The Life of an Apartment Child

There are many things I am happy we will be leaving behind when we move into our house at the end of the week, including

• carrying The Bairn up three flights of stairs in his stroller after a walk.
• carrying The Bairn up three flights of stairs with groceries.
• living with my dresser and washing machine in my living room.

However, I will miss one daily activity that The Bairn loves and is adorable.  The Bairn loves to check the mail.  Every afternoon I ask him if he'd like to go see what the mailman has brought and he runs to the door and flaps his arms.  I hand him the mail key and set him loose in the hall and he runs like a tiny drunkard to the fire door, where I meet him and help him over the threshold before he takes off down the second hall.  I carry him down the stairs and then he finds our mailbox and attempts to open the door.  After he's given it his best shot, I take over, get our mail, carry him up the stairs and set him back down for his crazy run back to our apartment.  It's a highlight of both our days.

The Baddies

My only real complaint about our new apartment is the smoke.  Our neighbors smoke and the building's ventilation system sends that smoke right into our bathroom every evening.  Somehow, this does not bother Steve, but it drives me mental and leads to conversations with Steve in which I cannot help but whine and pinch him in an effort to convert him to my side on this issue.  My side being a determination to punish the neighbors for their attempts at poisoning my baby.  I try to extract promises from Steve that he will go break our neighbors' wrists or at least force them into a smoking cessation program, but he will not even help me rig up a system that would send the smells of our diaper pail back through the system to their apartments.  He is not a team player when it comes to ending the second hand smoking in our apartment.  Not. a team player.

Keeping Calm and Carrying On

Since we moved back into our flat on Friday, I've been hearing mouse noises at night.  I told Steve about the nighttime rustling but after investigating and finding no mouse droppings and nothing chewed up and having no cases of  Hantavirus surface in the flat, he dismissed my claims.

Steve:  It's probably just the building settling.
MBC:  No, it's a rustling.  And it's something alive moving.
Steve:  It's probably Ludmila (the neighbor) walking around next door.
MBC:  No, it's not big people steps!  It's a little animal opening a package of crackers or something.
Steve:  It could be a noise from outside.
MBC:  No, it's coming from right over there.  It's a mouse or (and I actually kind of wanted this to be true) a hedgehog or something.

This morning over breakfast Steve oh so casually asked me if I'd heard any mouse movements in the night.  I did.  Three times.  He didn't comment on it, just finished breakfast and went to brush his teeth.  When he came back he announced, "We have a mouse."

MBC: Why?  What did you see?
Steve: I saw the mouse.  He was popping in and out and dancing all around while you were standing by the sink.  I thought about not telling you, but I didn't want you to freak out if you see him today.

I've never taken so little satisfaction in being right before. 

But it's probably best that Steve DID tell me, considering my reaction to Hammy's first appearance.

Hammy, the Night Visitor

Yesterday's mounting evidence that there was a rodent loose in the building:

1. Two nights of scratching, scrabbling, and gnawing sounds in the ceiling above our bed.
2. The discovery of a pile of rubble--wall bits, rock, and dust--below a pipe in the bathroom. Upon investigation, Steve declared that this was the result of a rat hole.
3. The appearance of a small, furry face from behind the bookcase in the living room.

The rodenty noises at night and the discovery of the hole had already worked me up to quite a state, and I was moaning about our new accommodation and reminding Steve about that scene from The Lady and the Tramp when the rat tries to bite/kill the baby when I spotted the animal face, so I don't think my reaction was an OVER-reaction when I screamed and ran into the bedroom to cry about living in a vermin-infested tenement.

Steve was left to tend to the creature and I could hear him talking sweetly to it and offering it nuts and seeds. A few minutes later he guided me back to the room to introduce me to our "special guest" who he had named Hammy. Hammy, the escaped hamster, who wandered away from home (the flat above us) two days ago. His owners were very pleased to have him returned. I was very pleased that he was not a wild rat planning to give me rabies.  But I do not miss him.

The day we got things cleared up enough to open the wee folding table in our new flat, Steve was very excited to stop eating on the couch even though our chairs were still at the old flat.

When I used to live in lousy apartments in college, I often worried about the gas stoves.  There was always a bit of an odd smell to those apartments, and I generally attributed it to a possible slow gas leak that was gradually poisoning me.

