The Landlord from Hell!

We rent. We have, between us, rented around 50 properties in our lives and you think would think that we should be quite clued up by now on how to read landlords and how to spot when we’re actually being ripped off. This is not so.

In our defense though, we only met our landlord when we decided to rent from him, up until then, he had managed to not pitch up at any of the scheduled house viewings, preferring to delegate the job to his domestic worker. We were assured that the various smallish problems with the house would be sorted out on receipt of the deposit and that the house would be ship-shape for occupation on the scheduled date. This was not so either.

The weekend before we were scheduled to move in we arrived at a scheduled time to clean the place up a bit and measure for curtains etc., only to find a labourer hard at work and a pile of construction-type tools and sand in the centre of the lounge. We rescheduled. Actually we paid a cleaning company to come in and clean . The next two weekends after moving in were spent away from the house giving the landlord time to make the necessary repairs. Alas, he then told us he had run out of money and could do no more in the house (cough cough - Hello! what about the DEPOSIT!) and that we would have to live with the hole in the ceiling, the missing panes of glass and the semi-varnished sun-deck, the leaking toilet, the unpainted, partly epoxied crack above the door, the varnish all over the panes of glass that are in the door, the three ceiling fans that don’t work and a laundry so poorly equipped for water drainage that it is in fact a little reservoir. As well as a lack of stove – the existing one being found to be full of dead flying ants and living spiders and not in any kind of working order at all.

He also neglected to inform us of the personal training business his wife runs under our bedroom – nothing quite like waking up at five to conversations, grunts and the frequent dropping of weights.

In his defense though, we should have seen the signs when he asked for the rent in cash and told us about how he had to call in his cop buddies to get the rent out of the previous tenants. We really should have known..

Check out :www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/archives/2003_08.html - Classic photos including the one I used up top!

Bloody Yellow Pages!

Ja… If you live in KZN you will, no doubt, be sick of the hunna-hunna with regards to road renaming. Luckily the outraged letters to the newspaper appear to be petering out, God knows there were enough of them and they all amounted to nothing except to draw awareness to the vast lake of malcontent that exists in Kwa-Zulu Natal – but we knew about that anyway.

So, many innocuously named roads have been renamed after prominent (and not so prominent) veterans of the Struggle. Everyone will have an opinion on this and I am not discussing it here. My story is this:

Today I had to visit premises in Loop street which is in the CBD of Msunduzi (aka Pietermaritzburg). I was not exactly sure on how to get there, I don’t own a GPS and so I called up the trusty ‘Yellow Pages route-calculator on my browser and got a map. Fabulous! Except that the Yellow pages have not yet gotten around to noting the name changes. I drive down Nkosi Albert Luthuli road and travel the 2.6 kms required to get to Loop Street and find, to my dismay, that I have been misled for I am looking at Jabu Ndlovu Street.. I am eventually able to double back – thinking I must have miscalculated – Loop street hasn’t changed it’s name – or has it?

It has, it is now Jabu Ndlovu street. Fortunately I have a working knowledge of what is where in the CBD but what if you didn’t – what if you were from another part of the country driving around looking for Loop street – it doesn’t appear to exist. The issue is that if you lived in the town during the renaming stage you would still know where everything used to be and hopefully what it is currently known as but if you didn’t, expect to get lost – a lot.

Check out the link below for a little bit of information on Jabu Ndlovu:

www.lrs.org.za/pdfs/wgu/wgu_gall/c7.pdf

The Holistic Dilemma

Ardent supporter of Woolies stores that I am, I was there when the change-a-started-to-come.. The organic paradigm shift… No more spider DNA in your long-life tomatos, no more insecticide soaked broccoli florets and fear-filled, hormone stuffed pieces of meat.. Milk without hormones, tea in recycled bags and preservative free baby food.

Did I rejoice? Yes I did, the whole concept appealed. It appealed even more after my daughter was born and I resolved to keep her off sugar, caffeine and preservatives for at least ten years. Hahaha! The road to hell is paved with good intentions, she is addicted to sweets, demands niknaks every second day and wolfs down processed ham. But parental failings aside, I really care about this, I wnat to live in an enviromentally responsible way. I feel guilty about wasting paper, I buy fair-trade when I can find it and organic, I use energy efficient CF bulbs (even though they aren’t as bright as the old style nasty ones), I recycle, I get emails from Greenpeace and I treat my dog’s fleas with cedar oil and the ants with cinnamon.

Now that I’ve congratulated myself I want to get to the point. Hey, it’s my blog and I can be as self-congratulatory as I want. The issue is that it’s expensive and that organic produce is not really readily available yet. I wanted to feed my daughter organic baby food but it was literally double the price so I didn’t. I didn’t want her to use disposable nappies but the creche insisted that I did and I need to work and so I had to buy them. It seems to me that you can only live a natural, environmentally aware lifestyle if you have money! Here in Pmb, everyone drives to work, the public transport system is not reliable and so, if you can afford a car, you drive it. Everywhere. Bad. I want to reduce the amount of driving I do (better for the environment) so when I need to shop I go to the nearest store not, gentle reader, to the chain store across town that sells organic produce at an inflated cost due to the gorgeous packaging.

In reality, as things stand, buying organic and eco-friendly products is a luxury for me and I do it when I have extra cash and feel like indulging. Which seems problematic. In a world where the largest population is the poor how can any meaningful change be brought about when the day to day cost of living responsibly is so high?

an introduction

I am a down-at-heel bitter capitalist with Waldorfian aspirations as well as a working mother. This blog is a rant platform and a place to ponder the subtlties of pre-schooler parenting, organic gardening, recipes, depression, beautiful things and the humane eradication of ticks. I live in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Kwazulu-Natal and a city with a tragic shortage of Woolworths stores. I have a four year old daughter, an amazing and brilliant husband and a ferocious maltese. I’m new to blogging but have big ideas so watch this (somewhat work-in-progress-ish) space.