I Live In A Wonderful Neighborhood

No I don’t.

So, over the last few days, I’ve been dealing with smelly things.  The installed washer in the basement, as I mentioned in the last post, doesn’t drain so well.  The three or four five gallon buckets per washer load wasn’t a great time, so I called up Joe Merritt, plumber, to take a look at it, and also replace a few dripping basement water valves.

He showed up a little bit late (surprise) on Monday and headed down to the basement.  I showed him what needed to be done and he got to work.  After a few tens of minutes, I checked in on his progress.  He had replaced all of the valves (three of them) and had moved onto the clogged waste pipe, seen below the pipe with the bucket resting on it here:

He was prying the PVC pipe back to let it drain a bit into the bucket.  Some really super smelly water was coming out of it.  Like, super extra poopy.

Now, keep in mind that this drain had been sitting idle for months and months before we moved in.  There was likely all kinds of crap (literal and not) sitting in there, drying out, and thus, shrinking a bit.  Once we moved in and started to flood the drain with water from showers and sinks and toilets and hopefully nothing else, that old, dried drain stuff swelled again and made for a slow drain.

Once he had sufficiently and slowly drained the pip of grossness, he started to snake the drain with a small hand snake and I headed back upstairs to not snake a drain with a plumber.

When I returned to the basement after I heard some swearing, I smelled something truly awful.  Just abysmal.  When I finally fought through the stink cloud and found out what the problem was, I was met by a huge pool of drain stuff all over the place.  Apparently, the snaking didn’t go well and to figure things out, Joe Merritt removed the pvc pipe from the sleeve to the left of it.  Big big mistake. 

As soon as he removed the pvc, all kinds of disgusting and old, um, material came flying out of the sleeve.  He caught some of it in a bucket, but there was more than five gallons of material to catch.  The result?  All kinds of poop, grey water, hair and all things disgusting all over the floor.

Better news?  When trying to put the pipe back into the sleeve, he broke the pipe, and the attached trap right off.  Awesome.

We moved the appliances out of the way and got down to cleaning things up.  Well, he did, as I pay him to keep poop off of the floor.  He used the shop vac for a few minutes and brought a bag full of gross out to the garbage can.  Once the chunks were gone, he replaces the pipe and the trap so it was all back to normal.  But much smellier.

Here’s the after picture:

And another, for fun:

Everywhere that is wet on the floor in those pictures is where the drain sprayed grey water and poop.  There was a lot and it smelled very terrible.  It still kind of does after two days of open windows.  Gross.

I paid Joe Merritt for his troubles and he left.  he gave me the number of a plumber who actually unclogs drains, rather than just does rough/finish plumbing and he came here yesterday.  I will write about that shortly.  Why not now?  Because I have better things to write about.

As I mentioned in the title of this post, I live in a crappy neighborhood.  The evidence has been mounting for awhile now (Exhibit A, Exhibit B) and I think, based upon what happened last week next door, the verdict can finally be rendered beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here is the nail in the defense team’s proverbial coffin:

Around 11pm, I was in the living room watching an illegal feed of the Celtics overtime win in Boston over the Chicago Bulls.  In the final few seconds of the overtime period, I heard a bunch of yelling and commotion from outside.  Since the yelling in my neighborhood usually amuses me (it’s usually a teenaged guy yelling about a girl who wronged him, seriously), I opened the window next to me to listen in.  Nothing crazy, just a girl yelling about something and a guy trying to explain himself. 

After a few minutes of this, Amanda, who was in bed, appearing out of the bedroom and asked me if I heard all of this.  Of course I did.  Since there isn’t much space between buildings around here, it’s tough to tell the directionality of yelling in the neighborhood.  I figured it was coming from around the block, but Amanda let me know that it was, in fact, coming from the parking lot of the house next to us.

Awesome!

I bounded into the bedroom, we turned the lights off inside (as to not be seen), high fived and hunkered down for some greatness.  We were not disappointed.  It was a group of about five or six people (of college age, but most certainly not enrolled anywhere accredited), all visible from our bedroom window, milling about around a four door sedan.  There were two or three girls, one yelling hysterically,  two fellows near the car and one guy who seemed to be playing intermediary between them all.  It was clearly the two fellows near the car versus the hysterical girl and her roommates, with the third guy trying to calm people down/keep the fellows in the yard.

After a bit of time, one of the two fellows, started to get really nervous, antsy, as it was revealed that the police had been called and would be arriving shortly.  he really did not want to be there when the police arrived, but he never actually had the nerve to run.  We surmised that it was because the car was his and he would be caught one way or another (either now, or later I guess).

Knowing that something funny might happen, I grabbed my video camera and got to immortalizing the experience.  The audio is a bit soft, and it was nighttime, and thus, dark, so I apologize.  Oh, and there’s swearing, so heads up:

So here’s what we think went down: The crying over the trunk fellow drove his friend, the other arrested guy in the white striped black leather jacket, to the house next to ours.  The other arrested fellow apparently had a key to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment.  He used the key to enter her apartment while his driver waited outside.  While in the apartment, he managed to grab her computer and television.  Before long, his ex-girlfriend came home and parked behind the perpetrator’s car, boxing it in.  She flipped out.

The police came and made me laugh a lot.  Apparently, he broke into the apartment and tried to steal his ex-girlfriend’s stuff because she, *throat clear*, she owed him five American dollars.  This guy broke into a house to steal things over five dollars.   He was arrested and went to jail, at least for one night, for five dollars.  He convinced his pants peeing friend to be an accomplice with a car for five dollars.

Hilarious.

This neighborhood is hilarious.