I live at some sort of weird intersection of space and time. Admittedly, I don’t have much evidence to back up this claim, but something odd is definitely occurring in the apartment as of late. If I get sucked up in a vortex of some kind and disappear, this will be all the proof I need to show I am right.

When we had moved into our current residence, we chose it because it had been recently remodeled. In typical Korean style, it was done as quickly as possible, and on the surface seemed well done. Only after you’ve been living here for a few months do you notice the paint on the door knobs, the sloppy grouting work in the bathroom, or the doors that don’t fully close due to one too many layers of paint.

Then there are the lights. We have overhead neon lights. The reliable kind that flick on and stay bright for ages. Except, all of a sudden, within a few weeks of each other, each of the lights in the house started dying. Even an old style bulb light burned out. This is a trivial annoyance, as it requires a fuse to be replaced, and possibly the purchase of a new set of neon tubes. We took the tubes with us to go shopping, and tested them out in the displays in the store. All of them worked in the store, yet were completely dead at home!  We found the right size replacements, bought fuses, and came home. Our new lights worked even thought the old ones no longer did.

Then, each of the batteries in the different clocks around the house started dying. These are relatively new clocks, dating from either my single life, to some of our wedding gifts. Each one had their batteries die within a week or two of each other after having worked for years, or in some cases months without needing to be changed. The remote for my DVD player has died as well, which might be attributed to one to many trips to the ground, or perhaps something sinister is afoot.

Our method of fixing the problem is to buy slightly higher quality batteries, lights, and fuses. Everything seems to be working at the moment, but if we have another system wide failure, I don’t know what to think.