The Final Chapter in Apartment Living

When we first moved into our apartment I tried to convince myself and Ian that this would be fun, this was an adventure. We've never lived in an apartment, won't this be fun? This weekend we'll finally be moving out and into our new house and all of us (and I include the dogs in this) cannot wait.

I haven't really minded the smallness of it. I can't do my Yoga because the dogs take up so much of the living room and we eat on the half of the sectional I snagged when Mike got here with the furniture since there's no place for a dining table. But that's okay, I guess.

I tell people I'm not "into stuff" but I'm starting to miss my stuff. Ian drew some graffiti on a piece of cardboard and stuck it up on the living room wall, so this is our art. I have pens and markers in a cup I bought at Goodwill so that's a kind of accessorizing. There's also a can of purple spray paint sitting on a kitchen shelf - I guess that could also be called accessorizing.

I never thought I 'd say this, but I'm starting to miss cooking, real cooking the kind that entails more than one pot (again bought at Goodwill) and a cheap WalMart frying pan. There's about 4 square feet of counter space in the kitchen and one drawer. I haven't cooked anything that needs chopping, dicing or mixing since I don't want to buy a tool that could do this since I know I already own one that's in a box.  Most of our meals have to be cooked in one pot....think Hamburger Helper with no MSG.

But this is not really the worst of it. Last month our apartment complex was evacuated because a man who robbed Ray's Supermarket, two blocks away, escaped into the complex. It was quite the excitement - police dogs, policemen running around with guns drawn and hordes of Hispanic families standing in the parking lot speaking too rapidly for me to understand.

And then this weekend, once again, our complex was evacuated. The entire complex was roped off with the scary yellow tape declaring CRIME SCENE-DO NOT ENTER, again the dogs and men dressed in frightening black holding even more frightening large weapons. Apparently a man was suspected of building a bomb in his apartment. But not to worry, as the paper stated the next day, he was not building a bomb but he was declared to be mentally unstable and taken into custody.

I talk a lot about diversity at my job. I try to convince students, faculty and staff that diversity is a good thing and we all need to embrace it. There is definitely diversity here in this complex however I think I only want to talk about it, I don't want to live near it.  I really want to live in my nice safe house and look out into the field and see my horses and pet the cats and walk the dogs. I figure this, like anything in life, will be counted toward those "character building" lessons, the ones my grandfather was always expounding about that quite frankly I was tired of, I figured I had enough character to last me a lifetime.

This weekend we will be moved and even though I will probably be living out of boxes for a year or so, I can't wait. I hope that sometime in the future I will drive by the apartments and laugh and say to Ian, "remember when we lived there, wasn't that fun?"