We don't have a gas stove here, but I still think the bad smells in our Tiny Town flat are indications of a silent killer.  Sometimes I lie on our bed and imagine the various invisible molds that I'm sure exist wafting into my lungs, before I hop up and throw open the windows for a bit.  Then I go check the black bug count in the bathroom.  Every time I go in there, I find two or three itty bitty black bugs.  I kill them only to find them replaced the next time I enter the room.  I don't know what they are or where they come from or how to eradicate them.  I just can't seem to get this place clean and sweet smelling.

When the landlord gave us the keys, he said the cleaners had been over, but that was a lie.  That, or the cleaners did come around, but only to sprinkle crisp crumbs on the dark, must-be-vacuumed-every-single-day carpeting (with one of the two broken vacuums conveniently stuck in the hallway) and to check to see that the mattress was flipped so that it would be upside down (NOT a reversible mattress) and give an extra special springs-poking-out-my-kidneys effect for the first night we slept on it.  They may have done that.

Suggestions for getting rid of my bugs?  Or would anyone like to adopt us and put us up in the east wing of their mansion?

AND end complaining.

I Will Miss the Beautiful Tree in the Drying Green. I Will Not Miss Jerkface.

We sold our flat.  We put it on the market on Saturday and it sold on Wednesday.  That's approximately 11 months and 3 weeks faster than the estate agents advised us it would take to sell it.  Since we're so good at selling things, we went ahead and put our (second) guest bedroom furniture up for sale on the local version of Craigslist.  We listed it yesterday.  Today it's all gone.  If you want to come visit us and actually sleep in a real bed in your own room, you should hustle on over to the United Kingdom before June.  Otherwise, you can share a cardboard box with us down by the river (we don't have a van).

I Never Ask to See His Badge

Greg came to visit last Monday.  Greg is our police officer.  We email him when we need him to keep the neighbors in line and he comes to see us when we are having The Troubles.  Last week he came to follow up about the fire set by some schoolgirls in our stair tower.  This fire (there have been others) was my first opportunity to call an emergency number.  Usually we ring up the police on the non-emergency line, but a fire in a building seemed like a good time to dial 999 (and I know all about dealing with fires in the UK from watching The IT Crowd).  They're my emergency services.

Yesterday somewhat surly officers came over about The Screamer, the guy who screams obscenities at his toddler, and today some very friendly officers who have relatives in Canada came to call (also about The Screamer) followed by some mystery cops who rang us up to let them into the building, because we are nothing if not best friends with the local police force.  MBC + Local Police = BFFs 4Ever

I Don't Like These Numbers

3 : Number of lights out at the top of the stair tower (ALL of them).
16 : Number of days the lights have been out.
5 : Number of phone calls made to the factor about the lights.
5 : Number of promises extracted from the factor that the lights would be fixed.
0 : Number of times the factor's promises have been fulfilled.
384 : Number of £ we pay the factor for this service each year.

I'd Rather Star in a Light-Hearted Comedy

They are going to have to make one of those Taking Back the Neighborhood films about me because I have spent all. week. long. fighting the fight against the many forces in my neighborhood trying to ruin my life.  First it was my showdown with the school girls smoking in my stair tower during their lunch break.  Steve says he's never seen me behave so firmly toward members of the public before, but that is because he never knew me when I was a practicing librarian and had to lay down the law all the time.  So, anyway, I kicked some girls out of our building and contacted the police (which is why it will have to be a Taking Back the Neighborhood film and not a Changing the Lives of Wayward Young People film).  THEN I called ASBO and reported our neighbor and his noisy ways.  Then, speak of the devil, we arrived home that night to find that our security door was broken--there was no power to the door.  We were unsuccessfully trying to enter from outside and our neighbor was unsuccessfully trying to exit from inside.  Together, with Jerkface's friends, we managed to kick the door open before calling to report the problem to our factors.  But of course the factor didn't get back to us, so I have just called and demanded action.  Because I'm taking back the neighborhood.

I wonder who should play me in the movie.

In Which We Take a Bite Out of Crime

I feel like we call the police a lot--when our neighbor is noisy (he's turned mysteriously silent--we do not question it, we just rejoice), when we discover a fire in our woods (okay, that was really the fire department), when broken down cars are abandoned in our car park, and so on.  I took to heart all those McGruff the Crime Dog commercials in the 1980s.



Our stair tower has recently become even dirtier than normal.  There are cigarette packets left on the steps and the walls are marked up and yesterday we noticed soil scattered all over the place.  We didn't think too much about the soil, until we came home in the evening and Steve spotted the leaves---marijuana leaves.

So, we were back on the phone to the police.  They came over and took our report and asked us a lot of questions and, I hope, didn't find it suspicious that one of our greenhouse gardening books was lying on the floor or that several pairs of gardening gloves were spread out to dry, having recently been washed.

