Right now, Pickle is eating Chaucer’s food (not that it matters, since they’re both getting pretty much the same thing right now). Chaucer is sitting on the back of the couch, glaring at her. She chases him all around the apartment, which is really funny to watch. Hopefully once he gets bigger Chaucer will lay the smackdown on her, since right now he’ll only play with her if he can’t see her head. It’s funny to watch the two of them play with the crinkle sack, Pickle inside and Chaucer on the outside.

I got a disturbing phone call from Comrade on Thursday afternoon (I hung up on him without talking to him). I’ve got no idea how he got my phone number, since the only people who have it are my parents, Eddie, and work. Work knows better to give it out, and my parents wouldn’t do that to me, so my only theory as to how he managed to get it is that he got a copy of the police report from when the house was broken into. To make matters worse, I’m fairly certain that he showed up at work at the same time that I was leaving, which means that he went through the trash bags we’d left in the house and found a pay stub or something.

Yesterday Eddie and I relaxed together. We went to lunch at Olive Garden, went to Newbury Comics, Target, and Barnes & Noble, where we picked out a few books. We went to FYE and bought 4 DVDs, all used, and by the time we got home it was almost time for dinner. We surfed the web for a bit, ordered a pizza, and then watched Pulse and Cursed. We snuggled on the couch together while the animals chased each other around before they also settled down. Today we’ll be calling Electric Ink and seeing if we can stop in this afternoon so we can get some more stuff done. Because we like the pain.

Last night, a little after 8pm, Eddie are and I are snuggled on the couch watching Survivor when we hear a knock on the door. Knowing it can only be the little man upstairs, I grab Pickle and Eddie takes the gate down and opens the door a crack to find out just what the hell he wants.

“Tomorrow ees Friday,” he says. “The city come and collect trash.”

Yes, well no shit! Could that be the reason why we took the trash out this week?!?!

Yes people, Friday is trash day in this part of Pawtucket, which is exactly why we took trash out this week when we had a full bag, exactly as we’ve always done when we have a full bag. Because you know, otherwise we hoard it in here or something.

I really need to get working and get out of this fucking place.

For the most part, my day was ok. We left the house at our normal time just after 6am, with Eddie slamming a not-even-close-to-full bag of trash (several empty soda cans, a box, and a couple of beer bottles) into the trash cans out in front of the house and mumbling “I hope that woke you up, fucker.” We got to work and school on time, and I spent the better part of the morning watching A Beautiful Mind and crocheting in class. We took a test, went over some basic, boring stuff, and we all left at about 12:30pm.

And then, in the parking lot, I was faced with a big decision: do I go home, and potentially face an hour or so alone in the house before leaving to get Eddie, or drive straight down to Walmart and spend 3 hours there doing nothing. My choice was to spend my afternoon in the parking lot at Walmart. Why? Because I don’t want to be here alone with Comrade if I can help it. Like I told Eddie today when I told him what I did, who’s to say how often he’s peeked in the windows? He admitted to three weeks, but I’m willing to bet he’s been doing it any chance he’d get if the curtains are open enough for him to see. These windows are not low to the ground - the bottom edge of the window is a bit over my head if I stand in the driveway below them, which is the windows he admitted to looking into. It’s the same with the bedroom windows. The front windows seem a bit lower because they’re on the lawn and the little garden, so there’s a bit more to stand on. While he’s a bit taller than me, he’d still need to actually make an effort to look onto our kitchen table.

And you’d think that someone who has had at least one webcam running in her house 24/7 for the last 6 years would have no problem with the fact that someone looked in her windows, right? However, to me there’s a huge difference between someone watching the webcam of a person hundreds of miles away and a person looking into the windows of the girl who lives downstairs. The house just doesn’t feel safe to me anymore. I feel completely violated.

Any ideas on how to make some money so I can have enough for a security deposit on a new place? It’s not possible for us to use the securit deposit on this place towards another one, since Comrade’s not required to give it back immediately - he’s got 2 weeks to give it to us after we move out, and I’m pretty positive he won’t give it all to us because he’s bound to find something that we fucked up and charge us an arm and a leg for it. I don’t want to be here anymore. At all.

Comrade just left. The man is insane, and now Eddie got a peek at why I can’t stand to deal with him.

First, he came in and started in on the bedroom because there was a ripped window shade and “omg get it down!” He’ll be buying and giving us another one. He may have had more interesting things to say had we left the toys out, but we hid them the other night.

