I return to blogging to announce GF and I are moving into a new place! We signed the lease this week for a studio apartment in Seattle (Not "Seattle." I'll now be living in the actual city limits, so I won't be using my code phrase anymore).
I thought I'd take this time to reminisce on the things I'll miss, and the things I won't miss, about our now former home in Bothell (We're moving, so I see no reason to keep that anonymous).
Bothell sounds like the name of a planet in Star Wars, but it's actually a quiet town east of Seattle. When I say quiet, I mean dead. Nothing happens here, from what I can tell. GF's theory is that people live in Bothell, but no one actually does anything here. They go to Seattle, Bellevue, or Redmond to work, eat, and have a good time.
There are a few things, however, I will miss about Bothell. That sleepy-town demeanor is one I rather like, frankly, so I'll actually miss that.
I'll also miss a couple of restaurants that GF and I became familiar with. GF and I discovered a few places in Bothell and Redmond that offered some of the best Mexican food I've had in Washington. And I'll deeply regret moving farther away from the milkshakes, french fries, and old-school vibe of the Ranch Drive-In (The burgers weren't that great though).
I will not miss living right across the street from a fire station, however. Especially when I was unemployed and staying at home a lot, I've had to put up with a lot of sirens, horns, and flashing lights since moving to Bothell. Thankfully, they tended not to blare the sirens at night, but the lights would still cut through the blinds as we slept.
Although I will kinda miss watching the paddle-ball games between firefighters during their down time. They'd park the trucks out in front and you could see them smacking a ball back and forth over a low net inside the station. It was a little amusing on particularly boring days.
As for our actual apartment, the list of things I'm not going to miss far outweighs the things I will.
I won't miss the strange musty smell I notice when I walk in after being out of the apartment for awhile.
I won't miss the sweaty toilet. For whatever reason, the toilet gets water condensation all over the outside, which then drips to the bathroom floor. It seems to mostly occur when there's heat in the apartment, and the only way to keep it in check is to directly point a running fan at the toilet.
I won't miss the windows constantly fogging up and attracting water condensation during the fall and winter months.
I won't miss the moldy bathroom and bedroom walls. It plays hell with my allergies, not to mention other health issues it raises. Even as I'm writing this I'm having one of my worst days in recent memory - half the apartment is covered in mucus right now because of how much I've been sneezing today.
I won't miss the college students who try to park in our spot during classes when GF is at work with the car.
I won't miss the chain-smoking old lady next door who sits right outside our front door. If the windows are open, the smell of nicotine and tobacco wafts into our place.
I won't miss our apartment's poor air circulation. I believe this is what is behind the sweating toilet, foggy windows, and weird smell. There's a permanent humidity/mugginess that hangs about our apartment, and is most pronounced when we are both home and/or when one of us is cooking or showering.
I won't miss our smoke detector, which we have to remove every time we cook because the stove sets it off. It's not even very close to the kitchen!
And I certainly won't miss our landlord and maintenance guy. Let's call them Joey and Ricky, respectively.
Joey, essentially, doesn't care. He is landlord for four or five different apartment buildings around the Eastside, and seems to focus more on his non-Bothell ones. I think he considers us lower-class because we live in Bothell. When we had to pay our first rent plus deposit in person, he invited us to his place, but then refused to let us in. We handled the transaction outside his front door. GF's theory is that he had a "lady friend" over for a visit, but my theory now is he just doesn't like his Bothell apartments and their inhabitants.
We've come to him with some of our problems, and Joey's response has been nonchalant at best.
Sweaty toilet? Keep the bathroom fan running well after you've finished your shower (It doesn't always happen after a shower, and, like I said, only pointing a different fan at the toilet does the trick).
Moldy walls? Nothing I can do about that. Keep the window open all day and maybe point a fan at the wall (Thanks, but the fan is already pointed at the toilet!).
Maintenance guy not very fast at coming around to repair things? "Don't worry, I'll light a fire under his ass." Result: maintenance guy still doesn't show up.
Ah yes - Ricky the maintenance guy. I think Ricky's main problem is he's overworked. Judging by my conversations with him, he's Joey's guy for all, or at least most, of the apartments. So even though he lives right by us, he has to commute a lot to the other buildings - which seem to get more of a focus.
Ricky once drilled a couple holes on our side of a wall when one of our neighbors had a leak around their bathtub. It took him more than a month to go about patching up and painting over those holes. Weeks after he had already solved our neighbors' leak. He wound up having to paint the entire wall because he accidentally used the wrong shade of white paint, which then took four days to dry.
His response to our mold problem was the same as Joey's - "nothing I can do about it."
We have a towel rack in the bathroom that is sliding off the wall. It's been that way since June. Twice Ricky has promised to come fix it, and skipped both those arranged times. The first time he apologized and said he's been very busy working on renovations to apartments in Kirkland. He has not responded to our attempts to contact him since missing the second appointment in mid-July.
Joey has also been informed of the towel rack, and still nothing has happened in the two weeks since.
For all its (many) faults, there are a few things I'll miss about this dump. We have several shrubs and small trees in front that do a good job keeping the hot sun at bay during these summer months (Although GF doesn't appreciate the lack of natural lighting). Also, the old apartment is quite large for a single bedroom. Our new place isn't going to be nearly as spacious or have as much closet space.
But the thing I'll miss most of all is the mystery of our neighbors in apartment #1.
Apartment #1 is the home of the chain-smoker I mentioned earlier, but it is also the home of several others.
When we first moved in, five people were living in #1. The old smoker lady, a middle-aged woman, a 20ish year-old woman, a teenage guy, and a little boy. What's odd was two things - Number 1: They were all African-American and appeared to be related, except for the chain-smoker who is white. Number 2: All the apartments in our building are only one bedroom. Where the hell are they fitting five people in a one bedroom apartment?
Then there's a third strange thing about our neighbors. Four out of those five people from when we first moved in are now gone!
In their place is a different teenage African-American boy, a different African-American young boy, and a white teenage girl. I noticed the change shortly after New Year's. The old white lady and her cigarettes remain the same. Furthermore, I've lately noticed the latter two newcomers, the girl and younger boy, don't seem to be around much anymore.
My theories about the rotating cast of characters include A) It's a halfway house. B) The old lady owns the lease to that particular apartment and rents it out to people in need of temporary cheap housing. C) Same as B, except the old lady is also a cannibal/witch who needs to find new tenants/food every few months.
Now that we're moving I guess I'll never figure it out. But as long as the new place is free of mold, weird smells, and a muggy atmosphere, I think I can live with that.
