The Reason I'm Freezin'

The landlord finally put in new bathroom fixtures, then noticed "stuff" falling out of the bathroom ceiling vent. He calls the heating and cooling (HVAC) guys.

Now, for ten years pink fuzzy "stuff" and then glittery gray "stuff" shot out of the the heating vents every time I used the (forced-air) furnace, so much so that I stretched old nylon stockings over the vents to contain it and so didn't have to sweep it up every hour. The HVAC guys climbed through a little window into the attic where I have never been, ripping down a rotted window box on their way. The attic contains only heating ducts, all chewed through by mice and rife with huge holes. The ducts weren't metal. They were foam, wrapped around a wire skeleton, wrapped with gray plastic, wrapped in one last layer of pink insulation. These are prized mouse-nest-building materials.

So now I know why stuff shot out of the vents, and why a whole tank of propane got sucked up in a couple of months, and the reason the living space, especially the bathroom, never got warm. Mice scrabbled in the ceiling above my bed every winter, waking me at all hours so I'd bang on the walls, throw books and shoes at the ceiling, and yell -- and every couple of weeks put a block of bright blue mouse poison in the wall by the fuse box and within a couple of days they ate it, the little b*****rds. Landlord is going to replace the ducts with metal ducts. Then the HVAC guys told him that was no good without an updated furnace. So I'm gettin' that too, and maybe won't have to dread winter as I have the past couple of years, and pay the electric company big money for constant use of three electric heaters. The lack of heat during winter was one of the few negatives of living here.