Smokey the Neighbor

So we have had a lot of snow lately. Apparently it is a 118 year record for D.C. and the city was completely unprepared. The city literally shut down for an entire week while the snowplows tried to clear the snow away. The good part of all the snow is that we got a week off school...the bad part is that our next door neighbor decided to become a chain smoker. The snow really started to come down on a Friday. That night we smelled a little smoke but we didn't think much of it. By Saturday night we were about to die. Our neighbor must have smoked three packs and blown all of the smoke into the wall. The worst was when our heater turned on and it blew the smell of cigarette smoke all throughout our apartment. At about 9:00 p.m. we decided we had to do something about the smell. As we did not know our neighbor our first approach was to ask the front desk if people had a right to smoke in their units. It turns out we do not live in a smoke-free building and there was nothing the building management could do about it. We next decided that we would knock on our neighbors door and politely ask if he could smoke on his balcony or somewhere other than directly into the wall separating our apartments. When we approached his door we could hear him talking inside his apartment, we think on the phone. Once we knocked it got silent and rather than answering the door we simply heard a curt "what?" How do you respond to that? We said, "hi, we are your next door neighbors and had a quick question." No response. We waited a little while and he never said anything or answered the door so we just left. We then proceeded to open our window all the way up, crank the heater (the other one not near the adjoining wall) and putty up all the cracks in the way adjoining his unit (e.g., around the air ducts and the electrical box). We woke up on Sunday morning and church was canceled but our neighbor had already started smoking again! We decided we had to do something. We finally decided that the only thing we could do was venture out onto the roads (the main roads were plowed by this point but all the side roads had about 2 1/2 feet of snow that had not been plowed) . We drove to Target and $150 later we came home with an air purifier. It has worked pretty well so far and I have sealed off a lot more places in the wall with tape so we haven't had any more problems but were were still annoyed that we had to spend $150 to fix his problem. We have also decided that come June when we have more time we are going to move. We want a larger apartment but we want to stay in our ward as we really like it now that we are out of the nursery/primary (2 years later) and are finally starting to make some friends.

Here is a picture of the snow, and a picture of our new air purifier which we named the "suck it" - after The Office.





We also had a lot of time on our hands will all the snow and no work and we decided to make some vacation pictures using our Photoshop skills. I think they turned out pretty well!