Then, he went into the kitchen and complained that the ceiling needed to be painted. While he was in there he bitched because there was a dead fly up there by the light. As predicted, he accused us of storing trash in here, even going so far as to say that over the summer, he looked through our kitchen windows and saw pizza boxes on our kitchen table for 3 weeks. Ok, I admit that there were 2 empty pizza boxes on the table (they don’t fit in the trash can), but where the FUCK does he get off looking in our kitchen windows? Or any of our windows for that matter?

In the bathroom, he said nothing about the fact that the clothes were piled up everywhere, but he did complain about the fact that there’s a leak in the shower door that seems to breed a steady stream of mildew. Because obviously, the warped door frame is our fault and all. Curse me for pressing Eddie up against it and having my way with him! Not that that would happen, unless we really wanted to fly out of the shower and into the towel rack. He also thinks that we have nothing better to do than make sure that there are no dust bunnies behind the toilet, because the toilet is too dusty.

He found nothing of interest in the living room except a large crack in the ceiling, which has been there since I moved in, and the fact that one part of the blinds in one front window wasn’t all the way down, and was slightly higher than the rest of them. And he seemed more upset than neccessary that the chandaleer in here doesn’t hang properly and leans a bit. The horrors! The same thing goes for the man-cave - nothing in there to pique his interest.

We let him know that the hot water heater seems a bit FUBAR because our hot water gets up to maybe 100F at the most, and while that’s not bad for the summer when a cool shower feels good, during the winter we like things warmer. He agreed and will be checking out the water heater. He then proceeded to complain once again about the trash and requested that we take it out at least every other day, whether it has anything in it or not. because obviously, in his little personal universe, trash bags grow on trees and we can just afford to toss them out with 3 empty Diet Coke cans and a Hamburger Helper box. And the quote of the night (in my best typed Polish accent)?

Creestal, you are a woh-min, you should know ‘ow to do this theengs.

Yes, you heard it here first, folks, having a vagina makes you automatically have the ability and desire to scrub your house from top to bottom! It must be one of the perks of having XX chromosomes. someone alert the Nobel judges, I deserve an award for this idea.

I swear to god, if we could find a place the same price as what we’re paying and not looking for first/last month rent with a security deposit on top of that, we’d be out of here asap. I don’t need some anal-retentive landlord telling me to clean the back of the toilet.

The house is almost clean. The living room is pretty well done - the cage is disassembled and hidden away, all the ferret toys are gone (even the box with 20lbs of rice in it), and all the floors are swept. The man-cave is tidier; the only worry we have is that he’ll come in and say “Move everything away from the walls because it’s a fire hazard.” Should that happen, I plan on telling him to take his fire hazard and shove it up his pale Polish ass, because if he wants to discuss violating fire code I’ll be more than happy to bring up the fact that he won’t give us a key to unlock our front door to the local police/fire station, since they’re about 2 blocks away.

My oral presentation went fine. We also had a quiz today, which I completely forgot about but probably aced anyway. And, in a fit of complete stupidity I put my shirt on backwards this morning, just noticing it while Eddie and I were in Stop & Shop tonight. Eddie’s been offered overtime tomorrow, but with only 1 car I’m still debating about whether or not I want to get up at the asscrack of dawn and drive him down there for 5am. I could come home and sleep (doubtful - who wants to go back to sleep for just an hour anyway?), or put some finishing touches on the housecleaning to get that out of the way tomorrow rather than Wednesday, or work on some of my crochet.

I came home this afternoon, drove around the block once to verify if Comrade was home, and then parked in front of the house once I knew he was gone (he makes me very, very nervous, to the point where I will avoid going outside if he’s out there so I don’t need to talk to him). I ran inside, packed up some food for Pickle, peed, packed up Pickle inside one of my purses, and bolted. Of course, in the span of the 5 minutes that I was in the house, Comrade pulled into the driveway and was messing around somewhere, which meant that I had to take off even faster than intended because if I had met him in the driveway or stairway I’d have to explain what my purse was writhing around and jiggling on its own. Thankfully he was nowhere to be seen and I drove up to Burger King and put Pickle in her carrier. She’s currently at my mother’s house for at least tonight. Poor girl. I’d like to bring her home tomorrow if possible - I supposed we could leave a note on the door telling him to come in while we’re not home and we could have dinner at Mom’s tomorrow and bring the furry home later that night, but that would require us to know for certain that he’s checked things or risk bringing her home and having to sneak her out again because he hasn’t inspected.

Eddie just too off to the grocery store to cash in a jar of change, and I think I heard him outside talking to Comrade. I’m not sure though, and I can’t find my phone to call and find out.