Zel-kun’s Words

So, this weekend Zai’s cousin Mel came to Chicago.  The last time one of Zai’s cousins came to Chicago, it was Jess, and it was perhaps the worst night of the year.

We went to the Melting Pot (incredibly overpriced fondue place) right after I had gotten out of work, so I was already a little grouchy from being on the road for two hours after my ten hour day.  I was tired and nearly fell asleep in the bar while we were waiting to be seated.  I then listened to them talk about whatever they were talking about, all while trying to keep focused on staying awake.   I don’t recall the conversation being anything I could join in on, girl stuff.

When the food finally came, she practically molested the waiter right there, caising him to forget to refill my drink, and adding to my overall frustration that night.  When the meal was finally over (about 11:30 or so), I headed to my car and pressed the unlock key on the remote.

Nothing happened.

I press it again, still nothing.  I shrug and try opening the door.  Its locked and the alarm goes off.  So I’m stuck there , as it begins to snow, with a locked truck, on a Chicago street in valet dropoff lane, which is coincidently illegal to park in once the valet service leaves.  So I ask Jess and Vicky to watch the car for a moment (to make sure I don’t get ticketed, or worse, towed) while I go to a Walgreens a block away to get a new battery for the remote.

I come back and she’s nowhere to be found.  Apparently they both had to use the bathroom, at the same time.

Well, the new battery didn’t work, so I go in the restaraunt and look up the number for a 24-hour locksmith.  I get through to four different answering machines when I realize something very important: Its nearly midnight on Wednesday, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

These places are all closed for the holiday.

Finally, I get through to a locksmith, who sounded like I woke him up (probably true).  He takes about forty minutes to come, and spends about an hour ripping out the vital components of the car alarm.  Namely, the part that prevents me from starting the car.

The car starts, I hand him a couple hundred dollars, and finally drive around Chicago dropping people off, returning home in the small hours of the morning.  I decided I didn’t like Jess, and it took me a long time to realize that it was because of the already bad day I was having when I picked Zai and her cousin up.

For that I apologize to both Zai and Jess.

Meeting Mel couldn’t have been a more opposite experience.

I had taken Friday off to work a bit on the apartment.  I get to Zai’s house around noon, where I park and we walk on over.  On the way, we pass a street vendor, and I get some Elote.

Damn I love Elote.  Apparently, its just Spanish for corn, but its delicious.  Basically, its a bowl of steamed corn with butter, cheese, chili powder, and creme mixed in.  Its something I’ve missed out on these last twenty-five years.

At about 5:00, we stop working and head back over to Zai’s to get ready.  Zai’s father cooked carne asada (steak) and chorizo (some sort of seasoned pork sausage), I had a couple tacos full.  It was quite good, Zai’s father is a good cook.  I even try a piece of cactus.  It had the texture of a steamed bell pepper, and a taste somewhat similar.  It was good.

I like to say that with the language barrier, it is food that’s bringing Zai’s father and me together.  He heard I loved chorizo (true), and cooked some up, to which I complimented him repeatedly on.  We may not speak the same language, but I think ‘yum’ is universal.

The following day he made me some Elote, knowing how I have been raving about it lately.

I then ride in the van to go pick up Mel.

I didn’t spend ten hours at work, and I’m not driving.  That puts me in a pretty good mood.  When she gets in the car, I am assaulted by Spanish.  The next hour or so is basically me listening to Spanish, but I’m not driving, and at Zai’s house I’m in a comfortable chair, so I don’t care.

Finally, they say they’re going to drop Mel’s father off at his brother’s and head to dinner.  I say I’ll head on out and see them tomorrow.

“No, you’re going to dinner.  Let’s go.”

That was Mel.  I was amused.  For those that don’t know, if you’re a man, and you associate with women, free will is an illusion.

Dinner was decent, we went to Friday’s.  The conversation went around the table, and Mel had some pretty interesting stories.  At the end of the evening, as Zai was making me a farewell cup of tea for the road(and Zai DOES make the best tea), we actually talked for a bit.  She’s a bank manager who has to deal with an outsourced IT staff, and I deal with retail IT issues occasionally, so we had some stories to share.

The next day we saw Pirates…

But I’m going to hold off on that story for a few days, give some people the chance to see the movie without me spoiling it for you.

Zel-kun out.

