Not at all a boring Thursday night...

I've been having a slow week trying to settle back in after my wonderful vacation. I'm currently sitting at my newly organized/clean desk watching a BBC version of Tom Jones. It is very interesting because I have heard of the play in passing but had no idea what the story was about or when it takes place. It's a pretty funny story as well, with lots of mishaps and barely missed chances.

In other news, we are having yet another plumbing problem. What a surprise. For clarification, I love my apartment for many reasons and after the bed bug incidents/month, nothing emotionally terrifying has happened. It is just the small stuff that I suppose is normal to anyone renting in a high-rise apartment building in a city.

In any case, the latest plumbing issue is in a whole new room! The bathroom! Hooray, variety. After taking a shower today, I was unable to turn off the hot water completely. I went downstairs to tell the building manager that we needed a plumber but apparently the building manager was on her way out for the day, even though it was only 4:15pm and the office is supposed to be open until 5pm. I told her that the HOT water wouldn't turn off and she replied "oh, so it's a leak. I'll send maintenance up tomorrow."

Well, the good news is that hot water is included in the rent and therefore we won't be responsible for the hours and hours of "leaking" hot water wasted tonight. It is not just an obnoxious drip either! It is a steady dribbling stream of water. The bad news is that it is a complete waste of water and goes against all the other conservation efforts in our apartment. Eva and I are very good about turning off lights when we're not in the room, not running the water excessively, using the water saver option on the dishwasher, using energy saving lightbulbs, and so on. And yet we are wasting gallons of hot water tonight because the building supervisor decided to go home early instead of arranging for maintenance to see to the problem tonight.

Two more bits of randomness to go:

Eva came home in between her day job and her stage management job to find a nice big freezer box from her mom, containing various meats and chocolate cake. The unexpected surprise, however, was the packet of dry ice. Eva came into my room to ask if I had any need of dry ice. I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head... So Eva decided to play with it in the bathroom sink. Hehehe. It was really cool to melt some of it with the running water and watch the steamy substance (I think Eva said it was carbon dioxide) roll over the sides of the sink. Eva assures me it wouldn't kill me or set off any alarms, as long as I didn't spend a long time in the bathroom with the door closed... She did say that if I started turning red and had trouble breathing I should stick my head out the window or something... Before Eva left she decided to put the leaky faucet to good use and put the rest of the dry ice in the bath tub. I haven't looked in on it lately but I think it has mostly dissipated now. Luckily the heat has gone from being to low to way to high so windows are cracked in every room (even though the outside temp is in the low 20s during the day). It is, as Frances said, "natural air conditioning." One must resort to such measures when dealing with building controlled heat.

Last bit of excitement for the evening is the Iowa caucuses. NPR has a very nice chart of the caucus returns and I reload it every couple minutes in anxious anticipation. When I first checked I was distressed to see that Edwards was ahead in the Democrats' caucuses. However, that was only with 17% reporting. Now, less than an hour later, Obama is ahead with 36% of the votes at 681 votes, followed by Edwards at 572 votes and 30% of the votes. Clinton is trailing in third with 30% and 568 votes. This is at around 8:39pm CST with 80% of caucuses reporting. I've been learning a lot lately about the caucus process and the Democrats basically use a kind of Electoral college system while the Republicans use a popular vote style. (Go to Wikipedia for a good explanation or check out the stories at NPR) I'm very excited the Obama is getting a larger lead because earlier it was neck to neck with the top three seperated by only a dozen or so votes, each taking around a third of the votes. With 20% still not reporting, however, I'm afraid there may be a final turn around but I can always hope.

So from the above paragraph, you can probably tell two things: I am an Obama supporter and I don't care much about the Republican results. I've been listening to NPR stories about both parties but since I would much rather have Obama win over anyone, I don't have much of a preference yet about who he should run against. At the moment, though, Huckabee has a strong lead with 34% of the votes but only 65% of precincts reporting.

Well, I must return now to my movie since I am extremely lost in regards to what is happening in Tom Jones. I only know that Tom is in jail and just found out he accidently slept with his mother. While meanwhile, the heroine Sophie is bawling her eyes out because of some letter Tom wrote just to get another woman off his back. Yep, I'm lost...

Happy January 3rd to you all!