Crazy Landlady

My two roommates and I have recently come to the conclusion that our landlady is, in fact, insane. On our first day in the apartment, as I said in a recent entry, we told housing about the maintenance issues at hand and asked them to fix the more problematic ones. So, they turned in the housing maintenance form to the landlady, who is obligated to fix things according to her contract. Then, before we have heard anything, we find our landlady (Simonetta) at the exterior door to the apartment waiting on us to return home (its getting dark at this point...). It just so happened that that night, my roommate Irene was having over her mom, brother, aunt, uncle and two cousins to see the place before going out to dinner. Did that stop Simonetta? Oh no! She came right upstairs with us, despite the obviously bad timing and lack of notice, and began to MEASURE our furniture. No one is sure why she did this, but she and her daughter each had a measuring tape and they began in my room, making their way back and forth to the other side of the apartment. We were all in shock, and therefore unable to appropriately respond to this intrusion, so we just let her come and go without much said. Afterwards, the conversation went something like this:

Me: So, our landlady was just at the front door waiting on us to get home.
Irene: Yeah, what if we didnt come home until the middle of the night?
Me: Maybe she has a key.
Irene: Yeah. I think shes allowed to come when she wants.
Me: No, shes not allowed to come at all. JCU said its illegal.
Irene: ILLEGAL? We have to tell housing about her...shes crazy.
All of us: (much rambling about how insane she is and the fact that she wears clothing that resembles a sheet draped over her)

So, the following morning we did go to housing and tell them our woes about Simonetta. They called her in front of us and told her that she isnt allowed to come over without notifying JCU and setting up an appointment, and that it is illegal for her to even have a key to the apartment. So, no more problems, right?? HAH!
About a week later we realized that it had almost been four weeks since we submitted the form for maintenance and nothing had been done. Perhaps it was lost in the shuffle? We thought we would check it out so we went into the Housing office and they said that things were getting taken care of. Apparantly, Simonetta would lose rent money if she didnt get the problems fixed. Overjoyed would not describe the way we felt: hot water in our sink...its almost too much! Sure enough, Simonetta called us and set up an appointment, which she never came for. She called again and said that this Thursday (yesterday) she would call around 3 or 3:30 to confirm and that she would like to be confirming a 5:30 or 6:00 time to come over to fix our kitchen problems. YAY! Well, no phone call yesterday at all so we assumed we would hear from her yet again for another appointment. Oh, would that we were so lucky! Actually, at 7:00 she calls us while we are at the school waiting on a friend to go eat dinner nearby and says that she is in front of our door (familiar?) and that we must come home. Woah woah woah! I have a certain fear of this very irrational and scarily insane woman so I had my roommate talk to her. Our landlady said that "oh I could just go in and fix things in the kitchen"...but isnt it illegal for her to have a key? Thats what we said. We rush home, despite the fact that two friends are waiting on us, and we let her in, allow the maintenance guy to fix the sink (yay!) and go. We are grateful for her finally getting this done, but are a little bit peeved by the whole trend that she has set in dealing with these problems. So, another visit to housing is in order for Monday. Yuck! Still, its a little bit funny to be dealing with an Italian and certainly educational. We always get some good laughs at her expense...sinful laughs, but laughs anyways. She is so "typically" Italian and that cracks us up. It was especially funny when she pretended that there was no hot water in the sink because of the city...? and also when she acted like she didnt speak English so thats why she had misunderstood times before (even though our ITALIAN roommate spoke to her in ITALIAN about it). Oh shes a character...I look forward to two more months of the madness.