The New Apartment

I've been living in a new apartment for about a month now. We moved here because we thought it would be a great place to live during the great Spring weather (which has yet to appear here yet...we had snow a few days ago). It's got a pool and lots of grass to lay around on. However, after staying at the Stein Eriksen Lodge last week, I realized what a dump our apartment is. And I decided to document it.

Our roommate Becky, whose TV we have been using for two years, moved somewhere else so we were left with my TV. I thought it would be perfectly adequate, but when we set it up...well the screen is about as big as a computer screen. We have to squint to see the ball when watching the NBA finals, and whenver any writing shows up (most often in the after-stories at the end of movies, ie: so and so went on to own a store in Bluffton) we all have to get about ten inches from the TV to be able to read it. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I think this picture just needs one word: pathetic.

We were actually fairly excited about the couches here, they look a lot softer than the ones we came from. However we soon discovered that upon sitting on them, you sink to the point of drowning.

The bathroom is doable. The toilet necessitates an unnatural observation of one's own waste as it doesn't completely flush about once in every ten flushes. You'll notice in this picture that the outlets in the sink area are oddly positioned. We're curious what electrician thought that putting the outlets immediately below the lights, barely within the reach of shorter people like me, was a good idea. I don't enjoy being reminded of my lack of height every morning as I go to plug in my hair dryer.

There is another lighting mystery in the bedrooms. Apparently the electrician also decided that only one of the two occupants deserved decent light, so he decided to put the fixture on one side, right up against the wall. I lucked out with the lit side of our room, but it is absolutely blinding in the morning.

The kitchen is small, but that's very doable as there are just three of us. The biggest problem is the absence of a dishwasher. It's sort of a wash-and-use situation at this point. If you need a spoon you've got to dig through the sink, find one, and wash it. But we don't really have anything to dry them after we wash them, so I've been using a clean t-shirt. We also decided to actually cook something after things settled down from the move-in. We wanted to make a chicken dish in the oven, but we realized we had no pans to put in the oven, and nothing to pull hot dishes out of the oven with. We bought some cheap stuff at Smiths but only the minimum. We made quiche (baked in an alumnum pie tin we got for 93 cents) and muffins last week. Instead of springing for a muffin tin we bought the cupcake liners, put them on an old cookie sheet, and poured the batter in. It worked well enough that I may never invest in a muffin tin!

The last, and possibly most irritating aspect of our apartment is the noise. We live right above the lounge of our complex, and there is a piano in the lounge. We have to deal with people pounding away at all hours of the day. I woke up to someone playing Phantom of the Opera (not well) and singing along! We also live on the pool, which we thought was brilliant. We'd have easy access, we'd have a good view of whoever was hanging out there, what could be bad about this? However we soon learned about the pool gate. It's this big iron thing that closes automatically behind people as they enter or exit. However, if they don't slow it down before it closes it BANGS shut and shakes our whole apartment. The heater vent drowns out most of the talking and yelling at the pool but there is NOTHING that will muffle the noise of that gate.

Thankfully only three more weeks of this place.