This is probably a better topic for an episode of The HOA and maybe some of this will get recycled there but hey, it's my nickel so let me lead this week's email off with a grudge I'm holding.
I live in an old mill building. It's huge, the size of a city block, twelve stories tall, well over a hundred housing units contained within its thick brick walls and tar-black roof. I live near the top which, as I've mentioned before, means that it gets very hot up here even in the dead of winter.
The logic of buildings like this, which were designed before air conditioning and climate change and whose sheer scale would have made temperature control prohibitively expensive, is that in the warm months the building could be cooled by venting warm air out the upper-story windows while cool air was pulled in from the ground floor. In fact, unless the wind outside is both strong and pointing directly into the windows, it's hard to pull air into the upper floors from outside because there is so much air trying to get out.
Last year a neighbor and I both pooled our sets of extra window screens and opened the entire top floor up. During the few breaks we got in the heat we actually managed to make the heat break inside a little bit as well.
But the second the temperature started dropping below 45 overnight, someone decided it was too cold to have windows open and stole every single window screen. Now we are through the spring, the building is stifling all the time before we have had our first 80 degree day, and nobody has brought the screens back out.
The thing that I've spent the winter and spring stewing over is the mystery of which person in my building is the thief. Some ignoramus decided to swipe and hide all the stuff my neighbor and I had contributed to—why not just say it—the commonweal. The social contract? Rent to pieces! The milk of human kindness? Curdling in the tropical heat we have lived with since early March.
Who could it have been? I have my suspicions of course. There is the regrettably under-trained handyman, always put-upon by our aging building and who views the common spaces as his personal domain. There's the frail but crusty old bastard down the hall who is quick to provide a teasing but extremely pointed admonishment whenever he feels personally inconvenienced by another resident: "Wow that's almost enough for the freight elevator," he'll say as you maneuver a stack of cardboard on to the elevator to the basement to take to the lone recycling bin. The moment a cart or wagon squeaks in the hallway: "Sounds like someone needs some WD40." Reader, I am fain to tune this man up, except that he provided me an excellent recipe for Tom and Jerries one Christmas a couple years ago.
Whoever it is, their day is coming. I have most cleverly laid a trap, you see. It may take months for these seeds I plant—in the form of discreet little AirTags attached to the new screens that were just delivered—to bear their sweet fruit. But there will come a cool night when someone passing by those screens thinks, "I got away with it once, I'll do it again!" And at that moment they will be undone, for my screens will cry out for justice and lead me to the one who has done me this offense. They will find that I am Nemesis brought to their door. They will open it to find me standing before them in the night and they will hear me say:
"Hey, sorry to bother you but did you by chance take the screens out of the windows by the elevator? No it's not a problem, it was pretty cold! But you know I'd just love to get them back and put them into storage for the winter. No no, it's perfectly okay. Yeah see they've got my name written on them. Right there, but it is kind of small and smudged now. I can see how you missed it. Anyway: thanks, and sorry about the cold."
- Monday: The main podcast feed will receive a LudoNarraCon conversation between myself and Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
- Tuesday: Cado and I felt like we have some unfinished business in Manor Lords, and Janet will join us to help lead Braydednfordcestershire to its glorious summer. Stream starts at 2 Eastern.
- Wednesday: Whoa slow down Remap! Nobody can handle all this content what with the Shogun podcast hitting the premium feed and Cado and I leading Oberhof Racing through its next couple tilts starting at 2 Eastern.
- Thursday: We'll be recording Remap Radio and you can listen on...
- Friday: Plus Patrick will be streaming more Dragon's Dogma 2 though he might only have time to do it for half the day starting in the afternoon around 2 Eastern.