Maybe there'll be a big bust and we'll get an award from the lord provost.

Or maybe not.

Now You Know Why I Will Not Be Posting Pictures of Myself on the Blog

I love it when people play with my hair. My mom is very good at it and will do it for hours and that is one of the many reasons to love her. My college roommates could often be sweet talked into playing with my hair and for a while, when she was small, I could suggest to M6 that she fix my hair and she would run off and enthusiastically return with some hair styling tools--usually chopsticks and mason jar lids. Sometimes even Steve is coerced into playing beauty school with me. I am, obviously, the client and he is the beautician, but last time he participated he spent most of the time musing on what kind of machine he could invent that would play with my hair for him so that he wouldn't have to be involved in the future. Hmph.

Today I went to an actual beauty school. I hadn't had my hair cut since September, but salon services are pricey here, so I went to the local college to have a student work on my hair. I always got my hair cut at the beauty school in Utah and while the students were perkier than I would have liked, always asked me if I was married, and scared me with their shiny hair and fake tans, I never had any real complaints about my experiences there. Today, though. Woo baby.

First, I should explain that students leave high school and start college at 15 or 16 here, so my stylist was a teenager. A surly teenager. She barely spoke to me (which I kind of like in a stylist) but she also barely spoke to the instructor. As in, he asked her how she was going to cut my hair, and she shrugged and stared at her feet. Oh, dear. When she finally did receive instruction on how to cut my hair, she did a lot of scowling and sighing. It really seemed that she hates cutting hair. She reminded me very much of a teenager in gym class being forced to run the mile.

Here's the main thing, though. It took her THREE HOURS to cut my hair. She spent the entire first hour (after spraying me directly in the ear with water while shampooing my hair) trimming one section of hair. I asked her to take about two inches off and she seemed to be doing that a millimeter at a time and a single strand of hair at a time. The instructor finally came along and told her that it looked fine and that she needed to push along because she was taking too long. At which point she snapped at him, "Because I'm not good at it!" Yikes.

Bad experience, but only £3.50. I might still go back.

Justifiable Complaining

We live in a nice flat. It's got plenty of space and big windows that look out onto the drying green. We can walk to our allotment and to the library and there's a bus stop right at the end of the drive. We usually like living here a lot, but occasionally we have experiences in which we're jolted awake by our next door neighbor arriving home at 2:00 a.m. with 7 of his closest friends and a case of alcohol. It then sounds like they begin rearranging the furniture above us and reciting all the expletives they know at top volume. Steve's a heavier sleeper than I am, so it takes him longer to wake up during our neighbor's parties and, usually, while my head is starting to explode, Steve is still half asleep and giving me a patient tutorial on proper earplug usage and singing little half songs about ducks. (Sometimes I think Steve is having a really rockin' time every night in his sleep if his half-conscious mumblings are any indication.) Then he wakes up all the way, acknowledges that the neighbor must be taken down, and calls the police. THEN we lie awake, asking one another if that new sound we hear is the police arriving. It's important to anticipate their arrival (sometimes I go downstairs and sit on the kitchen sink, so I can see down into the parking lot and watch for them), because before coming up to shut down the furniture rearranging party, they will buzz our flat to let them in the security door. And the buzzer will wake up the rest of the building, because it was installed for an 800-year-old woman and sounds like a tornado siren. THEN Steve crouches at the mail slot in the door so he can hear the conversation between the police and the neighbor. And then we go back to bed and say things to each other like, "I want them all taken down to the police station and shot." Even though our normal conversation to one another is, "I like puppies." And "Rainbows are nice."

Last night I had to call the police twice, because the neighbor did not shut down his party after the first police visit. It was someone's birthday, you see, which is a two-police-visit kind of celebration.

And that is why I'm too tired to shred up the 10 lbs of zucchini sitting on my kitchen counter. Instead, I'm going to light the vegetables on fire and shove them through our neighbor's mail slot.

Let's Hold Off on Snow Until Christmas

It has snowed allll daaaaay looooong. Snow. Snow. Snow. I think I've been quite clear about my winter/snow feelings. I don't believe in snow, except in situations where everyone gets to stay home. I PARTICULARLY don't believe in driving in the snow, and this is because I learned to drive in Tennessee, and here's what happens when we even hear about a snowstorm coming through without actually seeing any flakes in Tennessee: Everyone runs immediately to the store and buys the place out of bread and milk (I'm not even kidding), and then everyone runs home and STAYS THERE until the snow comes and the snow goes. One year we had a huge snowstorm while I was spending the night with a friend. I had to stay at my friend's house for a couple of days, until my parents came to get me. On skis. Because the roads were impassable. Again, not kidding. (And not so different from today, because one of my co-workers is probably coming to spend the night, because she can't get home.)

