More on Apartment Living

Martha Stewart should put out a magazine on "Apartment Living." Now, for those of you who live in apartments, please know ahead of time that you will be highly offended by what you read and skip this post. But I think Martha needs to tell us how "good things" can be brought out of crowded apartment living.

I hate, loathe, and despise apartments. I detest hearing the boom, boom, boom, of the stupid music that the people next door to me play. They not only are deaf, but they also have poor taste in music which includes some sort of bongo wailing. Then later in the day the people in the apartment above decide to play their selections, which apparently have been stolen from Bo and Luke Duke's residence somewhere in Hazzard County, Georgia. Now a motorcycle in the covered entry!! Do you have any idea how loud that is, or how that echoes? Thank you for waking the children up from their naps...

I don't like apartments because even at "home," you can never get away from people and the inconsiderate things they do. Even a simple matter of getting out of the car and entering your apartment may well be a dangerous experience. Broken glass and careless drivers can be found even in the best of places. And I know the apartment manager makes $100 a month on each dog in the complex, but I don't *feel* the benefit when I step in or near the little surprises their owner leaves in the only grassy area in which my children can play.

Apartments have sex offenders. Oh, you don't like hearing that, but if you go map them out you'll find that at least the registered ones sometimes cluster in apartments. I had one very kind schoolteacher in total shock when I revealed to her that the apartment complex she had let her daughter hang out with friends contained a sex offender with several different child sex convictions (and God knows how many uncaught, uncharged or plain old plea bargained!). But it's such a nice apartment! Oh, no. Unless you live in the mega metropolis city where there is NO housing alternative, "nice apartment" is an oxymoron.

We've already covered the roaches in my last post. Have you eaten breakfast yet? I'll tell you about the NEXT apartment we lived in, in Kansas City. But first please note that I am not telling any bad stories about the gated community apartment that is more money per month for a two bedroom place than most five-bedroom mortgages. If you've got to live in an apartment, make sure you're really rich and can buy yourself some "nice" neighbours. Maybe I'm just an elitist, but it really DOES make a difference.

When we moved from Florida to Missouri, D went ahead of me so that I could stay behind with the children and get the house sold. Then we would live in an apartment for a little bit so that we do not wind up purchasing a house in the WORST place to live, not knowing what area is on the nightly news every day. The apartment in Kansas City was just so-so. It wasn't full of amazing amounts of roaches (actually, I never saw even one, but it was winter in a northern climate too to be fair). When something broke, the apartment managers were sure to take care of the problem in a reasonable amount of time.

But it was still an apartment. The good thing about this apartment is that it was right in the bustling part of town and you could walk (at your peril!) to about anywhere you'd like to be. The bad thing was the neighbours I mentioned earlier, and the fact that D never cleaned out the cabinet drawers upon moving into the apartment.

D claimed that the brown pellets in with the SILVERWARE he was eating with was just "old rice," and it didn't really concern him. This "old rice" had mouse hair and a distinctive shape. I about puked. A call to the apartment manager brought a worker within a couple hours. Oh, those are mouse droppings all right, he said. A mouse trap was laid up under the sink, but we didn't see or hear any mice.

I triple-cleaned the silverware and the cabinet drawer, but still ate with my hands whenever possible as long as we were in that apartment. Thankfully D only brought a few forks and etc. and these somehow never got mixed in with our REAL set when we moved.

After a while I kind of forgot about the mouse trap under the sink. It was a pretty crowded kitchen and I had taken to putting the grocery bags there to use for trash. We were cleaning up to move out and I grabbed a BIG bunch of these bags and pulled them out of the cabinet, to find I was holding a dead floppy mouse in a trap.

EEEeek!