So Zai is getting her laptop up to speed, and finding more and more things newly wrong with it since its return from the Geek Squad:

For some reason, the battery keeps falling out.

There’s a loud clicking sound while its running.

The computer routinely won’t recognize that a power cable is attatched, instead draining the battery.

The touchpad sometimes stops responding entirely.

I’m not sure if these issues are simply coincidental, but they need to be fixed nonetheless.  So Saturday we are going to once again take it to Best Buy.

Thank goodness I bought that warrantee.

in other Geek Squad related news, I was left a comment on my previous post about the Geek Squad by Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad.  I was invited to email him, and I’m still waiting for a reply as of now.

I’ll keep you posted.

Zel-kun out.

I finished up Fate, tallying up about 12 hours or so in gameplay.  $20 for 12 hours isn’t the best deal in video games, but honestly its one of the better offerings the PC RPG market has given me in quite some time.

And that’s sad.

It was Saturday when I finished it up and decided there was room in the budget for a trip to Best Buy to spend some more money.  I picked up a copy of Keiko Matsui’s Walls of Akendora (jazz-esque instrumental music) and a copy of Silverfall.

The box artwork was standard, skimpy busty red-haired woman on the front with a sword, and the back looked like your typical hack and slash.  I would have put it down except for one thing, it purported to be a world where nature and technology were in conflict with each other, and you had to choose a path.

This intrigued me, reminding me of the game Arcanum, and how great the concept of that world was.  Sadly the game itself failed to achieve the greatness it could have with some reworking (It made my Hall of Shame for that).  It was my hope that Silverfall was the game I thought Arcanum should have been.

I took it home and installed it, half-dreading that it would be yet another failure in the PC RPG market.  I started it up, and after about an hour of fooling around with the character creation and prologue, I was impressed.

The game’s graphics are pretty well done, the shadowing effects and the reflections on the water are really something.  The characters are done with cel-shading, giving to a very unique style.  Its a resource hog when run with max settings, enough to make even my machine’s framerates drop occasionally.  Not often enough to make me drop the settings and lose the visual appeal, though.  I’d say once or twice a gaming session, usually when the game is first starting up.

The technology behind the game is impressive, with a physics engine that makes enemies occasionally fly from the force of a particularly powerful fireball, hit a tree, and slump to the base of it.  When you first start the game, it runs a check and takes you to a webpage to install the most recent patch.  Its a nice change from having to hunt elusive patches down (I’m looking at YOU, Etrom and Neverend).

Sound is so-so.  It serves its purpose.  One of these days, PC games will realize than an expert composer can make an otherwise mediocre game impressive, even the biggest budget PC games have barely serviceable sound.

Plot is okay so far.  It could be improved by more voices and better cinematics, but its not bad.  You can choose quests that align you with nature or technology, influencing your ‘loyalty’ to one or the other (you could be neutral if you wanted, doing both).  And having a certain amount of loyalty enables you to spend your skill points in a special nature or technology tree.  For example, you can have mechanical constructs follow you around, or you can have feral beasts fight for you, et cetera.  This also allows you to wield nature or technology equipment (remarkably powerful mystical stone weapons, or pilots goggles, up to shotguns and rifles).

However, like all good games, there are negatives.  The camera could use some work, and the keys to switch your skills are a bit cumbersome and non-customizable.  The targeting system can be tricky.  And the game, while very fun and action-packed, is a bit on the easy side.  That’s fine for me, it gives me a bit of freedom to pick and choose my equipment for aesthetics, so you can make things slightly more difficult, and have a cool-looking character.

After all, isn’t that what its all about? 

On the flip side, it can be extremely difficult to start off as a melee or ranged fighter.  Keep a stack of potions handy.  It levels out after you gain some appropriate skills and get an ally.

I spent the whole of Sunday and most of Monday playing it, the first game I did so in AGES.  I’m having a lot of fun levelling up and advancing the plot.  So all in all, I’m pretty happy with this new purchase.

Incidentally, I’m one of three people in the country that like it.  Most reviews I’ve read for this game are negative, only one or two above a 4/10, and only one as high as 7/10.  I notice that whenever people don’t like a hack and slash, they compare it to Diablo.  Funny thing, I never really liked Diablo, but looking at Diablo and Diablo 2 reviews, I could only find one or two reviews below 6/10.

