Gasface

Good morning, Elephant Larry Blog! It's Stefan. I know I don't write THAT often on the Elephant Larry blog, but I figure, hey, it's Tuesday, new leaf, etc. So my Tuesday resolution is to get off my ass and write a little more. So here we go.

So here's a thing...it turns out that my girlfriend's apartment has been full of gas for the past month or so. About a week or two ago, we were hanging out in her room and she asks me "Does it smell like gas in here?" So I take a sniff around and determine that, yeah, it smells a little like gas. Not that much, but enough so that you can tell. We don't really think much about it, we just go about our business, lighting candles and having a grand old time.

Then, yesterday, her roommate Tanner decides to investigate. He's home most of the time (he's an author), and really noticed it while the windows were shut during the day. ConEd comes out to visit, and it turns out that there in fact is a gasket missing from the gas pipe in her apartment. Apparently, when the construction crews that "renovated" (longer story) her apartment before she moved in, they just didn't put in this little 5-cent gasket in the pipe that runs through her closet. So it's been steadily leaking gas into the apartment for the better part of a month.

I'm always a little hesitant to attribute everything to a single cause retrospectively, but it's definitely been true that the two of us have been really sluggish and tired for the past month. We don't spend every night in that apartment, but perhaps if you're constantly breathing gas all day, that could give you headaches and tiredness? Plus, whenever the windows are closed in the apartment, her cat hides under the bed and sleeps a lot. And on Saturday, when Biz was at home and the windows happened to be closed, she was so tired that she kept just passing out on the couch, waking up, being up for a short time, and then falling back asleep again. Could it be the gas? My guess is probably. Anybody else have experience with this sort of thing before? What kinds of steps can you take about this kind of thing? Do you sue the landlord? The construction crew?

So of course they're going to fix the gas leak, but it's a little frightening that this horrible construction crew is going around, doing work that could potentially be deadly. They didn't do an exceptionally competent job anywhere else in her apartment, so it's scary to think what else they're screwing up on a regular basis.

Ah, New York.