Escape from New York: Fall 2009 edition was a week-long food, family, friend, and fun-fest with the BF.  We covered a lot of California territory, starting with Santa Monica and working our way north through Malibu, Agoura Hills, San Luis Obispo, and finally his hometown of Templeton.  More will be related later once I get caught up on all the “real life” (ha) I missed–mail, messages, etc.  Suffice it for now to say it was a beautiful trip with the one I love.  His family and friends welcomed me with open arms and I loved seeing his history and all the surroundings that were once his every day.  And the sun and beach and vineyards didn’t hurt, either.

Then I got to come home to this sh*tshow.

Our landlord (CROMAN MANAGEMENT, in case you live in New York or want to warn someone) totally, TOTALLY sucks.  And while I was gone, my roommate had to deal with coming home one day to find ELEVEN 2-ft by 2-ft holes in our ceiling, scattered throughout our sprawling 500 square feet.  Covering everything in that square footage was a thin layer of dust, the remains of a crap blizzard of poor management that had passed through.  Several phone calls/angry emails/threats of legal action followed.  Today, after a 5:15 am arrival at JFK and a nap, I sat in my apartment while a surely illegal group of workmen sung in Spanish and made the holes–the ones they were SUPPOSED TO PATCH UP–bigger.  Then they did a half-ass mop job and went vamonos. And here I sit, not on a sunny beach beside aqua water…but in the remnants of this year’s Dust Bowl: powder in my eyes and nose and lungs, holes in my ceiling, grit on my floor.  And all so they can pipe in a new heating system.  Which is greatly helpful to us considering we have never once needed to use the heat in our fourth-floor-heat-rises-pipes-radiate shoebox.

From the coast to a war zone.  This is a New York memory that I will not treasure.