Tuesday Tune: 20-12-2011

First things first, let me share with you this weeks Tuesday Tune:

It’s called Dormire (Sleep) by Subsonica.  I like it.  Even if it has stolen the initial melody from Simon and Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning 3am.

Now.  A small....rant, shall we say.  I am doing this more for my benefit than yours as I need to order the recent events relating to my “boiler situation” so that I am able to recall the exact chronological facts if I need to at some point in the future.  Don’t read on if you’ve got your own challenges to face, go and do something that will lessen your challenge, rather than hear about mine.
 

Let me take you back:  it’s my second year studying at University for my degree.  I am living with 4 other students and my room is the colour of the inside of a cucumber crossed with that of mint leaves.  It was like that when I moved in and that’s how it stayed.  Yummy!  This room had four walls, in fact it was a square, however three of the walls were external walls.  My goodness was that a cold place!  The best gloves I ever owned I bought specifically to play the piano in that room.  And I remember there being ice on the inside of my window as it was not only cold, but damp, with mildew appearing on one of the walls a frequent occurrence.  This is not a sob story.  We’ve all suffered such pitiful living conditions (and if you haven’t, bravo!).  This is the beginning of my coldness.  Something I have not managed to escape since that year, 2005.

Since then there have been other properties that I have resided in, most of which were not very adept at keeping the heat in.  So when I moved to Ita...

...you know what.  I can’t be bothered with this.  

I was going to give you an account of each step that I’ve taken since living here to get my heating and hot water sorted but there really isn’t any point in doing so.  Today it was officially decided that, yes, my boiler is broken.  Wow.  As if I didn’t know that already.  I’m pretty certain that it’s been broken since I moved here in August but I didn’t know until I needed it in October.  When I noticed that there were problems, it started with only six out of eight radiators working,  I informed the landlord who got someone round to have a look.  

“There’s nothing wrong,” was the response, “keep all the radiators on all the time and check the level on the boiler regularly.” So that’s what I did. One month later the boiler had deteriorated and gave up heating the water.  That was two weeks ago.  

Thankfully, I’ve now got a personal “boiler squad”, consisting of three people from work.  If it wasn’t for them I’d be facing a Winter with no hope of ever being warm again.  But in fact the wheels are in motion to sort out this mess.  All I can literally do is pray.  Everything else is completely out of my control.  

In this present moment I’m very thankful for meeting such generous people since living here.  I am currently sitting on the sofa wearing a  pair of ski trousers (lent to me in September by my Manopello friends in anticipation of freezing temperatures) accompanied by a long, red coat (given to me by a Pescara-based friend as my own coat doesn’t meet Italian standards!).  The temperature of my house isn’t exactly freezing; according to the thermostat it’s a tepid 15.2 degrees, but I’m pretty glad I purchased two electric heaters in the beginning of November in a bid to keep the gas bill down.

This whole situation takes me right back to the beginning of this post, with my second year house.  It was in that house that the shower exploded whilst I was having a shower.  There was a loud bang followed by black smoke pluming from the bottom of it.  After reporting it that day the landlord appeared a few days later.  Did he fix it?  Don’t be silly.  He took a photograph of it so he could sue the builders who installed it, of course!