I’d give Silverfall a 7/10.  Its good, but not great.  Though admittedly, its the best thing I’ve played for the PC in some time.

Zel-kun out.

I’ve been shopping at Best Buy for as long as I’ve been working.  If I bought a game, music, or a PDA, it has likely come from the land of blue shirts and yellow tags.  Best Buy is a decent enough store, I can usually find what I’m looking for there, and the price isn’t too bad.

I also bought my first laptop from there, complete with an extended warrantee.  The laptop and warrantee now belong to Zai, I sold it to her a couple years ago when I realized I really couldn’t justify having a laptop.  Since then we’ve made good on the warrantee a couple times, replacing a fan, the screen, a battery, and a power cord.  The warrantee easily paid for itself.  I never had a problem with it, until now…

I took a look at Zai’s laptop, and saw that the polygons in World of Warcraft were flickering.  This concerned me because I bought the laptop explicitely so it could run World of Warcraft.  It has well beyond the reccomended specs (Even checked the specs on the new Burning Crusade, which are roughly the same).  And it ran the game flawlessly for a long time.  So there must be something wrong.

After hours of finding and downloading new drivers (and old drivers, seeing if a rollback would work, I got nowhere fast.  So I brought it up to Best Buy so they could check to see if maybe the video card or system board was going bad.  They say it’ll take a week to look at.

A week.

I understand the time, but that’s a week Zai is effectively without internet access.  So we can’t play WoW or do anything else online, so it puts a damper on my daily activities.  So we go to pick it up the next week, and on the laptop is a note:

‘Laptop does not meet specifications for game.’

I raise an eyebrow, this is obviously a load of crap.  I walk into the aisle, grab a copy of WoW Burning Crusade, and show it to the member of ‘Geek Squad’ behind the counter.  I show him the problem the game is having, and show him the specs for the game.  He admits that the laptop exceeds all the recommended specs, and decides to run a quick system diagnostic (a dumbed-down version of what was SUPPOSED to be run when we sent it out).

After thirty seconds, it finds several bad hard drive sectors, and he admits that he can hear the hard drive clicking very softly, and that a flickering polygon can indeed be caused by a dying drive.

Its nice to know that wherever he sent it, whether it be Geek Squad HQ (which I suspect by the logo on the packing slip) or HP, they didn’t even bother to look at it.

As a man who fixes computers for a living, this makes me pretty upset.  I would be fired and put on the street in a heartbeat if my boss caught me returning a computer without going through a proper testing proceedure.

So the ‘Geek’ said he’d replace the hard drive and image it in the store, and said it would take two or three days (I would have expected a better turnaround to a customer who just wasted a week, especially considering he gave me the drive so I could perform my own data backup and transfer).

So Zai comes to pick up her laptop last night, and I wake up in the morning to receive a message from her that the scrollbar on her touchpad is not working.

Way to go Best Buy.

You guys suck.

Disclaimer: My anger is not directed toward the helpful ‘Geek’ behind the counter.  He was very friendly and I was nothing but polite towards him.  Its towards an organization that has effectively jerked me around for a week and a half now.

So I spent Saturday working on the place where I’ll be living.  It’ll be a lot of work, but it has potential.  And having a project that’s hard work, but means something to me is a good thing.

Saturday began with picking up some stuff from Home Depot: spackle, putty knife, paint stripper, sandpaper, and small brush for the stripper.

The two goals for the day were preparing the walls for painting, and getting the paint removed from the built-in china cabinet.

So while Zai worked on the cabinet, I tackled the walls.  I scraped several coats of paint off the screws holding the outlet and light switch covers in place.  I then pried them off and gave them to Zai who wanted to clean them off and re-use them (they’re old scroll-worked metal) once the walls were painted properly.

The last person to paint the place did it quick and cheap.  He also did it pretty half-assed.  Streaks of paint got onto window sills, doorframes, etc.  Anything that happened to be on the wall was simply painted over.  Outlets, light switches, hooks, curtain and blind fixtures, and even screws and nails.

I intended to remove all these things so when its painted, it will look considerably less crappy.

My father came out to give the place a look.  He had a far more positive attitude than my mother, stating, “Your mother and I’s first place was very much like this, I think your mother forgets that sometimes.”

He also said, “I like to see you working.”  Which is a reference to how much I hate any sort of manual labor, and with my dad always having some sort of project around the house, it was a common occurance for us to be on each other’s nerves.

