Death of a Landlord (Part 3)

It's the same weekend. The concrete slab leaves much to be desired on several fronts: curing is incomplete, snow continues to fall accompanied by the outside temperature, and the angle of the slab is laughable.

Additionally, the hot tub remains in the driveway, 10 feet away from the concrete slab. Landlady and Charlie are in dire need of help. Moving the hot tub is the one thing that they really can not do on their own. After all day of calling our friend Anthony (who happened to be at work, which they didn't seem to understand), he shows up as the sun sets, fires up the company front-end loader, and proceeds to, again, take care of our landlady's project for no pay, hardly a thank you, and way more hassle than it is worth.

With hot tub in place, everyone goes home, including Charlie and Landlady (to their homes down south, not their home above ours). Charlie calls Anthony the following week to hook up the electricity, whereas Anthony electrocutes himself not once, but twice, and knocks out the power to our house as well. Landlady offers him ONE beer. Doesn't really cut it, I imagine.

We now have a "spa" that runs off of our electricity, as the house is not zoned for dual occupancy, yet is metered separately by the landlady, who now writes us a pitiful check for our obscenely high electricity bill. Quite literally, our electricity bill increased from $150 last December, to $338 this year. I am certain that Southern California Edison is having to create new billing "Tiers" to figure out how much to charge our energy inefficient household. It's embarrassing and wasteful. They heat the hot tub to its normal temperature while it's consistently been -5 degrees overnight, and they aren't even there to use it.

Billing my landlady has proved exciting, as usually it is the other way around. Other than that, I've deemed nothing positive out of the entire endeavor, and have in fact, seen an increase in blood pressure due to extreme frustration. Not to mention, our friends frequent our house less. I don't blame them.