Things I Love About My Apartment:
1) It’s mine. All mine. I pay for it all by myself, and I am free to do whatever I like with it. I can decorate it however I want, I can clean when I want to (or not), and I never have to worry about roommates making a mess, being on the phone when I want to use it, watching the TV when I want to watch something else, or borrowing my clothes/accessories/shoes/food/diet coke/condoms/whatever (all of which are actual things that roommates have borrowed and/or taken in the past).
2) Teenie is in it, and she is the greatest sleeping companion ever. (Sorry, Dave, but she doesn’t hog the blankets.)
3) I can see a tiny piece of Puget Sound from my living room.
4) When we were in California, I got this awesome refrigerator magnet at the House of Blues that says:
BE NICE
OR LEAVE
– Thank You
It makes me happy every time I see it.
5) The apartment has a full-size stackable washer & dryer, which I am totally in love with.
6) I can see the Space Needle if I walk 10 feet from my front door.
7) The maintenance man is very nice and always fixes stupid things for me (like replacing lightbulbs), even though he has a creepy 70’s porn star mustache and looks alarmingly like John Oates’ long lost twin. (The picture on that link makes me laugh every time I see it.)
Things I Hate About My Apartment:
1) Yesterday it was 90 degrees outside, and I have no air-conditioning. Today it’s going to be about the same. I’m melting. Someone kill me, the cold showers aren’t helping anymore.
2) They’re building a new apartment complex across the street, and construction starts at 7 a.m. every day, on the dot. Ever woken up to the gentle wafting strains of jackhammers? It sucks. And for those of you who want to offer me a fix-it solution: I cannot sleep with my bedroom window closed. See above. It’s 90 f-ing degrees. I have to be able to breathe.
3) An Irish pub that’s about a block from my place opened recently, which seems to be contributing to much more late-night street noise than before. (Mostly drunken yelling.) I don’t mind it so much on the weekends – hell, I’m probably one of them on the weekends – but it gets irritating during the week. Especially when I know the jackhammers are going to wake me up in just a few short hours.
4) People who live above me throw their cigarette butts off the balcony and they land on my patio. This pisses me off to no end.
5) The apartment manager and her family also have a courtyard-facing apartment like I do, but they’re on the ground floor. She has 2 small children – her daughter is five and her son is three. And every day, I hear her and her husband yelling at them. Not just typical parent yelling, but borderline-abusive yelling. The other day I heard her tell her 3 year-old son to “just shut up”. Um, hello? He’s 3. What the hell do you want from him, lady? Ordinarily this type of thing would be something that I would report to the apartment manager except that… oh yeah… this IS the apartment manager! So instead, I just sit and listen and cringe. I’ve considered recording them yelling at the kids and then sending it to them anonymously with a note that says something like, “just in case you don’t hear how much anger is dripping out of your voice every time you address your children…” But alas, I have no recording device, and I don’t want to get evicted, so I think I’ll just keep my mouth shut and pray that these kids wind up in the hands of a very capable therapist in about 20 years.