The Joys of Apartment Living

I re-adjusted the alarm on my clock so that I wake up 10 minutes earlier than before. Ostensibly, it was to beat the traffic heading South on the 405. For some reason, the cars and trucks slow down and eventually stop for no apparent reason. No accident reports on the radio. No sudden appearance of a sink hole swallowing that damned Hyundai that cut me off. No stray animals or pedestrians trying to dart across lanes. I've given up trying to understand this phenomenon. But I have learned that hitting the freeway 10 minutes earlier drastically reduces my chances of winding up in the slowdown.

However, the real reason for waking earlier was to access hot water in the showers. That's the one thing I don't enjoy about living in an apartment: sharing the hot water heater with two other units. In the olden days (read: a few weeks ago), I would get up with the alarm, stumble into the other room to find clean clothes, then stumble again into the bathroom. Undress, step in the shower, turn on the hot and cold water faucets to allow the heat to slowly kick in. Once the water temperature was just right, I'd turn on the showerhead and clean up. Until one of the downstairs neighbors also turned on the shower thus changing the full burst of heated water into a mere trickle of arctic coldness.

So I figured 10 minutes earlier in the morning would mean plenty of time for a nice hot shower. Such were my thoughts this morning. The hot water was spraying from the showerhead. My hair was all sudsy with shampoo. Then, I heard the fan click on downstairs. Fuck! I quickly spun to stick my head under the water, frantically wringing the shampoo from my hair, when all of a sudden, the spray turned into a trickle. Still, I cupped my hands to fill them with water and doused my head with that little bit. Until the arctic seas returned.

I jumped when that coldness hit my face and almost slipped in the shower.

I then did the only thing I could think of doing: turned off the cold water, and spun the hot water nozzle as far as it would go. I heard a gasp from downstairs and quickly soaped up and rinsed.