Blessed by the Potato

Well, I’ve seen lawns toilet papered before, but this is ridiculous:

My building recently upgraded the toilets, and that was the pile made after a single day of renovations (I think it took them 5 days total). I thought they were going to continue to pile on toilets in some kind of monument to the porcelain gods, but on the second day they brought in dumpsters instead.

I don’t particularly care for the new toilets: they work well enough, but the flush lever is way around on the side and halfway down, almost as though they were trying to hide it from you in the dark. They were also installed a few inches from the wall, and have a slightly convex top, so it’s rather difficult to use the toilet tank as a makeshift shelf (our old toilets had a flat lid with a raised lip and were flush with the wall, perfect for battery-powered nightlights, kleenex boxes, and whatever else might need to be put there). Of course, what I’m most concerned about is that my landlords will use this as an excuse to jack my rents in January. Considering they did this as a cost-saving measure (they’re water-saving toilets; new showerheads went in too, and the building pays for the water), it seems like the perfectly sneaky way to screw me later on.

Naturally, I threw the original notice (containing the water-saving motivation) in the garbage as part of my crazy post-thesis apartment clean-up. My place still has a little ways to go yet, but I’ve cleaned up so much it’s almost unbelievable. After snaking my way through piles of paper on the ground, I seem to suddenly have this giant expanse of usable floor space that I just don’t know what to do with.

I still don’t know exactly when I’ll have my car back. After I get it back, I’m going to have to clean it. Wayfare made a good point: I should probably just pay someone to clean it, since cleaning up the mess of the person who stole my car would probably be somewhat psychologically devastating. Anybody know of a good place to go? A chain of some sort would probably be best, since I don’t want to leave the mess there for a week until I get back to Toronto…

Ben’s right, my post did deserve more profanity! I just hadn’t had a chance to see my car to see exactly what those fuckers did to it, so it hadn’t really sunk home yet. I took a few pictures with my camera phone, I’ll see if I can get them on here.

But basically, they just trashed the inside (as you’d expect from someone with so little respect for someone else’s property that they’d break in and steal it). Both front seats have been damaged with puncture marks. The ashtray was torn out (presumably to get at the $45 emergency gas money I keep kept there). The glove compartment was emptied. They had McDonald’s and threw the wrappers and cups all over the backseat. They took my bag full of towels from the trunk and ripped it apart (what, thinking I kept my laptop in a bag full of towels or something?). I keep a tub of road salt in the trunk for emergencies — that was dumped all over the trunk, and then my windshield washer fluid likewise opened and dumped on that to make a congealed salty wreck of my trunk. The poker set was stolen (but the frisbee, thankfully, was not).

Just what the fuck!!?!?!

Edit: The radio was left. Also, about the timing: I left my apartment around 12:30 yesterday, and saw the car was gone — the cops called my parents at 12:47 (just a few minutes before I got back upstairs after talking to my landlord).

Update: Here’s a picture of the broken ignition.

Also, I’m not sure how far the car was actually driven. I thought I filled up in Toronto before coming back to London, which would have left me with about a half a tank of gas — it was sitting at 1/4 full in the lot there, with 380 km on the trip meter (I reset it when I fill up, and I think it should have been at around 300 km when it was stolen). So, that could have been a fair bit of driving with a lot of idling; an outcome that would fit well with my supervisor’s scenario of the car being stolen to commit a few robberies and then being dumped.

It’s amazing sometimes how much the river can flood in the springtime. Fortunately, this year I remembered to take some pictures of the difference. I didn’t manage to catch it quite at the peak (when they were paging people over the public address system at the hospital because the parking lot was flooding out), but I did get within about 2 days, so the water level is pretty high!

Here’s a pair of shots of the bike path running under the bridge onto campus:

And here’s a pair of the creek running behind my building (that during hot periods in the summer dries up completely):

I don’t know how fast the water rises once the snow melts and those ice dams are removed, but you can see why they always warn parents not to let their small children play near the creeks and rivers in the early spring. Not only does it flood out some of those paths, but the water moving down the river moves a lot faster, too.