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Last night, one of our next-door neighbours started shrieking at about 11pm. This is an unusual event, because although the wall separating our house from the one next door has as much sound insulation as a single layer of bricks can, our current neighbours are exceptionally quiet. This is something we appreciate, because our old neighbours, who were, admittedly, in the house for all of 4 weeks, didn't seem to be capable of speaking to each other in anything other than yells. During those 4 weeks, which coincided with the football season (World Cup, was it?), it was so bad that we went out for dinner every night football was on - because the other option was standing in the kitchen trying to cook and trying to drown out the football commentary (both TV and drunken student) with extremely loud music, and failing. Ugh.
Anyway, what the girl was shrieking yesterday was disturbing on two levels. The first was the lovely reminder of Horrible Student Accommodation of the Past (including![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meeping's residence in Ongar Road that was condemned by the local health inspector as "unfit for human habitation"!). The second was the utter gross-out that comes from contemplating the contents of other people's poo...
( Cut so that anyone more squeamish than me who is currently in the middle of a meal can finish without being put off. Or for anyone morbidly afraid of toilets. )
In other news, our lovely new Vax vacuum cleaner started producing an unpleasant smell. Richard opened up the cylinder yesterday to try to find out what was wrong, and said "ewww, it smells like someone's been using this to suck up poo"! I reminded him that I've never actually done that, and established instead that the problem was mould growing on the HEPA filter. So I threw it away, and put the entire cylinder in a bucket of hot water and bleach. Now it just smells faintly of bleach, which is an improvement (!). But is this a common problem? The HEPA filter claims it only needs changing once a year, but we only bought that cleaner in June - so it's lasted a mere 6 months before going skanky. I've used the cleaner enough to have needed to empty the cylinder about 4 times, if that helps.
Anyway, what the girl was shrieking yesterday was disturbing on two levels. The first was the lovely reminder of Horrible Student Accommodation of the Past (including
meeping's residence in Ongar Road that was condemned by the local health inspector as "unfit for human habitation"!). The second was the utter gross-out that comes from contemplating the contents of other people's poo... ( Cut so that anyone more squeamish than me who is currently in the middle of a meal can finish without being put off. Or for anyone morbidly afraid of toilets. )
In other news, our lovely new Vax vacuum cleaner started producing an unpleasant smell. Richard opened up the cylinder yesterday to try to find out what was wrong, and said "ewww, it smells like someone's been using this to suck up poo"! I reminded him that I've never actually done that, and established instead that the problem was mould growing on the HEPA filter. So I threw it away, and put the entire cylinder in a bucket of hot water and bleach. Now it just smells faintly of bleach, which is an improvement (!). But is this a common problem? The HEPA filter claims it only needs changing once a year, but we only bought that cleaner in June - so it's lasted a mere 6 months before going skanky. I've used the cleaner enough to have needed to empty the cylinder about 4 times, if that helps.
