Persistent ghosts

I rarely use the lock on my bedroom door.

There’s usually no need. I only live with one other person, and we both know to knock before entering – it’s simply a common courtesy. And not just knock and then barge in, but knock and leave an adequate amount of time for the occupant to shriek “don’t come in!” if they are busy prancing around naked or whatever suits the moment.

Last night was one of the few times I used the lock, because – I’ll be honest – I was a little bit scared.

It was around quarter past twelve at night, and I was reading creepy stories on the internet as I am bound to do from time to time. I’ve made a rule that I’m not allowed to read them when Sacha’s away, because I go just a little loopy on my own and start thinking every creak signals my impending doom. She was here this time though, so I figured it would be alright. It still put me slightly on edge though.

Sacha had come into my room to speak to me about ten minutes earlier because the washing machine was throwing a miniature tantrum about some late night washing she’d put on. She closed my door as she left, and a small while later, as I lay in my bed reading by the light of a single lamp, the door suddenly creaked open.

It was just a crack, and I figured that Sacha must not have made the door click when she closed it behind her. It was one of those annoying doors that have to be pushed that extra bit to make sure they latch shut properly. I decided I’d ignore it – I could close it in a moment when I turned off my laptop. But as I lay there in my bed, it continued to creak and inch open, then stop, and continue. There was probably a breeze in our house somewhere, but it was enough to creep me out, so I got out of bed and pushed the door shut until I heard that click that told me it was definitely latched.

The fact that I knew it was closed properly made it relatively alarming for me when the door suddenly creaked open again a further ten minutes later. Again, only a crack. I’ve never known the door to open itself after clicking shut, so this time when I got up to push it shut again, I turned the lock for good measure.

That was a pretty anticlimactic story, but it made me nervous nevertheless.

Learning to wear the big kid pants

I’m not the kind of person who takes well to flatting with others.

Most people my age and in my situation are relatively messy and carefree. I am generalising, but if you walk into the homes of a whole bunch of 20-year-old students, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a clean floor or a bench that doesn’t have at least some dirty dishes piled on it. 

I’m not saying floors have to be clean all the time or dishes can never sit on the bench waiting to be cleaned – what I’m trying to say is that most student flats are filthy (no offense fellow students).

I, on the other hand, was brought up with quite strict cleaning rules. As a result, I’m a pretty tidy person. This can make living with another, less tidy person, a little bit painful, more so when it’s more than one less tidy person you are living with. I hate people leaving their mess for someone else to clean up, and I hate when they let it build into a monstrous pile of mess that nobody wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Because of this, I don’t hesitate to ask other people to pull their weight.

I feel as though I’ve had to be, on occasion, the nagging mother figure. I try to do it in a “would you mind doing this. . . ” way, rather than an order. The hard thing is that I have had to do it quite often, and it sucks to have to be “that person” who constantly chases everyone else up on the dishes they haven’t done or the toilet paper rolls they’ve been leaving in a pile behind the toilet. Don’t get me wrong, these are small things, but they do build up. 

My old flatmate apparently couldn’t handle being asked to do these things, because he up and left my other flatmate and I without so much as an explanation, even though we’d been close, even best, friends for two years. At the time he said we treated him like a child, but I’ve come to see this more as an issue with being told to do things by anyone.

A lot of people my age are still getting used to being free of their parents. They have no obligatory chores, nobody to make them eat their vegetables, and nobody to ground them. They certainly don’t want to move out of home and straight into another place where somebody with no authority over them starts telling them what to do. The sad thing is, a lot of them aren’t mature enough yet to realise that when you move in with other people, you actually need to start taking responsibility for these things. That was something my old flatmate could never grasp, it seems, and it’s something that suggests to me he maybe deserved to be treated like a child if he was still going to stomp and wail when asked – politely – to do his fair share.

On the bright side, ever since he left, things have been going smoother. My existing flatmate and I have settled into a comfortable routine, and we’ve made sure to talk about things that bother us so that we can reach some kind of solution. Maybe living with only one other person is just easier.

 

Haunted windows

I’ll just say it straight out – I’m a little bit scared of my bedroom windows.

A few weeks ago I happened to notice one of them was sitting open a crack. I hadn’t opened it, but I figured my boyfriend, who had stayed that weekend, must have opened it while he was here. I thought no more of it.

But last week, I came home from class to find the other window cracked open. ‘That’s odd,’ I thought to myself. Sacha’s boyfriend had been at our flat during the day and had been fluttering around cleaning barbecues and whatever things boyfriends do in their spare time. ‘Maaaaybe Alex opened my window?’ I pondered, somewhat perplexed. I would have asked him, but he was gone by that point.

