Sunday, October 17, 2010

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood OR Boyz n the Hood

Here's a little more about our neighborhood and living situation here in Omaha. It's mildly ridiculous. First off: we live in the hood. There's pretty much an invisible line half way down our street separating the nice houses up the street from the sketchy houses down the street. And there's a scattering of a few sketchy houses on the nice house side and a few nice houses on the sketchy house side. Our building is one of the nice houses on the sketchy house side. Our neighbor on the right is a dumpy house and our neighbor on the left is a dumpy apartment complex with a parking lot filled with dumpy pimpmobiles. It's a lovely experience. The parking lot is behind our building and comfortably holds 4 cars. So we squeeze 10 in. This caused Dane a ton of stress but we've all kind of come up with our assigned spots, so it's all worked out now. Except when the douche bags who park on the right start shifting to the left and squishing us left side parkers towards the wall. Screw those right side parkers. Also, Daneish and I have to double park each other so we can actually park in the lot and off the street. Whatevs.
Now let's get to the good stuff, aka who lives in our building! We live in a small building, only 6 units total (3 stories, 2 apartments on each floor). We like it because almost everyone is a grad student like Daneish, so they're quiet and keep similar hours. Perfect. Except that many of our neighbors are assholes! Let's do the rundown of the building: We live in the basement with Heidi and Eddie. Across from us is Doug. I have yet to meet Doug b/c he's the newest neighbor. He gets lots of packages delivered but is rarely home (hence why I haven't met him despite our front doors being 4 feet apart). He also had Cox Business come by and do some work, so in my own melodrama that I created for him, he has a wife and family elsewhere with a fake job that they know about, but his real job is housed in his apartment here and when he comes here, they think he's on business trips. Clearly, Doug is an illegal arms dealer or in the mob. But Doug is quiet and voluntarily parks on the street, thus leaving an open spot in the lot for the other tenants, so he's ok in my book. Above us are 2 med students, Erik and Tim. They're super great. They keep the same hours as Dane, Tim plays on his intramural ultimate frisbee team, and they gave us cookies a couple weeks ago. They are the winners for my favorite neighbors. They're also fairly quiet, very nice, and Tim tolerated me drunkenly talking his ear off at a med school party before the semester started. Anyone who can put up with that automatically wins my respect. Now the next 2 groups of tenants run together in my head, I can't tell them apart. It's the apartment across from Erik/Tim's and the one above that one. They both have fairly unattractive female tenants and they all drive 4 door sedans, so they're all the same in my head. They are also the worst offenders at shifting over in the parking lot so we get squished. I generally dislike them, based only on their parking issues and unattractiveness. Which brings us to the last apartment in the building, the one two floors above us. It is inhabited by a couple, the wife in is law school and the husband is a loser. Dane refers to him as a "Gomer" (as in Gomer Pyle) and is incredibly distracted by the large gap in his front teeth. I hate them for many reasons. These reasons are: 1. They ALWAYS leave their clothes in the communal washing machines/dryers for DAYS. It is super irritating and really drives me up a wall. 2. They park next to us and take up more space than they should. 3. They're weird runners. I'm all for people who work out and I know running is a popular sport that involves all kinds of mental highs, etc. that I know nothing about. But these people are weird, even for runners. 4. They are GROSS. I saw a Subway bag (full of big food wrappers, meaning to me that there was still leftover food in it) sitting in their car for over a month. DISGUSTING. 5. He's a LIAR. During our first week here, we suddenly started having water leak down from the ceiling in our bathroom. We also heard water running somewhere else in the building. I ran up to the second floor to see if they were running water, etc. There was no answer but I heard the running water sound stop. Dane went up to the third floor to see if they knew anything about the apartment between us (we didn't know at the time, but the 2nd floor apt was empty at the time). When Dane explained to Gomer why we were asking, he was like "oh, water's leaking? In the bathroom? I don't know anything about it." Hey Gomer, Dane hadn't mentioned the bathroom, just water leaking. We found out later from the maintenance people that Gomer had overflowed his bathtub and it wasn't the first time he'd done it. Now I understand overflowing a bathtub, I've done it before. BUT ONLY ONCE. Apparently this is a regular thing for Gomer. Ugh. And idiot AND a liar. So that's our awesome pack of neighbors. No BFFs, but generally tolerable.
Our apartment came with a lot of issues. When we moved in, we noticed a damp spot on the carpet in our bedroom and assumed they had just cleaned the carpet there because there were some stains there too. We found out the next morning when the spot was bigger and wetter that it was actually the A/C unit leaking water. It was a several week process to actually get the leaking stopped and then followed many visits to repair the closet the A/C thing is in as well as remove the subsequent mold. There were also another couple dozen other things that needed fixing/replacing when we moved in. While I've lived in other apartments before so am used to places that need work upon arrival, this place and it's long list of needs really upset me. For a few days, I'd always seem to find something new that needed fixing at night time and it was just enough to set me off to crying and bitching about the hell-hole we lived in. So I think Dane was pretty worried about me being able to hack it here for a while, but I've recovered pretty nicely! It took a few nasty e-mails to the management company and some google-ing about renters rights, but it's livable now! Now that it's functional, I like our apartment. The walls are made of paper so we hear our neighbors, but they're generally quiet so it's not bad. And now we can laugh about living in a real-life version of the movie Duplex.
Dane and I have a good routine going so our little apartment works for us! Dane is in charge on garbage, so he takes it out when it gets full. I do... everything else. This is laundry, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, errand running, big errand stuff like car repairs, and small handyman work around here. I have a pretty good schedule going to keep everything running, my favorite of which being laundry weekends. I try to always do it on a weekend morning, before the other neighbors get up. Doing our laundry has drawn to my attention the extreme collection of boxers and undershirts that Dane has acquired. This kid has 2 (count them, TWO) pairs of jeans TOTAL and like 40 pairs of boxers. I don't know if he was stocking up in case he was in charge of his own laundry or what, but it's ridiculous. There is no space for me to put his clean ones away and it drives me nuts. BUT our apartment is furnished and usually in pretty good shape, so we're happy here!

Our big plans for tonight: dinner at home while we register at Target for the wedding. We plan to hook Dane's computer up to the tv so we can register on the bigger screen. That's a pretty hot Sunday night date!

My biggest happy moment of the week: randomly discovering while out shopping that something I was planning on getting for my bridesmaids was on SALE!! Then a SUPER helpful salesgirl (shout out to Becky!) called a couple different locations for me to secure the SEVEN items that I needed. Super exciting!! Hooray sale and helpful people!

Thing I'm most looking forward to in the upcoming week: More training at work (I love learning how to do the job I was actually hired for!) and another babysitting job on Saturday. The family I babysit for here is cute and the kids are pretty well-behaved, so I enjoy it. AND I like getting the extra cash (it goes right into the wedding savings jar)!!

There's this week's update, kids! If I get some free time this week, I'll post some more!

3 comments:

  1. This needs to be published in a book. "How I survived Med school without going to class". There's your title :)

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  2. The routine you and Dane worked out sounds similar to ours except I take out the garbage and recycling too. . .Adam, he, um, well... OH! He mows. Yes, mows.

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  3. I was actually thinking of calling my book "How to Feed Your Med Student". And Miche, at least he mows! I have a feeling if we had a yard, I would be learning how to mow it. But I should probably give Dane a smidgen more credit, he takes Eddie on half of his daily walks and it helps me out a TON!!

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