When you wake up in a freezing apartment to the sound of somebody outside your bedroom window using a sanding drill to scrape dirt and particles from your concrete window ledge, then it's the kind of morning that calls for a tall pint of Guinness. And a shot of Bushmills.

The men that were outside my bathroom window a couple of weeks ago are now working in the section of building right outside my bedroom. And today they're using tools that whir and buzz and grind. And it's not even 8 am yet.

To add insult to injury, our heat has been off for most of the week due to a broken thermostat on our building's boiler. Most people in our building are unfazed by having no heat because our building is an older construction (think 20's-era) with really thick walls, so it tends to trap heat very well. People in efficiencies with only a few windows don't normally have a problem. But for people with corner apartments, like me, it can get pretty damn chilly. To give perspective, I have a one-bedroom (not exactly 'huge') apartment with a total of 8 large windows. That's a lot of windows for a relatively small space. And here's an engineering tip: Glass does not make for good insulation. Right now I have on two pairs of socks, and my fingers are blue. If I lean too close to my monitor, my breath fogs up the screen, and I have to stop to wipe off the condensation with my sweater sleeve. There is a frozen icicle of snot hanging from my nostril. It's not pretty. Thankfully, the sun is out today, so it will warm up this afternoon. The weekend should be interesting, as it's going to dip back down into the low 20's on Sunday. I guess this is all good practice for the annual all-man fishing trip coming up at the beginning of April in the mountains of New Mexico.

In other 'building' news, I'm no longer the condo association president. What I've discovered is that in Washington, people have become so used to cover-ups and scandals, that they automatically assume any person in a position of leadership has a hidden agenda and is trying to keep them down. To them, instead of being the person who volunteered to 'represent them' and help manage the daily minutia that crops up in the building, I was simply 'the man.' Here are a few of the questionable actions I took while on the board:

• Tried to expand our storage so that everybody in our building could have free storage, instead of only a few people having it for a fee
• Helped resolve multiple issues involving our boiler and hot water heater so that people (including myself) could have heat
• Unclogged drains for people using a complicated plumbing technique called 'Drano Max' when people would complain to me that their sink was backing up and it wasn't their fault.
• Made a unilateral decision ok'ing the installation of air-fresheners in hallways.

As you can see, I was a friggin' tyrant.

Bottom's up!

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