Disgusting.

Hey, sports fans! Ready for your weekly-ish blog post? I bet you are! Who's a good audience? Yes you are, yes you are!

Okay, sorry, just had to get that out of my system.

Oh, before I forget, for those of you keeping tabs Carina has started another solo-project blog that's really awesome at http://makeofmyself.blogspot.com/. It's a really well-done layout that she put together herself (including the favicon). Right now she's doing a series of fall-related posts, including lots of fall-themed recipes, crafts, imagery, stories and, my favorite, Halloween stuffs. Go and give it a look, it's much more interesting than my posts!

All right, I guess I do owe everyone a post as well as an explanation for the title. For the folks who have been keeping track of the game, you know that I'm not exactly thrilled about the living conditions in Hong Kong. Usually I kvetch about the quality of life (cage-dwelling, pollution, overcrowding) that is present throughout the city. Although I usually do this through my own lens, I don't always talk about what I have to deal with personally and uniquely. Well, here it goes: poop on the floor.

Yes, you read correctly. Today I walked into the bathroom to wash my hands after attempting to clean off the communal stove (an impossibly sticky task), when I noticed an extremely offensive odor. At first, I assumed it was coming from the commode. I flushed it, assuming it would remove the stench. As I looked down, however, I noticed a brown smear around the base of the toilet. I started to kneel down to take a whiff and make sure it was what I thought it was, but I only needed to lower my head slightly to confirm my intuition. Gross.

Now, poop on the floor is probably something that everyone has dealt with. You have all probably known a small child, (un)domesticated animal, or geriatric relative who has "accidentally" defecated on the floor. I get it, that kind of thing happens. It should be tolerable. Unfortunately, none of those excuses apply here. Our flatmates are both adult students in university. Someone is probably thinking, "Well, college kids do crap on the floor, you know." Yes, yes I do know that. That behavior can usually be explained by stupid partying, however, and neither of our flatmates is exactly the party-going type. So...excuses? Yeah, none.

This, by the way, is not the first of a long line of offenses. Since I moved into this flat over a year ago I've had to deal with a filthy, bug-infested, half-broken kitchen, a washing machine that floods said kitchen half of the time, and a bathroom that constantly smells of urine. They never clean any of the communal areas themselves and I frequently find myself doing all of the sweeping, swabbing, and disinfecting. Just call me Jeeves. If I lived with a crazy cat lady, this might make sense. I expect more out of university students living on their own, though. Maybe they should go back to their mothers and suckle at the breast and have their diapers changed. I could have been sent locusts, floods, or earthquakes...but, no, I was given these flatmates. Good God, sir, was that fair?

Oh, that may be going too far. First of all, I'm an agnostic. More importantly, I really only think it's the one guy (the other is rarely ever here). Still, to cover all of my bases I sent an e-mail to the flat owners today, requesting that they forward an attached message to the other tenants as neither has given me his contact information. I suppose they could excuse themselves by saying that we are rarely ever around at the same time. That's a good excuse, although I wish that I never had to encounter them or their feces...or their leftovers strewn across the kitchen and bathroom. What does he have, seizures? In that case, why is he living on his own!?

Okay, enough with the frightening flatmate stories (for now), I can give some positive news, too. Carina and I had a pretty busy week. Carina was swamped with work, and I've been heavily researching my future projects and preparing for my lecture. Oh, did I not mention that? I'll be giving a mini-lecture this Friday on the first half of my master's thesis. I'm limited to thirty minutes for this first presentation, but I'm going to try to get as much in as I can. I'll be presenting the full version on Thanksgiving (gobble gobble), so I can have up to an hour for that. That'll let me wax poetic but, for now, I need to keep it nice and tight. I've been rehearsing with Carina, who's been really nice to let me bore her to death, and she has been giving me suggestions for how to be more concise without cutting content. Let's hope it goes well!

Much love,

Colin