apartment maitenance

We have water dripping from our ceiling around the radiator/heating pipe in the living room. I'd say about 2 drops a second from the main location, another location that drips a bit, and the ocassional rivulet coming down the pipe as well. Filled up 3/4 of a spaghetti sauce jar in about 3 hours. From the looks of things (we came home from the weekend and noticed dirty water stripes on the pipe) this has been going on to some degree all weekend.

I've called the management company, but the odds of getting a response tonight are low.

Patty is going upstairs to try to talk to the neighbors, who may not speak English to see if they have a dripping radiator that's then coming down into our place. (ETA: they aren't home, we're going to put a note under their door).

How concerned should I be, in terms of floor/ceiling stability? Is this just one of those things that I shouldn't worry about? We've had our radiator in that room drip lots of water before, but it was clearly just our unit, not stuff coming through the ceiling from the apartment above.

What else can we do until we hopefully hear from these people tomorrow?

Is there any reason calling 311 (local NYC complaint/information line for those not from here) would help?

And no, I have no way of contacting our super.

sundries

- The historical ball gender thingy transpired without incident. Various people saw me and said "George Sand," and I smiled and nodded as this makes my existence historically acceptable.

I was glad that we could attend the event and also feel, at this point at least, that we could against next year. I remain internally deeply ambivalent about the gender/queer thing situation for reasons that are alternately too complicated and too boring to get into.

- In fact, being away this weekend was an absolute godsend and something we both totally needed.

- Too bad the return home has involved a clogged toilet, the previously posted about leak, and a good deal of cat puke. All of thise situations seem to have subsided for the moment. Real life is hard, and it has made me innordinately stressed out.

- To update on the leak sitaution, the boiler has cycled on again, but no more leaking for several hours. It just started again, now as the boiler is cycling off it seems.

- OMG, why does iTunes have none of hte music I want right now?

- Firefly! So that thing where Mal gets a wife? wow, that could have gone in a lot of different directions. Probably the most satisfying episode so far, and with a lot of odd character reveals. This goes on my list of "watch this show to learn how to structure/characterize."

- So I am thinking of buying a laptop sometime between now and mid-January. I need your input.

I am trying to decide between getting a Mac (anyone with info on timing because of impending new releases, let me know), a random PC netbook, and an actual proper PC laptop. There are pros and cons to all for me. My main needs are the Internet and word processing. Secondary needs are Excel, possibly Access. I use photoshop a lot, but realize that's a problem on Macs and will probably just continue with that on my old desktop. Ideally my budget is 1K or less. Obviously if I go with a net book type thing I want to spend a lot less, and I might conceivably push my budget for $1,400 for a Mac.

Thoughts?