More Health Updates

Hello, friends. I just thought I’d throw a quick update out there, for anyone interested in how kiddo and I have been doing lately, since we both got slammed with health issues around the same time.

Dream Journal 6/26/17 | Gross

Click here to read my previous dream from the same night.

I was in some sort of YMCA locker room/spa hybrid. I really had to use the bathroom, but I was really nervous, because the toilets were all side-by-side in a straight line in the middle of the room, with only short shower curtains on each side, separating them.

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Dream Journal 11/22/16 | Cousin

Kyle, Liam, and I took a trip back to my home state of Maine.

Dream Journal 8/30/16

I was looking at a large apartment to rent with my friends Adara and Callie, who I hadn’t seen since high school. We decided to move out to California together to go back to school, though I’m not sure what for.

Dream Journal 7/15/16 | Blood and Mold

[Dream #1]

I was in a large warehouse style store, and I was trying to pull something off of a shelf, and a ton of random stuff fell down on top of me. A bunch of people rushed over to pull me out of the pile, and when I came out, my face was covered in blood, and one of the workers started screaming that my eye was missing. I started to panic, but discovered that my eye wasn’t missing, it was actually cracked open, like it was made of glass.

Advice Needed For Dealing With Landlords

** EDIT: For anyone wondering, yes, we did sign a lease. We rent through a realty company, but do have an actual landlord, who we have never met. Our lease is only a half a page long, and is basically a “Dear John” letter, with next to no specifics on who fixes what, other than that the tenant is in charge of “basic” repairs and upkeep. I’m pretty sure that pulling up a toilet, which has been caulked to the floor, and replacing a wax ring, is not basic, right?

Hello, friends. I need some advice. I’ve always rented, and currently live in a not-so-fancy, not really up-to-date apartment. We have had a lot of issues, as many of you have read, but we’ve been dealing with a lot of issues that were preexisting, from before we moved in, that I have been researching. I don’t know how long we are going to be in this place, at least another half a year, but since I have a very mobile toddler now, I want it to be safe.

Recently, I’ve been growing more concerned about our toilet. So, the linoleum in our bathroom was quite discolored when we moved in, and there is a VERY large yellow and gray stain all around our toilet. I didn’t think much about it, mostly because I was naive, and obviously they knew about it before we moved in, and I assumed whatever caused it had been fixed, and the floor was just permanently discolored now. Recently, I’ve been doing some research, because I don’t know if it is my imagination or not, but the stain seems to be growing, and I discovered that it probably means that there is a faulty wax ring, creating leaks under the floor. The floor around the toilet also does not appear to be 100% sound, and was also like that when we moved in, but doesn’t appear to have gotten worse. I can see that the toilet is poorly caulked to the floor, and has been caulked for a while, which probably means they haven’t fixed anything with it in a long time, right?

I know that I need to contact them to fix it, because it is absolutely their responsibility to make sure that our plumbing is all working properly, and is not a hazard. Does anyone know if there is anything that can be done about the floor discoloration? The stain is MASSIVE, and hideous. We don’t have any windows in our bathroom, so we can’t get any direct sunlight on the spot, which I read helps, and I’m assuming that nothing can be done until the moisture under the floor is taken care of anyway. Would they have to tear up the floor? How long does it take to repair a wax ring? What if there is a mold problem, would I have to pay an inspector to find out? How should I go about asking them to get this all done? They’ve always been so flaky when it comes to fixing things around the apartment (we’ve been here a year and a half and I still have a hole in my kitchen ceiling waiting to be covered…). Has anyone ever dealt with anything like this before?

Thanks for reading, friends. Any advice is welcome!

Jan

Take A Walk With Jan #12 | Vlog

Hello, friends! I am sweaty, sunburnt, and cranky as hell. I am also too lazy to write about it, so here is a quick(ish) vlog telling you why! The video is unedited, obviously. Please excuse my appearance, as I really don’t give a shit about it right now, haha. Oh, and some pictures from our walk today. I forgot to mention that after Liam fell down, he decided to pick up, and throw out, all the sticks in the park.

Enjoy!

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Thanks for reading/watching!

Jan

Daily Prompt 3/13/2016 | Incomplete

In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt 3/13/2016 | Incomplete

My apartment is currently a disaster. I’ve been sick for three days now, and my tiny toddler is using up every ounce of energy that I have left in me, which isn’t very much at all. I have a long list of things that I desperately need to accomplish, and just haven’t had the time to do.

Fun fact: Just because you are a stay-at-home parent, and spend the entire day inside the walls of your home, that does not mean that you will have tons of free time to get things done, and clean, and make your home beautiful. Nope. Basically the exact opposite, actually.

I thought I would share with you my list of things I need to get done, and share with you my excuses as to why they remain incomplete to this day.

1. The Dishes
I’ve written about my dishes before, and it hasn’t gotten any better. The dishes used to be Kyle’s one chore, even back when I was working full-time, and he was unemployed, I only tasked him with the chore of doing the dishes, and it was such a fight to get him to do them more often than once a week. For those who don’t know, Kyle is my fully grown, adult husband, and not a teenage boy.
After the baby came, I stopped working, and Kyle started working full-time, and getting him to do anything, especially the dishes, was impossible. At one point, and I am embarrassed to even be telling you this, our dishes had gone undone for 3 months. Every few days, I chipped away at the top layer of dishes, but the ones at the bottom… absolutely disgusting. After a few weeks, I was able to get them done, and they were easier to keep up with after that.
Recently, Liam has been in this needy, clingy stage, and will not let me leave his side to do anything. I can’t pee, I can’t cook, I can’t do the dishes or clean, or get on the computer, or he loses his mind. The only free time I get is when he is sleeping, but my apartment is so small that I can only do quiet activities (like sleeping…), which means no dishes. So, they are stacking up again. Ugh. I’ll pay some one to come do them for me. Please?