This morning, I woke up for class and got ready to leave. When I opened my curtains, the window by the head of my bed was open again. I know for certain I hadn’t touched it, and my flatmate wouldn’t have. Nobody else had been in our house. Why was my window open?

So there you go, I’m seriously confused right now. Every time, the window has only been open the tiniest bit, but enough to make me wonder how the hell it happened. They have latches, so they shouldn’t just be opening themselves up.

In other news, a dangerous fugitive is on the loose in Hamilton. Probably no connection, but still. . .

Our awesome, creepy house

When Sacha and I first moved into our new flat a couple of weeks ago, I went for a little wander around the property. It’s a pretty cool little place: It has a big long deck right across the back, a cute little gully out the back, and something that I think is meant to be a pond. Needs a bit of a clean up though.

The almost pond.

Inside the house we have about a million and one light switches, some of which we can’t figure out turn on what lights. I have a light in my wardrobe, but the switch for it is nowhere to be found. Sacha has seven light switches in her bedroom alone. It’s lightswitchtopia. (I just went around and counted – we have 27 light switches.)

I have also made an exciting discovery. About five minutes ago I went for a wander to check out the little gully I mentioned. Turns out it backs out onto a creek. A creek!

Here’s the weird part about the house, though. In my casual wanderings, I found the little door that lets me get underneath the house. I went in, and this is what I saw.

There were two walls covered in photos of shoes. It was utterly bizarre, and it still creeps me out a little bit. Several people have suggested that somebody with a shoe fetish used to live here, or someone who was part of a shoe cult. Someone else said that maybe it was a murderer who used to take people’s shoes after they killed them. While I don’t think it would be a shoe-stealing murderer, my flatmate may be leaning towards some kind of murderer hypothesis, considering these alarming scratches in the wall above the head of her bed.

So yeah, there’s that. Apart from those two chilling aspects, and the fact that our house creaks pretty much nonstop, it’s a really nice place, and I’m really enjoying it. Except for the fact that it’s ridiculously cold. I’m trying to stop having the heater going all the time and instead rely on my hot water bottle to save power. Let’s see how it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The unknown

For the first time in my life, I’m going to be properly alone for a period of time. What I mean is that never in my life have I been alone in a house for any more than two nights. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve been alone for two nights. One night is the limit. My first year living at a hostel was different, because there were people all around me in their own little units.

Just as I come back from Auckland, my flatmate is off there for her internship. I have two weeks to do absolutely nothing before I head off to Wellington for mine. This means that for two weeks, I’m home alone.

When I say alone, obviously I have the kitten with me, so I’m not totally by myself. That being said, I’ve only been alone with him for one night and I’m ready to strangle him. He meowed for about an hour straight this morning until I let him into my room. Then, when I snuggled back into my bed and pulled the blankets over my head, he walked back and forth across my face for about five minutes trying to figure out how to get through to me so I could pat him.

I don’t know yet if I feel lonely with my flatmate gone. I don’t know if I feel scared being all alone in the house (bearing in mind that it’s a relatively old house and it constantly creaks as if somebody is moving around in it).

I’m either going to love this or hate it.

Blonde moments and stupid accidents

Yesterday when we were moving furniture to our new house, my flatmate got her finger jammed in the couch and, after screaming, swearing and crying for a bit, settled on laughing through the pain. I, somewhat awkwardly, didn’t know what to do with myself, so wandered off to carry on packing things into the car.

Today, we were unpacking things in our new house. I was in the kitchen, she was in her bedroom, down the hallway. As I unpacked cups and plates and put them away in the cupboard, I heard a noise from the end of the hall. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, because I’d been thumping around with boxes. I paused for a moment to listen, and from her bedroom I heard the faint sound of hysterical laughter, and knew that my flatmate had hurt herself once more.

The day didn’t end until we’d each been hurt several times. For me, most of the times I hurt myself involved banging my head on my car boot. For my flatmate, it was a variety of things. She even cut her finger trying to pick up a pile of blankets that I’d accidentally put down on some broken glass. Whoops.

We each had our blonde moments too. My flatmate spent about five minutes hunting for her car keys and starting to sound as if she were stressing about it, only to find them in the lock on her car boot. I found a big puddle on the laundry floor and tried to dry it with a bathmat, and then said that I didn’t have anything else to mop it up with, completely forgetting that right in front of my very eyes, there was an actual mop sitting in the laundry, just waiting to be used.

Moving is fun.

A little like deja vu

My flatmate was tired and, though she’d probably disagree with me on this, a little bit grumpy when she came home from her long weekend today.

Ready to relax, she started to run herself a bubble bath. She then promptly forgot about it.