Today I had to drive in the snow, though, because I had to get to my place of work, because crazy people actually voluntarily came to the library today instead of staying home and watching James Murray smolder in Under the Greenwood Tree, which is what I would have done if I'd had a choice. The getting to work was not bad, but the getting home was a bit of trial since it had been snowing on the roads for 9 hours. I drove home at about 20 miles an hour and it all went surprisingly well with only the tiniest bit of sliding and calming self-talk until I pulled into our condo complex parking lot and all the parking spots were covered in a foot of snow. I started to pull into my parking place and I got stuck without actually being IN the parking spot. My wheels spun and my car whined and then I whined and then I noticed that across the parking lot this guy who lives in our building who I keep meaning to introduce myself to because he seems upstanding and is a good Sunday School teacher and is my age was pulling into his parking spot. But I haven't actually gotten around to introducing myself because I always forget about it when I'm at church because I get all busy learning and worshipping and stuff, so I don't know my neighbor's name, so I couldn't think of what to call out to him for help. "Hey . . . guy!" So I didn't call for help. I got out of the car and I kicked the snow out from under my tires and considered whether or not I could use the lamp in the trunk that I need to take to D.I. as a shovel and I told the car that we were going to pull forward five feet and then we did. I parked with only my own magnificent snow skills, which must exist somewhere genetically within me from my West Virginia heritage, because, did I mention, I learned to drive in Tennessee and we don't do snow?

Despite my amazing parking in snow skills, though, New Year's Resolution Number One has now become Meet the Neighbor. There's no telling how long this weather will last.

Moving Day

I'm moved (kind of) into my new home.

I'm really hoping that nothing comes crashing down onto my head tonight.



And now I must go fashion some nightwear for myself, because I forgot to move my pajamas. They're still at the old house.

Tomorrow: The Day of Everlasting Cleaning

The Annual Move

I'm moving this week (boo!), and tonight I completed phase 1 of the moving project (yay!), which was to sell my extraneous furniture. The chastity couch is no longer part of my life. Neither is the big, standing sewing machine from the 1800s. And the Couch of Excellent Sleeping is promised to a good home. Now I just have to complete moving phases 2 (packing), 3 (watching boys haul my heavy boxes in and out of trucks), 4 (cleaning), 5 (unpacking), 6 (weeping from the emotional exhaustion of big projects), and 7 (eating ice cream).

Must stop moving every blessed year.

H V A C

It's 8:59 pm and it's 83 degrees inside my house and there's nothing I can do about it.

I have a philosophy about HVAC (I have philosophies about most things: Hummers, blogging, foods that can be mixed with pasta, etc.) and it is that the heating or air conditioning in a room should allow the inhabitants of the room to wear the clothes they would wear outside in a particular season to be comfortably worn inside in that same season. Soooo, in the winter, I want to be able to wear my sweaters in the house without burning up because the heat's cranked up so high that it feels like I'm vacationing in the Canary Islands. (A hot house in the winter just makes me cry that I'm not actually in the Canary Islands and raises my utility bill.) And in the summer, I want to be able to wear my capri pants and short-sleeved shirts indoors without digging out sweaters and slipper socks to shield myself from the air conditioning.

Because of this philosophy, I didn't mind too much when I woke up this morning and the house was 78 degrees. But then I baked a pie and it was 80 degrees inside the house. And people were convening at my house for a meeting. And it seemed unlikely that they would feel that 80 degrees was an acceptable indoor temperature. And I had started to sweat. And I was feeling like we were going to have to hold our meeting in swimsuits. So I turned on the air conditioning. And the temperature rose to 83 degrees.

It's cooling off outside now, but if I open the windows, the Box Elder beetles swarm into the house.

It's a hard knock life for me.

How Bad My Lawn Is

Not to dwell on the lawn or anything, but it does look quite unfortunate and then yesterday this happened: there was a knock at the door (I know, this always seems to be a problem at my home), and I answered it to find a man I'd never seen before standing on my porch.

Stranger: Hey. How are you?
MBC: I'm fine. Thanks.
Stranger: So, I just thought I'd stop by and see how you are.
MBC (silently in head): Do you think we know one another? Because we don't. You don't look even a little bit familiar to me. And you're not selling anything, because it's Sunday and there's a baby in the stroller on the walk.
Stranger: Because I thought maybe you were an old woman living here and needed help mowing your lawn or something.

