that in mind, too.

It doesn't matter if you want it back, you've given it away

The landlord insists (his wife, who he handed the phone to, insists) that the building inspector called him this morning and told him not to worry, fourteen windows in the apartment are just fine, it's only the two he already knew were a problem in February that he needs to fix and therefore no letter is forthcoming because no letter is necessary and I have no grounds for complaint and neither does my housemate and all this conversation took place after six o'clock on a Friday, meaning I cannot get to the Department of Public Works to find out what really went down until Monday and between then and now I will have to deal with the landlord. Who will not put anything in writing, because as his wife reminds me English is not their first language and what good would a letter that wasn't in English do me? (I said I didn't care if it was a letter in Portuguese. She said she wouldn't write it.)

And after an hour with the heat at 68°F, the bedrooms are 61° and 63°. I cannot tell if this is an effect of the caulking or the outside temperature being 36° as opposed to last week's 21°. Either way, it does not seem like a fix to me.

I do not feel this is my home.

[edit] I do not know if I can talk about this anymore, either. I can't even think how to finish this sentence.