As we chatted away in the kitchen, the bathwater slowly began to break free of its plastic prison, leaking over onto the floor in pursuit of freedom. Wonderful freedom.

My flatmate had just cooked me a lamb chop for dinner, and I went to put it on the coffee table in the living room. As I glanced down the hallway, it occurred to me that the end of our house closely resembled a swimming pool. A shallow, six-inch-deep swimming pool, but a swimming pool nonetheless.

“Sacha!” I yelled. “Sacha we have a problem!”

The aforementioned Sacha,  no doubt somewhat confused as to why I was hollering her name from the lounge, came around the corner, witnessed the carnage, and leaped into action. After scooping water off the bathroom floor with a bucket, the next 15 to 20 minutes were spent with the two of us prancing around on towels that we’d lain across the soaked carpet. I can only assume that Sacha and I had won the luck lottery because the water stopped just a few feet short of her expensive DSLR camera, and while it had seeped under a cardboard box of books that I had packed half an hour earlier (in preparation for moving house later this week), it hadn’t leaked through the box, and my books were fine.

The irony wasn’t lost on us that this happened about a week before we moved house.

With the best of the water mopped up and the heater set up in the hallway, Sacha decided all was not lost, and that she could run herself another bath.

And you guessed it, she forgot about that one too. Lucky for us, I was on the ball. As we sat watching TV, I wondered to myself whether or not she’d checked how high it was getting, and I quickly slipped out of the room to check on it. When I reached the bathroom, the water was filled right up to the top of the bath, just about to make another break for freedom. I turned off the taps, wandered back into the lounge and said to my flatmate from the doorway “You don’t really learn from your mistakes, do you?”

She got a panicked look on her face and jumped to her feet, racing off down the hallway to check on it.

I think my name should be: Melissa; house flood prevention person. I don’t know if there’s any way to make that sound good, so we’re settling with the awkward wording.

 

The appliance monster

We got a newish washing machine from someone at the beginning of the year when we moved into our new flat, and it quickly became evident to us that there was something wrong with it. It wouldn’t turn itself off when it was done washing, it would just keep repeating the rinse and spin cycle.

It was a bit annoying, but we got used to it and just had to remember to make it finish manually, and not leave it going when we left for class or something like that.

The same thing happened with our clothes dryer, which we’d had for the whole of the previous year. All of a sudden, it didn’t want to turn itself off. It would just ding at us until we turned the dial.

Here’s the funny thing, the other day, both the washer and the dryer turned themselves off without any help from us. The only thing that’s changed lately, is that our flatmate moved out.

Now, I’m not saying that he is; but I think we have to acknowledge the possibility that our old flatmate could be possessed by a demon that likes to mess with household appliances. There’s really no other way to explain it.

A flaming success

I made a fire today, and I was successful. Granted, there was  brief moment where I thought I was going to burn the house down.

It happened very quickly. Being an inexperienced fire builder, I hadn’t pushed a piece of scrunched up newspaper far enough back, and as I watched, it tumbled from the fireplace in a blaze of glory, a flaming ball of heat plummeting to the ground. Luckily, it landed on the tiled spot around the fire, and I stared, paralysed.

My mind was frantically scrambling for the next appropriate action. I’m not proud to say it, but my first thought was that I could hit the fire out with my bare hands. Perhaps worse was the next thought to cross my mind – smother it with more newspaper. I finally settled on smashing the burning paper with a log of wood. It wasn’t really necessary, as the flames had died down and it was starting to smolder, but I think at that point I just wanted to think I had done something.

After that it was smooth sailing, and my fire didn’t go out. I think my flatmate was proud of me when she came home.

Loyalties

If there’s one thing that flatting has taught me it’s the fluidity of friendship.

After about a year and a half of flatting, I’ve made a few enemies, and I’ve learned to see my friends in an entirely different light. I’ve been fed up and furious at them, I’ve started to worry that they secretly hate me, and I’ve been happy to see them go. While I dearly love my old flatmate, who I chatted to on Skype last night, I was relatively happy to see him go. We simply didn’t mesh, living together.

The one constant, throughout all of this, has been Sacha.

Sacha and I go to class together every day of the week. We live together. We cook together. We study together half the time. And yet, the funny thing is, we do well. Sure we have disagreements here and there, but for the whole time we’ve been friends, we’ve only really had one real fight, and that was more a misunderstanding than anything. I don’t doubt Sacha gets annoyed with me at times, and I have my moments too, but it’s never been something to threaten our friendship, and I know that I can talk to her about it if I’m feeling upset.

I don’t know what it is that enables Sacha and I to spend so much time breathing the same air, and not feel the need to rip each other’s hair out. But I’m not complaining. Whatever we disagree on, Sacha is a good friend.

I wish I could say the same about other people.