2. Toddler Proofing
My house is reasonably baby proof. The outlets are all covered, and dangerous items are high up, and out of the reach of my tiny human. However, my apartment is NOT toddler proof, and I am learning very quickly that my 13 month old son is way smarter than I give him credit for. He has started climbing, and opening, and grabbing, and getting into so much trouble. I have a book shelf in my living room, which contains Liam’s baby books on the bottom two shelves, and a miscellaneous assortment of not-for-baby objects on the top three shelves. Well, my toddler is now tall enough to reach all but the top shelf, and keeps getting into our stuff. Same goes for my desk, and the DVD shelves next to my desk. I am running out of places to stack my crap, so I really need to actually clean up my living room, and organize my stuff, so that it looks presentable, and safe. I was prepared for a baby, NOT for a toddler!

3. My Toilet
Anyone else have a man in their house who always manages to get pee on the outside of the toilet? Or on the floor? I find myself constantly wiping up after the grown man in my life, and it drives me nuts. Honestly, I blame the toilet. Our seat has been broken since we moved in, and the toilet is REALLY small. Kyle and I have lived in several apartments together, and this was never a problem. I find myself having to clean the toilet all the time, and I hate it. I also recently decided that I would invest in bleach tablets or something for my toilet, which means I am now a certified adult, right? I hate cleaning the toilet, man.

4. Liam’s Crib
I’ve been avoiding it for a while, but the time has come to drop Liam’s crib down to the lowest level. My 13 month old is just getting too tall, and has been trying to climb out recently. He can’t climb out yet, but I want to be proactive, just in case he figures it out. Where has the time gone? What happened to my tiny baby? I have this nearly 3 foot tall child now. WHAT? I also have a toddler bed sitting in the closet, waiting to be put together, but that won’t happen for a little while yet. Ahhh!

5. Landlord Crap
I’ve never met my landlord. Instead, I go through a realty company, who then relays messages to him. This is a bullshit, awful system, and nothing gets done. Last spring, I called realtors to tell them that none of our windows have screens on them, and thanks to the spiders, lady beetles, and misc. stinging insects that reside outside of my apartment, we were unable to open our windows at all. We also have no central air (which they lied to us about, another story entirely), and did not have an air conditioner at the time. The woman I talked to said she would send someone out immediately to measure our windows. Yeah, that never happened. Almost a year later, we still don’t have screens, and the weather is warming up, and I have to call them. Again.
Not only do we need screens, but our back door is crooked and bugs literally just waltz into our apartment, along with debris and weather from outside, but we have also had a hole in our ceiling, as a result of the leak in our ceiling that we experienced during our FIRST NIGHT in our apartment. The leak was fixed. The hole was not. Renting is just so fun.

Those are just a few things that I need to be completed, that probably won’t get completed any time in the foreseeable future. Ugh. Adult stuff. Ugh. Stress.

Thanks for reading, friends!

Jan

Dream Journal 1/29/16

Present day.

I was at a large, indoor arena, located inside a massive university. I was there with a group of people from my high school, who were now my age, to watch some kind of competition going on between MIT and Stanford, some kind of championship game for an unknown sport. The arena was located in the center of the university, and it was surrounded by windows, which were multiple stories tall. There were also several types of staircases, going in a bunch of different directions.

The lowest level of the building was where the bathrooms were located. I went down to the women’s room with a few other girls from the group, but the room was packed with people. The large, wrap-around wall of the bathroom was a large window, which looked out into the arena, and people were staring in. None of the stalls had doors, and there were no sinks. Where the sinks should have been, there were small toilets built into the counters, which you needed to jump up onto in order to use. One of the girls from the group jumped up and proceeded to use one of the sink toilets. She urged me to use the one next to her, as I had to pee badly, but the bathroom was littered with garbage and filth, and I opted to hold it.

I decided to leave, and ascended one of the large, spiral staircases outside of the bathroom hallway. At the top of the staircase was a large, open area, where a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament was happening. There was a tall, obese man yelling and waving his arms around, apparently because he was losing, and a skinny kid across from him, looking terrified. I stood there watching for a few minutes, when suddenly, a group of little kids walked into the room, probably first or second graders, and stood in a straight line. Everyone in the room stood up and lined up as well. The group of children began singing a Christmas song that I had never heard, and I tried to stand as still as everyone else. My heels were over the edge of the floor, and I was teetering, dangerously close to falling several floors down. A woman who was standing next to me started laughing and said that I had big feet, and I turned red.

When the kids finished singing, I went back down the stairs and met up with the girl from the bathroom. We walked back into to the arena together, which was now empty, aside for two guys running laps inumanly fast. One of the men was wearing a Speedo, the other in a black, wrestling leotard. we watched them run for a while, when the children before marched into the arena. They began marching in a line around the arena, singing the same song from before. People started flooding back into the arena.

And then I woke up.