I'm Having a Bad Day

This week I kept true to my resolutions for a better school year for two whole days. Today though, after a particularly stressful day, I've broken almost all of them! Since I can't write about my work annoyances, because I could get in trouble, I'll write about some other, much less stressful, annoyances in my apartment building... just because I feel like I need to vent a bit!

First, let me reiterate that I love my apartment. It's the Cambridge version of a Downtown Boston apartment. I'm smack in Inman Square, 10 minutes from Central, 10 from Kendall, and 15 from Harvard Square. Plus, my apartment is pretty big in terms of "city" apartments. Sure we pay a lot but in the end it's worth it... and if we ever have a mortgage it will most likely be less than our rent so it will feel like we are saving money :-)

We have a rather big living room and a huge kitchen! I will probably never have a kitchen like this in any other place I live. We can fit about 15 people, at least, in there. We have more cabinet space than I ever dreamed possible, which is a really good thing since we went a little overboard in Crate and Barrel and wound up with over 50 glasses of varying shapes and sizes. No problem thanks to our multitude of cabinets. Even with the absence of a garbage disposal, it is an amazing kitchen. It makes me happy and I love it. Sure our bedrooms are on the smaller size, but I can't complain since our bedroom has a partial Boston skyline view. Plus, the bedrooms are in the back of the building so we never hear any street noise. Also, living on the third floor has allowed us to keep our heat bill quite low.

Our apartment is rather well constructed. We never hear any of our neighbors. Even the people that live next door and blast their radio at 10:00 in the morning. The only way I knew that they did that was I happened to be in the stairwell when they cranked up the volume. That's really the only time you hear another tenant...if the stairwell doors to your apartment are open. At least that's what I think!

So I adore living here. I wouldn't want to move. That's why these two annoyances are labeled as annoyances..not problems.

I'll start with the doorknobs. We seem to have very "mind of their own" doorknobs in the living room and the bedroom. For instance, on the day of our house warming party I was cleaning the bedroom and my boyfriend had gone out to grab lunch for us. In order to vacuum the entire room I had to shut the bedroom door. I vacuumed and was all set to clean the kitchen, when in an unfortunate incident, I became locked in the bedroom. The knob wouldn't turn correctly and I was stuck in the bedroom just like that. I didn't have my phone, but I did have a tv, so I took a break until JO could rescue me. I yelled through the door that I was stuck in the bedroom, and after he stopped laughing, he was able to jiggle the handle in such a way that I was able to get out. Ever since then, I never shut the door unless I have my phone with me.

The bedroom door, and the bathroom doors, are really the only ones we close. But with the warmer weather (well what warm weather we had this summer) we've been closing the living room doors to keep the cold air trapped in there. This led to another unfortunate incident a while back. I was trying to bring in the butter, salt, and napkins for corn, when I got locked out of the living room. I'm not as afraid of being trapped in the living room though. It overlooks a major street in Cambridge, with lots of people I could yell too for help.

The other annoyance has to do with the neighbors. For the most part I really love my neighbors. They don't bother us and we don't bother them. They are always nice and polite. The sweet foreign family in #2 helped me bring in all of my stuff from my Cape vacation in to the building. The people in #4 seem super cool...and I would totally want to be their friends if given the chance. People only live in #1 every few weeks...I think they may be hiding from immigration but they seem really nice. That leaves #3 and #6. Lets start with #6. There are three people that live there...and it's the apartment next door to us. They are really nice, a very cool eclectic Cambridge couple and a friend of theirs. The boyfriend may actually be our landlord which makes the following situation all the more difficult to navigate.

The apartment is really not meant to house three individuals. Even though it is big it just doesn't work for three people. As a result they have taken over the landings in the front and back of our floor. The front landing is an oasis of their shoes and winter gear. I can totally deal with that because once the girlfriend moved in she totally organized all of it and it's not in my way at all. What I don't like, am annoyed by if you will, is the box of towels/blankets that they have positioned on one of the larger stairs that go downstairs. It's weird and I don't like it. But they don't complain about us so I can look past it.

The back landing is another story. Again, if they weren't so nice, I probably would've gone all Jen Lancaster on them, but they are nice...and may be our landlords. (We were told our landlord was a woman who one the lottery, bought our building, and then moved to Florida. One night JO was out at a local bar and actually ran into the couple that lived in our apartment before us. They said #6 was our landlord...so who knows.) While the front landing is organized the back landing is not so much. They keep their recycling out there, a laundry hamper, one of the big stairs houses their mop and bucket, and on occasion they leave dirty pasta pots and actual bags of trash out there. I actually did end saying something about the trash because it reeked and I was afraid of bugs. Yesterday I almost fell down the stairs when I tripped on a set of venetian blinds that were propped against the air conditioner they are using as a shelf. Again, if they were annoying this would really be a problem. But still, it bugs me a little bit.

The people in #3 though could be a real problem. Shortly after we moved in we had our friends over. We broke out our new Rock Band equipment and started playing. Granted it was late, and we didn't notice, so when #3 knocked on our door we felt really bad. Until, that is, his major complaint was not that we were playing the drums and singing karaoke at 11:30 at night. No, his major problem was that we walked too much. Excuse me??? I'll try not to walk anymore. We blew him off, since that was such a lame complaint. He hasn't given us any more trouble but I always feel like we have to look out for him. Lately he and his girlfriend have been leaving the front and back doors to their apartment open in an attempt to garner a cross breeze (umm...until today's high was 68???) So yesterday I my radio on and I went downstairs to do my laundry, leaving my back door open, when he glared at me. Well, you know what? The only way to hear noise from the other apartments is when you have the doors open. It's your fault, not mine...get an ac!

He also glared at me when I went downstairs to dump the smelly water left in my vase. I couldn't dump it in the apartment, it smelled too gross. I would've gone out back but people were eating out there and I didn't want to gross them out. So I went to dump it on the sidewalk, near a tree. The vase was quite heavy and he had just unlocked the front door to come in so I asked him to hold it. At that exact moment our friend showed up and tried to unlock the door...I don't think #3 liked that our friend had a key...but you know what. He has a key for two reasons:
1) We don't have a buzzer (another annoyance) and he visits a lot
2) He can come rescue me the next time I get locked in the bedroom.

Even though these aren't the real annoyances I would like to blog about, I do feel a bit more relaxed after venting.