I'm the princess

Neighbors Kevin and Jim and I spent all summer fuming in preparation for the showdown with the Absent Landlord demanding central heating this winter. We've been meeting on and off for months, talking about it and planning our attack.

Preliminary to our planned group meeting with him, last weekend while the AL was at my apartment surveying two bedroom windows which had been broken for sixteen months and ten months, respectively, I asked, with all my usual diplomatic subtlety, when he was going to turn on the heat and which system he was using this year. When he began to say he wanted to keep the heat low and have us use the space heaters, like last year, I interrupted him and said, "Yeah, I'm not okay with that." I informed him of his legal obligation to keep the heat at sixty-five degrees during the day and sixty degrees at night. He then promised to keep it at sixty-four.

Two days later, Kevin told me that the AL told him sixty during the day.

Oh no, I said. This is not going to fly. We're having a meeting.

So Kevin and Jim and I conferenced, and Kevin put in a casual call to the AL arranging to have him come over to Kevin's apartment yesterday evening to examine a ceiling leak. When the AL arrived (very very late), he found the three of us waiting on the porch.

"So," I said. "While we're all here, I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page about the heat this winter. You told me sixty-four during the day, sixty at night. Is that what we're doing?"

And the three of us pretty much bullied him into it, which wasn't that hard. We just kept repeating ourselves. One of the AL's favorite tricks (as he tends to avoid confrontation) is to tell one of us one thing, and another of us another, and then play us off against each other ("Why are you upset about this, Kevin? Sarah's fine with it"). We decided to avoid that by making him say the same thing to all of us at once. And now three people have heard him promise to keep the heat at one particular central temperature.

While we were waiting for the AL to show up, Kevin looked at me (this is a thirty-five-year-old man, mind you, who in the past has appeared to demonstrate no problem with speaking his mind) and said, "I'll follow your lead on this one, Sarah."

"Why?" I said. "Because I'm psychotically confrontational?"

He laughed.

So we get baseline heat this winter (yay!) and Kevin and Jim won't be moving out in the near future (again yay! they're great neighbors -- we're all quiet, considerate, articulate, able to compromise with problems of living in one house, and enjoy little nickel-and-dime improvements around the place, like patio furniture, clotheslines, and now we're planning a firepit in the backyard. I also bought Jim's old bicycle, and Kevin and I are porch-sitters. We all get along beautifully, and the AL has a bad habit of renting to drug dealers, so who knows who would move in?).

And Jim told me yesterday that if we got the heat and he decided to stay, he was getting a satellite dish. "You can feel free to tap in," he said, "I won't charge you. In fact, I'm getting hookup for four rooms, but I only have three televisions, so I'll just give you the fourth receiver."

"Oh. My. Gosh. That would be so awesome, Jim. I'll pay for that receiver," I said.

"Why? I won't be paying for it; it comes with the package. You can just have it."

So I'll have central heat AND Direct TV this winter.

I win.