The day ended at around 7:00, where we quit and went back to her house to watch Spiderman 2.  So now I’m officially up to date for when we see Spiderman 3.

Zel-kun out.

This chapter is a little different because it skips around different time periods.  I can’t see the story being told here being broken up, it just wouldn’t make sense.  So here it is, in its entirety, the story of Rose.

My first girlfriend.

The story begins in the spring of 1995, during my second year of middle school, seventh grade.  We had a class field trip to Indiana Beach, which didn’t really have any educational value whatsoever.  Its an amusement park.  Its a nice thing to know that the tax dollars that went towards my education were spent wisely.

Picture a short, fat kid with unruly hair, and you have me in seventh grade.  It was about noon and I had my fill of the crowds and the heat, and so I sat in the shade of the food stand.  There I met her, a sweet-looking girl, offering me a can of coke.

I hadn’t brought any money to the trip, so I was more than grateful for something to drink.  We struck up a conversation (can’t for the life of me remember what about), and became friends.

The friendship continued for a year or so.  I went to her house, played video games, we went bowling, went to movies, it was fun.  Then she asked me to a dance.  I figured why not, here’s a girl, and she’s asking me to a dance.

The dance itself went about as well as can be expected, with me awkwardly tripping over my own feet, and doing my best (and failing), to not make a complete ass out of myself.  We sat a couple dances out and I figured I’d do it, I’d ask my friend if she’d like to start dating.

She seemed to really enjoy the idea.

So things went on pretty much as they had, except now there was a hug thrown in every once in awhile.  Really didn’t think about it, I just rolled along.  That was until Valentine’s Day.

We got each other cards, of course, and spent the day together.  I can’t remember what we did, I think we watched a tape at my house or something.  That was back when people watched tapes.

At the end of the day, being Valentine’s Day, I kissed her, and it was like kissing a dead fish.  I realized then that I was no romantic interest in her at all.  I tried to convince myself this wasn’t true, but through the next couple weeks, I just felt more and more awkward and uncomfortable around her.

I decided it was time to break it off, to go back to being just friends.  I call her up (bad idea, I know in my wiser years), and tell her I think we should be friends.  I THEN discover I had chosen to do this on the same day her dog died.

Nice.

I’m pretty sure that at that moment, I was the punchline to some cosmic joke.

After some consoling, she agrees, and our friendship returns to normal…. almost normal.

We don’t see each other as much, we drift apart.  By the time high school starts, we probably only get together once a month.  And it was in the beginning of my Freshman year, the fall of 1996 that things took an odd turn.

Another friend (more on him in a future chapter) and I thought that Saturday would be a good day to go bowling.  I decide it would also be a good idea to invite Rose.  We arrange to meet at the bowling alley at 1:00.

I wash up and get ready, and then wait to be picked up by my friend and his father.  This was in the days before I drove, so I relied on other people to cart me around.  We end up getting to the alley at about 1:10.  After a walk-around, we don’t see Rose anywhere, so we kill time at the arcade that’s in the front entrance (We were playing Soul Edge).  When I look at the clock and see its 2:00, I decide I’d give Rose a call and see why she’s late.

I call and her mother answers the phone.  She then proceeds to yell at me about standing Rose up.

Ehwa?

I explain that I had arrived ten minutes late, and apologize.  I am questioned on why I am just now calling.  I reply that I thought Rose was late and that I was waiting for her, and apologize again.  This goes on for several minutes, me apologizing and trying to calm down an angry mother, and my friend barely containing his laughter.

I finally calm her down and convince Rose to come to the bowling alley.  We bowl and have fun, and that was the end of it.  Except for the being made fun of for being whipped by a girl I wasn’t even dating anymore.  It was not the end of that.

Awhile later I mention that there was some new movie or another coming out, and that maybe we should catch it sometime.  The following monday, I get a call from Rose.

We talk for a solid ten minutes before she finally screams into the phone, “Where were you on Saturday!?”

Ehwa?

I think this is one of the first times in my life I am so shocked my brain shuts down for a moment.  She lays into me about how we were supposed to see the movie saturday, and how I stood her up at the theatre.

I cannot stress enough at this point that I did not make any arrangements of any sort.  I had idly pointed out that I’d like to see a movie sometime.  And if she had expected to see the movie that particular day, maybe she should have clued me in.

