Tuesday, January 02, 2007

happy new year

we live at the back of our building and are lucky enough to have a beautiful backyard in which we have invested huge chunks of money, time and effort.
when kpr and i returned home from the holidays we found awaiting us on our back patio:

- 575,600 soggy cigarette butts
- a shattered wine glass
- a lone sweat sock, also soggy

nice happy new year presents from our upstairs neighbors.

(how many times can they be told not to throw their disgusting cigarettes off the balcony? its called littering people)

(if you are so drunk you can't hold onto your wine glass, perhaps you don't belong on a metal balcony three flights up, climbing in and out of a tiny window. if you fall next time and shatter your head instead, i'm sweeping you up and putting you in the dog shit trashcan just like i did all the glass. no calling 911 for you sucker.)

(a soggy sweatsock. ew.)

(i'm looking at you eurotrash from the third floor)

we've bugged our management company about 575,600 times about people throwing things off their balconies, and they've posted signs, but people just get back into the habit of flicking their butts out into the air, not their problem anymore. i think they aim for our pond too, and our goldfish walt loves the nicotine rush. i just don't get that about smoking and smokers, it is just so stupid the poisoning of bodies and blatant littering. don't you realize when you throw down your cigarette, someone else has to clean it up for you, or in ends up in the gutter, and washes into our water system, ending up in our beaches and in that nice piece of tuna you had for dinner last night? so fucking selfish.
i had a friend who, when she was a smoker, would stop on the street, put out her cigarette and throw the butt into the nearest trashcan- i thought that was so classy, and grown up.

the eurotrash on the third floor also covered their balcony floor with plywood, which is so fucking annoying. the balconies themselves are old, metal and the floors are slatted, to allow the easy pass through of water. this doesn't make it very easy to have a chair out there, but most people manage. however, the eurotrash on the third floor decided that they just needed to set up another living room on their balcony, so they covered the floor with plywood and set up a few chairs and tables (they even have a lamp). this is great for them and all, but not so great for us as whenever it rains, all the rain gets caught up on their balcony and is forced between the very small opening between their plywood floor and the wall of our building, and sends it shooting down the wall at a very high rate of speed and onto our patio and down our stairs to our basement. we've had trouble in the past with a gutter that was too small, caused this same problem and ended up breaking the air tight seal on one of our windows. we had the management company come in and replace the window this summer and about two days after the window was replaced was when the eurotrash moved in and installed their home made floor.

we've asked the management co to do something about this, like physically go in there and remove the floor and then slap them around a little for being such assholes- but they haven't followed through yet. i think it will be interesting to see if we have a blizzard this year (there is always at least one each winter), how well the balcony will hold up with three feet of snow piled up with nowhere to go. piled up against their window. when it melts dripping constantly down the wall of the building and onto us everytime we go in and out of the backyard.

we've got to put our foot down.