.:the life of a human shark:.
what the hell is it with me and my completely lousy luck with apartments/places to live and moving?
so we’re moving in two weeks. we haven’t even been here in austin for a year, and already i’m moving. how completely annoying.
when i came down here to find a place a to live last year, i went through an apartment locator, as that seems to be the big thing around these parts. you’ve got these people who will basically go and search for places to live for you completely free to charge. they, of course, make a commission off of this, but that’s beside the point…
the point is that you have someone finding you a good place to live based upon your criteria, and all you have to worry about is coming out to look at the place and signing all the paperwork. i think we’re probably a little difficult. we have two dogs. we wanted a small yard. we wanted to be central but not pay an arm and a leg for it. we got all of the above…
…but we didn’t bargain for the other…’friends’…that moved in with us. and my sarcasm meter is at an 11 out of 10, real friends, because these ‘friends’ i talk about are rats. not kidding. ‘effing rats. gross.
the short story is that around february, we started hearing things crawling around in our walls. at first, we thought they were cute, cuddly little squirrles that had made their way in through the roof. we saw them running merrily about with their bushy little tails and their mouths full of nuts, and therefore had deduced that it had to be squirrles. we found out we were wrong when christy went out into the kitchen one morning and saw a little nasty rodent staring back at her. she screamed, we called our building maintenence crew and they got on it. they sealed up the holes outside and they put sticky traps next to the holes they found behind our washing machine and the refrigerator.
the results were pretty staggering. within the first week, we caught three. and let me tell you something; rats…up close and personal…with their nasty, long tails and their little pink eyes…are abso-effing-lutley disgusting. but it doesn’t make it any less horrible to kill them. and that is basically what you have to do when you catch ‘em on sticky traps, else you just throw them away and let them just die from starvation/dehydration. no matter how gross i think they are, i think that’s pretty terrible, and so i have to result to taking them out and ‘executing’ them myself. the method is a nice brick to the head. i figure it’s quick and painless, but it’s still hard to do.
the straw that broke the camel’s back was when we came home from our vacation to find one of our furry rodent friends lying dead on a sticky trap in the middle of the kitchen. the maintenance guys must’ve come over and put one there. unfortunately, maintenance is off on sundays…and that’s when we got home…so we had to see it/smell it/get rid of it. it was pretty horrific.
and that did it. we met with the manager shortly thereafter and decided that we were out. and this time, i was determined that if we were going to move, we were going to move into a really nice newer place no matter what. i’m sick and tired of this half-ass living. it sucks. i thought that shit would end after college. as it turns out, that wasn’t the case.
i thought it might be fun for me to give you a nice little synopsis of my living situations throughout the years. you’ll be amazed…
1. probasco: lived in a two bedroom with a girl i hardly knew from my english class my freshman year in college. her name was maggie. she was crazy and liked to have loud sex with her boyfriend. we didn’t get along as well as planned. i moved out three months later to…
2. ohio ave.: cool loft apartment in an old historic house. 2 bedroom place. lived with my friend mike mrozek. no real problems until winter-ish and a little thereafter when we started smelling something bad coming from the heating ducts. turns out an animal…probably a squirrel…got in there and decided that it wanted to die. it rotted. it smelled horrific. we moved out. that led us to…
3. delta ave.: this was in mt. lookout, which was pretty pimp for a couple of college dudes. it was a small 2 bedroom in the basement of a complex, but it was close to mt. lookout square, which was a cool place to hang out. we lived there for about a year-and-a-half, and then moved over to…
4. rohs. st.: another clifton apt. cool street. lots of people we knew lived there. great old historic houses, but the neighborhood was a tiny bit ghetto. it was a huge 3 bedroom place with no AC. we hired a third roommate…a guy i worked with named randy…who told us that he liked to ’smoke a little bit of weed’. his idea of a little bit and our idea of a little bit was completely different, but that was okay. we still had a good time there. after a year, i decided that i was going to move in with my girlfriend melissa, and so we found a place on…
5. nassau ave.: in downtown cincinnati. 1 bedroom, kind of hip looking at the time. 6 months in, around the time winter came rolling around, it became ridiculously cold. we figured out there was no insulation around the bottom part of the bedroom. so we chatted with the landlord, and he offered to move us to..
