Large Scale Heating.

Apparently they just switched to natural gas boilers from coal.

So I know for efficiency purposes, large scale heating and cooling makes sense.  But obviously not everyone will be happy with the temperature.  Take for example my dorm.  This entire campus has steam heat (a novel concept for people from California like me).  But because most of the campus is run off one steam plant, it's not just an on/off procedure.  So basically, you don't want to turn on the plant for one cold night, then find out that it's gonna be 70 degrees tomorrow.  So you'd think that December in Kentucky would be cold enough to have the plant running?  Wrong.  For 3 days now, it's been unseasonably warm, and I can't turn the AC on.

When they clean my dorm's bathrooms.

Another one about my dorm?  Geez Thomas, why don' you just switch dorms?  (I'll save that for a later post)  So it seems like everyday around 1 or 2 o'clock pm, I'm usually in my dorm and I have to go to the bathroom.  But you know what sucks?  They clean every bathroom in the building daily (thank God), starting with the girls floors.  Then they work down from the top to bottom.  When they get to the bottom, they start the guys floors working up.  So as far as I can tell, my floor is the last one to get cleaned.  What time do they end up getting to my floor?  Around 1 or 2 o'clock pm.  Know what else sucks?  If I have to go to the bathroom while they're cleaning them, that's a no.  The people who clean the bathrooms are only women.  So I have to go down either 3 stories to the next guy floor, use the lobby guest bathroom, or venture to the University Center.  Yesterday, it took them 2 hours to clean the bathroom because someone thought it would be funny to throw talcum powder everywhere.  They had to bring in a floor scrubber or something that was ridiculously loud.  I hate this dorm.

Fine Friday IV: Elevators.

Today's post revolves around elevators.  Some elevators are truly a dream.  For example: glass elevators in an atrium.  But then you run into elevators in parking garages, old buildings, and the worst: dorms.  Another problem I have with elevators is speed.  Luckily the ones in my dorm (27 stories) are pretty fast.  Usually the worst offenders are parking garages.  Usually if my climb is less than 5 stories, I'll just take the stairs.  Sometimes that isn't possible though (see this post).  But sometimes you step into an elevator, and it smells nice, everything is clean, and the light music puts you in a generally cheery mood.