Tag Archives: apartment

i’ve lived with window units before

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I’m in my old apartment right now, borrowing someone’s wifi while I clean everything and take the last of my stuff.  I don’t like being here.  My new apartment is gorgeous and clean and has all the stuff I like in it.  The kitchen is huge, and the bathroom is covered in green tile and has an old medicine cabinet with a slot for razor blades.  Last night I opened all the windows and did the dishes to the sound of wind chimes and chirping crickets.  Last night I also did laundry without having to wait for someone else to be done, and as I put the last load in I looked out the window at my assigned, covered parking space and sighed with happiness.

Tomorrow night I will walk to the grocery store.

If my landlady called tomorrow and asked me if I wanted to buy my new apartment, I’d…well, I’d probably say no, because we’re in THIS economy and I’m in THIS town and in THIS financial situation.  But I’d really WANT to buy it, which I guess is my point.

So screw you, old apartment.  Screw you for the following reasons:

1. You were built after 1980.

2. Despite your large parking lot, you never had a free space near my building unless I got home before 5 p.m.

3. You were too yellow.

4. You contained the following residents:

a) The guy who asked if I’d date his friend, who is the same guy who offered me cocaine.

b) The guy who asked me three times if I watched “the game.”  What game?

c) The upstairs neighbors who stomped around as if wearing cement shoes, who are the same neighbors who threw water onto my patio, who are the same neighbors who broke some glass right outside my front door and did not clean it up.

d) The guy who kept his German shepherd locked on his patio.

e) The adjacent neighbors who had a video camera installed outside their front door (or they did until I reported them), who are the same neighbors who 1. had a food fight right outside their front door or 2. projectile vomited outside their front door. I couldn’t tell which.

f) Anyone who walked past my patio while I was sitting outside and chose to stare at me and/or talk to me and/or get into a shoving match with each other while I was trying to read or write something.

g) Various shouting people.

5. You are in the same complex as the apartment I lived in with my ex.  Not that I feel negatively about it, but who wants that kind of reminder?  It’s time to move on.

6. Your trash was always full.

7. Your recycling was very far away, as far away as the mailboxes.

8. You are in a neighborhood that doesn’t contain many things I like to do.

9. Your TV-antenna reception left much to be desired.  I know, I’m a dinosaur, and this complaint will be obsolete in four months, but still!

10. Your sidewalks flooded every time it rained, which meant that after every rainstorm I had to consider what sort of shoes I could wear that would protect my feet from rainwater.

11. You only had three windows.  THREE!  (My new place has six.)

12. Your patio had a five-inch gap underneath the fence, so every time the landscapers came, they’d blow armfuls of leaves onto my patio.

Old apartment, I will miss your friendly landlord and your dishwasher and your central air and the size of your patio, but I will not miss anything else.  I’m going to load up the last of my stuff and go home to play with the friendly cat who hangs out near my assigned parking space, take a bath in my green bathtub, and drift off to a nice, quiet sleep.

(Maybe a lot of this makes me sound like one of those creepy watchful neighbors who looks out the window through binoculars and writes down the license-plate numbers of suspicious people, but I’m not! I swear!)

’cause I’m movin’ out

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A history of moving to new apartments, told in types of boxes used:

December 1998: liquor and wine boxes: Kahlua, Jose Cuervo, etc.
I was a waitress/bartender at the time, and I pilfered most of my boxes from work.

May 2000: computer boxes: Dell, etc.
These boxes came from work, too, except I was working at my first web-design job.

June 2005: online shopping boxes: Amazon, Overstock, flat-rate USPS, etc.
Unemployed, broke, selling/buying stuff on eBay.

August 2005: same
These were the dark times.

August 2006: mostly the same
Except with the addition of some computer boxes from my contract web design job.

October 2008: laser-printer paper boxes, online shopping boxes: Xerox, B&H, CB2, flat-rate USPS, etc.
Web-design job, a little more money, new photography habit, still buying stuff on eBay.

I don’t know what any of this means, except that what sort of moving boxes you use says almost as much about you as your compulsion to collect and store every single box that crosses your path just in case they’ll be needed for moving. Seriously, who keeps so many boxes?

P.S. if all your moving boxes are plain brown ones with a nondescript return address, you’re buying too much porn.

uh, what?

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I sent an e-mail to my friend B the other day about how I’ve been having trouble focusing on things that require thought and effort.  The fault lies with the internet and television, to be sure, but let’s not get into all that right now.  The problem itself is that I can sit down and write jokey e-mails to friends, or post little things in my LiveJournal, but when it comes to the sort of substantive writing that requires critical thought, I’m woefully inadequate these days.  As is my custom*, I’m going to make a list of things I’d write about had I the mental capacity:

1. I’m moving to a new apartment.  It’s closer to downtown, it was built in the fifties, and it’s prettier, though more expensive, than my current place.  There’s more light, too.

I’ve got this weird thing going on with my current apartment where work is a 20-minute drive away in one direction, and most of my friends are a 20-minute drive away in the other.  This wouldn’t be too much of a problem (though I’d rather not have to drive AT ALL), except for the fact that the 20-minute drives home from my friends’ area of town occur late at night, which is not exactly a good time to be driving home.  More weekends than not I spend at least one night sleeping on someone’s futon so I don’t have to drive all the way home.

This new place is ten minutes closer to my friends’ area of town.  In one week I’d estimate that I drive to that area and to work an equal number of times, so I’m going to use the same amount of gas I do now on that front.  The bonus is that my new apartment is in a highly walkable area (71 out of 100!), which means I’ll be able to walk or ride my bike to coffeehouses and restaurants and the pharmacy and so forth.

There is no 2. because I’m bored now.

*One of my favorite little oft-used phrases in The Floating Opera, about which Orville Prescott said this:

Nevertheless, “The Floating Opera” isn’t anywhere near funny enough to make up for its grievous faults. Most of this odd novel is dull. Most of its humor is labored and flat. Some of its heavy-handed attempts to shock seem cheap in a juvenile and nasty way rather than sophisticated or realistic, as they probably were intended.

So, uh, fuck that guy.