After yelling at me for what seemed like an eternity, she slammed down the phone.  She had hung up.

My first instinct was to call her back, but I decided against it.  If she was still my girlfriend, maybe I’d consider it, but I did not appreciate being treated in such a way by my FRIEND.  I had decided that she was in the wrong, and she could call me back if she wanted to apologize.

The call never came.

Fast forward several years (circa 2003) to me working at Wal-Mart.  I stood there in electronics, and in she walked.  Like the fight had just happened yesterday, she morose and downcast, saying that we should ‘talk things over’ over some coffee after work.  She gave me her number and left.

I had a choice to make.  I could either call her, and perhaps open up the same issues as a few years ago.  Or I could toss the number and be rid of her forever.  I thought about it for a couple of days, asked some friends online what I should do.  Eventually, I decided to rip up the number.

End of story… no.

I see her time and again in my department.  Each time I send another associate to deal with her.  Each time they told me that she was just looking.

I see her being interviewed by HR at the front of the store.  I dreaded the thought of having to work with her.  I found out she had applied for a position in electronics.  HR asked me if I knew her and what I thought about her.  I decided to not sabotage her directly.  Even if she was seriosuly starting to creep me out, it wouldn’t be right.

I simply reply, “I know her, she’s a decent person, though I really wouldn’t be comfortable working with her.”  That probably cost her the job, but I was telling the truth.

Later, when I started my final semester of college, I pick out a seat in my literature class and wait for the professor to show up.  She takes attendance and I hear Rose’s name.  I also hear her voice from directly behind me.

If I was a little creeped out before, I was severely creeped out now.  I see her in my class, around campus, she seemed to be everywhere.  This continued until I abruptly left school (more on that later), and then left Indiana entirely.

It should be pointed out that my mother LOVED Rose.  In fact, until I began dating Zai, I could still find pictures of her hanging around the house.  That is my house in Illinois, in 2005, roughly a decade since my mother had seen her last.

My mother would sometimes occasionally ask, “Have you talked to Rose?”

This is why, I’m sure if I ever broke up with Zai (not bloody likely), my mother would ask, “So how’s Rose doing?”

So concludes the story of my first girlfriend.  The friend, the psycho, the stalker.  She was a good friend once, and I hope that despite everything, she is happy now.

I’m listening to the news on the radio, and I hear a story so strange I almost didn’t believe it.  Chicago alderman Joe Moore chased down a purse snatcher on Wednesday.

Story Here

That’s right, an alderman chased down a criminal to retrieve a lady’s purse.  He didn’t point out the crime and have some police give chase.  He saw the crime and gave chase in his clean suit and fancy shoes.  In the end, he recovered the purse but was eluded by the criminal.

I gotta say, not the sort of thing you expect politicians to be doing.  Its refreshing.

Zel-kun out.

No, its not an existential discussion, its a new computer game.

I haven’t been buying much lately, on account of me being broke as hell for various reasons.  But I found myself in a Best Buy, and well, I gotta leave with SOMETHING.

I saw it sitting there, it didn’t look all that impressive, it wasn’t made by a studio I trusted, and I never heard of it.  Not exactly three factors that normally draw me to a game.  But it sat there with its $19.99 price tag, with a tagline on the back, “casual yet immersive play allow the game to be played for fifteen minutes or hours on end.” (I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t remember the exact quote)

Usually, that’s how I play games that aren’t World of Warcraft, in shorter bits when Zai isn’t available to play, so I figured what the hell, I’d give it a shot.  I bought it and took it home, where it sat dormant on my desk for a couple days while I ignored it, watched television, and played World of Warcraft.

Monday rolled around and Zai didn’t have her laptop, so I’d be gaming alone.  I took it out of the box and was surprised that the only thing in the box was a CD in a sleeve.  No fancy manual, no jewel case, not even a little brochure advertising other games.  Just a single CD, not even a DVD.  I installed Fate and braced myself for the suck-fest I was sure would follow.

I was surprised to find levels of suck at an all-time low for a new game.  The interface was a simple point and click (think Diablo), and easy to use.  The graphics, while cartoony, were pretty well done.  I found out why the game could be both casual and immersive, because it made no pretensions.

Lot’s of RPG’s dress up a hack and slash dungeon-crawler with layers of convoluted plot, time-consuming quests, and levels that can take hours on end.