6. gilbert ave.: about a block down, still in downtown cincinnati. this was a second floor, really large one bedroom apartment. again, kind of hip looking and nice. and 6 months in was all i could take of her (see previous post on melissa for that story), so i moved out to my temporary living situation on…
7. montana ave on the west side: west side…if you’re from the east side of cincinnati originally, then moving to the west side is like moving to the depths of hell. there is eternal conflict between east and west side, and they are two completely different worlds. i took over the lease of my friend tavi for the three months he’d be out of town for an internship. i started looking for a roommate, and my dad helped me out with one of his students from his class. this guy was named brad, and so i moved into brad’s apartment on…
8. ingleside ave.: older 2 bedroom place with some class. big place with wood floors and some classic interior stylings. however…brad was a pothead. a massive, massive pothead. brad deteriorated over the next two months, and by month three, i couldn’t take it anymore. so i moved out one street over into a place on…
9. moorman ave: huge, cool 1 bedroom apartment that i would live in by myself. this place was awesome. it was updated and had more space than i could possibly fill. the only bad thing about it was the fact that my neighbor, lavonda, was really loud and she liked to fight with my two lesbian neighbors downstairs. they were super nice, but they just could not get along. oh yeah…and the windows were really old, so in the winter i’d get gas and electric bills around $250-$300.00. ouch. and when i quit my job, i couldn’t afford that, so i moved back up to clifton to a street called…
10. digby ave.: small, super cheap, top floor, classic german architecture 1 bedroom apartment. loved it. moved in next to my girlfriend at the time. thoght this was a great move. it was for a while. but i didn’t move out of there because of her. after about 8 months, i was getting lonely, and i had a couple of good friends that wanted a third roommate. so i moved over to…
11. burwood ave.: 3 bedroom place in a cool up-and-coming part of town close to some REALLY nice places. the place was ridiculously large and stupid, stupid cheap. it was $675.00 total split between 3 people. yeah. that was the only way that i was able to really survive getting laid-off. i lived there for about a year and three months, met my wife at the first annual bad sweater party held there, and then decided that i wanted to move in with a couple of other friends to an awesome part of town. that was on…
12. stettinius ave.: 3 bedroom place in a house in hyde park. that was the kicker…hyde park. that’s a pimp part of town in cincinnati. i lived there for a year and then propsed to my girlfriend (now my wife) and we decided to move in together. we found a place over on…
13. ingleside ave, part II: back over to familiar grounds. the place we found was, again, super cheap, and absolutely ridiculously huge. it was technically a two bedroom, but the second bedroom was attached to the first bedroom…so in order to get to the bathroom, you had to go through the first bedroom. perfect for us, though. it’s not like we were going to sleep in separate bedrooms… :). 8 months into that, we decided that we wanted to buy a house, and that’s what we did. we bought a house on…
14. bramble ave.: this was in an up-and-coming part of town. it’s extremely close to an EXTREMELY expensive part of cincinnati called mariemont. if you put our 3 bedroom cape cod house over the city line (it was literally 2 blocks away), it would’ve been worth twice what we paid for it. we were planning on staying there for quite a while. and then christy and i decided to move to austin for her schooling and me for my work. that leads us to where we are now, which is…
15. southport dr: 1970s-ish duplex in a wooded area. nothing spectacular about the place other then that it’s about as central to everything as you can get. but..rats are not acceptable. and so we are moving up north to…
16. 9501 FM 620: …and the place is BRAND new. it’s a 1200+ sq. foot 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment/condo, and we will be the very first people to live there. believe you me that after the experience i’ve had, this is going to be heaven. it’s about 20 mins outside of the city…but frankly…i don’t give a flying rat turd about that. it’s new. it might not have a bunch of ‘personality’, but at this point, i just want a place that i know i’m going to be comfortable in for longer than a year.
GOD i hate moving. HATE IT. and yet, i’ve done it 16 times in the past 12 years. can you believe that?! it baffles me to think about it.
i can’t wait to move though. rats are freakin’ foul. and i’m super excited about the prospect of having a REALLY nice place to lay my weary, tired-o’-moving head down.
…and you idiots in cincinnati that want to come to a real city to visit will have a nice place to crash….
.a.out.
oh no… rats! they are completely disgusting - i think i told you about the rats i had in my place on 4th street. my roommate at the time, Jolynn mentioned one day that she had been hearing some strange rustling around in her bedroom wall, which was basically in the basement level of our place. i didn’t think much of it until one morning i heard a strange noise coming from UNDER MY BED… it sounded like something softly hit the bottom of my headboard. i was half asleep at this point, so i didn’t make the effort to look… but then later that day as i was sitting at my desk in my room, something small and brown caught my eye as it moved past my doorway and towards the stairwell… so i got up slowly, and poked my head around the corner and just got a glimpse of it’s nasty tail disappearing around the corner. i quickly followed behind to witness it go down to Jolynn’s room and jump into a bookshelf and disappear. after taking a minute to get the balls to go check it out… i moved the bookcase and of course find this extremely narrow hole that had been chewed away by this little fucker. i immediately called my landlord, he came over and set some traps… which began working pretty quickly. i think we caught maybe 5 or 6… and i had to empty out 2 of the traps… gross. i actually lived there another year… call me crazy… but i really loved that place too much to let that bother me (although i doubt i would let it go that far again). fortunately, they didn’t come back after that month…