For those who “never understood the difference between blogs and those awful personal web pages from the `90s” (see, for example, the comments on “Co-opting the Future,” by John C. Dvorak, in PC Magazine, where Dvorak himself reveals he too doesn’t understand much about weblogs), this post will probably further confuse their already feeble and addled minds.
Why? Because it’s one of my wholly random and completely personal rants that I just want to get off my chest and make part of the public record, for that tiny slice of the public that might, just might, include my landlord.
I like where I live. Not just Philadelphia, but my apartment building. The location is perfect, for one thing, and it’s a pretty cool building, though the static, awkward, and uninteresting lay-out of my apartment would send any self-respecting feng shui practitioner into a dispiriting but still somehow satisfyingly harmonious meltdown.
The building used to be a factory where they once manufactured . . . No, I’d better not say, since doing so might make my location too easily identifiable, and some of the e-mail I get from cranky Rittenhouse readers kind of scares me.
Anyway, among the apartment’s advantages are 10-foot ceilings and 6-foot windows, which are nice when the weather is sunny and fair. But these same windows leak like proverbial sieves or, even worse, like White House stage manager Karl Rove.
Meanwhile, the building’s hallways are maintained during the winter at a temperature I would estimate at a brisk 45 degrees, yet another source of cold air that makes its way inside my apartment through a small gap under the front door.
As a result, on a day like today it’s freezing in here. Not only is the air cold, but the floor, even with its horrible wall-to-wall carpeting (a real selling point in the opinion of the building’s management but correctly termed “an abomination” by blogger Jane Finch), is cold. My hands are cold. My feet are cold. Shoes left on the floor are particularly cold. Everything I touch is cold.
And due to the otherwise-admired high ceilings, to get the place warm I have to turn the heat from “low” to “high,” an act that in and of itself sparks violent wind shears that really don’t help matters any.
I want to stay here -- in Philadelphia and in this building -- but I’ll tell you, I know already that the electric bills are going to kill me, again, this winter.
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