Not Fate.

The plot can be summed up as such:

You’re an adventurer, you’re in this town, this town is at the entrance to a dungeon.  Go in there and fight things, and find cool stuff.

That’s pretty much it.  The dungeon is divided into floors, and each floor takes about ten to fifteen minutes to complete.  Its an easy thing to say, “Hmm, twenty minutes until dinner,” and then load up the game, play one level, and leave.

Its also easy to say, “Hmm, nothing much to do right now,” and play though five or six floors.

The levelling system is simple, you earn points to increase stats.  And from a little experimenting, I’m finding that levelling up magic skills is equally fun to powering through with swords.  And as a kicker, you have a dog that follows you around helping you fight.  And by feeding him different things, you can transform him into various creatures both temporarily and permanently.

I gotta say, after a couple days of playing this, I’m still pretty impressed.  The studio also has another game, Mythos, in production.  If they put the same kinda work into making it, then I’d happily give it a shot.

Zel-kun out.

I like cinnamon.

I eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I eat cinnamon toast.  I have cinnamon in my tea.

I enjoy the occasional cinnamon roll.

When I was a kid, I loved cinnamon.  I put it on everything I could.

And then I saw in the store aisle, cinnamon gum.  Now THAT sounded good.

So I chew a piece and am betrayed!  What is this?  The sweet and familiar flavor had accidently been replaced with ground jalepenos and chili powder.  Its like there was no quality control at the factory.

“Hey Bob?” Some guy in a suit asks a slovenly worker in a stained jumpsuit.

“A’yup?”

“You’re supposed to be monitoring the assembly line to make sure only the best ingredients go into the gum.”

“A’yup.”

“I can’t help but notice that there is an enormous vat of chili peppers being dumped into the mix.”

“A’yup.”

“Ah, screw it, we’ll sell it anyway.”

And cinnamon gum was born.

Okay, so maybe its not that spicy, but its spicy ENOUGH for a young kid who is expecting it to taste like the cinnamon in every other food he eats.  Plus, I’ve had raw cinnamon, it has a little spice, but its nothing compared to what’s in cinnamon candies and gum.

Its like a cruel joke to play on children.

Candy = Sweet
Cinnamon = Sweet
Cinnamon Candy = Fire 

And it surprises me that no one makes a sweet cinnamon candy.  Seems like a good idea.

Zel-kun out.

So Saturday I had the chance to look at an apartment that may possibly be my future place of residence.  It isn’t in the best of neighborhoods, and it will extend my commute slightly.  But the price is right, and Zai can continue walking to work.

She needs to get her license and a car… but I’m willing to do this for now.

We looked at the place, and there’s no polite way to say it, its a dump.  This is no fault of the landlord, just horrible tenants before us.  They’re small issues, but they quickly pile up:

Broken Windows
Chipped Paint
Chipped Plaster
Filthy Carpet
Filthy Floors
Not one, but TWO non-working stoves
Bedrooms I can stretch my arms and touch both walls
Damaged door to apartment
A missing doorknob on the pantry
A loaf of bread nailed to the top of the doorframe

Now, I should probably speak of the pros:

Nice-sized living room, dining room, and kitchen
Walk-in closet
Walk-in pantry
The building itself well-kept, with a heavy locked door leading outside
About ten steps away from a mexican place with excellent chorizo tortas
Nice high ceilings (as a tall man, I appreciate the hell out of that)
Tall windows which make the place nice and sunny during the day
Wrought iron light fixtures
Two extra rooms to accomodate a study for me and a painting room for Zai

So I kinda like the idea.  I saw the place, in all its decrept splendor, and still thought ‘this could be home.’

But there’s one large issue at hand.  One that thrusts me into the middle of a situation I don’t really want to be a part of.  Zai’s godfather is the landlord.

This means I wanted to be extra-careful in my demands of the landlord.  I didn’t want to insult someone who would become family.  It was made more difficult by the fact that I’ve never dealt with a landlord before, I didn’t know if what I THOUGHT a landlord should be responsible for was accurate.

So I asked my parents, who said that the landlord should be responsible for everything.  So I relay this to Zai, who relays this to her parents…

Hoo boy.

I won’t say what came next, its not my place.  But I’m pretty sure my family has managed to insult her family without even trying.  Sooo… I think I have some work to do.

Zel-kun out.