Really not asking for that much...

...Just a little heat in my apartment.

Hi everyone. Yeah, it's been more than a month since my last post. Sorry. When I realized that, I decided I ought to post, and so I am posting about the thing that's on my mind right now.

Heat. Or its absence.

You may remember from a long-ago post that I was on the verge of getting the broken heater in my apartment fixed. What with a month or so of deepest winter having gone by since then, and me still being alive, you might have assumed that said heat was fixed. Well, you're wrong. I still have no heat! And it's not for lack of trying. The nice guy who's been working with me on behalf of my landlord (who has been on vacation in Indonesia) has really done a lot of work toward getting my heat fixed. (The landlord, too, did a lot before he left, but unfortunately, he was working with a very unreliable contractor.) After two visits to my apartment by a new contractor, it was determined that my heating unit was obsolete, broken and unfixable. So the plan was to get a new one, a better one, a more efficient one, meaning that not only would I have heat again, but better air conditioning come summer!

So it took a little back-and-forth across the 12-hour-time-zone-differential between here and Southeast Asia to determine just which heating unit would be the best to buy, but finally, one was ordered, and it was on its way. And as these things often do, the delivery took longer than expected. But we had an installation appointment scheduled for Sunday morning ... until that was canceled because the installation guy was on call for something else and had to go do that something else. We rescheduled for this afternoon at 3:30 p.m., so I left work early to be here for the installation. And then, at 4 p.m., a phone call: Um, the wrong unit was delivered, so we have to try to find one we can get locally, and we won't have any idea whether that's possible until tomorrow midday.

And space heaters really don't do much, by the way.

On a related note, does anyone know an easy way to clean - really clean, not Febreeze - a couch? Mine just smells sort of doggy. Part of that is because I have had a dog for two years, and he has spent half of those two years sitting on the couch (and the other half of those two years, the couch sat in a dank, dingy storage shed). But it's become especially bad the last week or so because I have been waiting to give the dog a bath until I have heat (see - I told you it was a related note). I can't have the little guy running around damp in this cold, cold living room! So he spends his stinky days sitting stinkily on this ever-stinkier couch, stinking it up, waiting for me to come home from work. And I want to be rid of the stink. Rid of it in a real, legitimate way - not just by covering it up with some fabric-spray. But is that really possible without renting a shampooer or something?

There. Now aren't you glad you waited a month for that post?