On the one hand, I'm actually pretty impressed that I have neighbor who would stop by and make sure I'm not infirm and in need of assistance (I DO need assistance with the stupid lawn!). On the other hand, my lawn is so sad that strangers come to the door to discuss it.

Bathing Lessons

I love bath bombs. I only pull mine out for very special occasions. They are a balm to my wounded, Summer Reading Program-afflicted soul. Which is why it was so, so sad that this weekend I chose to combine the supreme calm of the bath bomb bath with shaving my legs. I thought I'd save water by combining the two activities.

I assumed it would play out like this:
1. Shave legs
2. Luxuriate in fizzy, British bath

It actually went like this:
1. Shave legs
2. Drop delightful bath bomb into bath tub
3. Yell at the burning pain that is the combination of fizzy soaps and freshly-shaved legs
4. Endure (because a bath bomb is a special treat and there's no way I was getting out of that tub until the pain was beyond endurance)

I won't even go into the part where I was attempting to listen to a book on CD while I bathed but started the CD at the wrong point in the story and set the volume too loud but was then too paranoid about electrocuting myself to try and fix it.

So many lessons in bathing.

I need to move to a country where the women don't shave their legs.

STALKER

I have a neighbor named Max. He is four. He came over this weekend to help me do yard work. I was using my weed wacker and listening to a podcast, so I didn't hear him arrive, but I looked up at one point and there he was, squatting patiently on the sidewalk with his fingers in his ears. As soon as I acknowledged him, we became best friends and he talked almost nonstop for a good 2o minutes (he had to take a little break to run next door and come back wearing safety goggles and lugging his trimmer for me to look at--he says he'll come back next week and show me how it works). Almost immediately (after telling me that he also had a trimmer and that it was bigger than mine and faster and better) he asked me if I lived in my house and then, "Where's your husband?" It's like there's something in the water around here. Max also told me that his mom kicked his dad out of the house (not surprising--they spent a not insignificant portion of the winter having arguments in their driveway), that the bug he saw in my grass was full of poison and would kill me if it bit me (I took this under advisement, although it looked like a Box Elder beetle to me), and he invited me over for dinner to have some smoked chicken (I politely declined).

And then he spent the rest of the weekend knocking on my door. If I didn't answer his front door knocking, he let himself into the backyard and knocked on the back door for a while. At night, in the morning (while I was still in bed), in the afternoon. Max was at the door all weekend. I'm being stalked by a 4-yr-old.

I imagine I'll be seeing a lot of Max this summer, because he LOVES the trimmer, and I've decided that all my lawn care will now be done with the weed wacker. No lawn mower, no spades, no pulling weeds by hand. All plants will be uniformly cut down with my trimmer. Some tulips perished in this weekend's work, but it's a small price to pay for the new program.

Gracious Living

I started reading Sloane Crosley's book I was Told There'd Be Cake, which I really want to love but don't think that I do. I liked the first essay, though. The author discusses her worries about what will happen if she dies and people have to come into her apartment, which I worry about frequently, because sometimes I just don't get around to cleaning the bathroom for a while or there's too much chick lit on the shelves and I don't want people to get the wrong idea. Sloane specifically mentions the hazard of beginning a big reorganization project that doesn't get finished because of the need to stop and watch old sitcoms in a prom dress, which I also completely understand.

There was this one day when I'd recently moved into a new apartment in the ghetto. I was going through some of my things, when I decided that I needed to wear one of my old college formals, because it has a swishy skirt. I put it on and decided that I also needed to wear my boots, because when is it not a good time to wear boots? They always make me happy. And this was the year that I had a roommate who owned these goblets that made me extremely pleased. I drank all of my beverages out of a goblet that year. Orange juice from a goblet is just divine. AND if you're living in a ghetto, it's much easier to pretend that you live somewhere gracious if there's a goblet in your hand. So I was sitting in the living room, watching a talk show at 4:00 in the afternoon in a floor-length gown and boots, sipping a goblet of juice, when there was a knock at the door. I hesitated for only a moment before deciding that I wouldn't look like a crazy person by answering the door in my dress. How many people come to the door who don't know me anyway, right? Yeah. It was a man questioning everyone in the building about a recent theft. Did I mention how I was living somewhere a little bit dodgy? The police were there every few days and there was at least one big bust at the abandoned building across the street with 9 police vehicles including the k9 unit. And there I was living graciously in my formal wear on a Thursday afternoon.