This One's A Dud

Not *reaaaalllyyy* a big deal, but definitely annoying and somewhat untimely-- my dad needed my car (which was really his car) for a long road-trip to pick up my grandma from Maryland, so he swapped his for mine (which used to be my grammy's). Less than 90 minutes after I had his, the tire blew. I waited until the morning to do anything about it since it was after 9pm and freezing cold, and AAA came within an hour and a half or so of my calling for assistance. The guy who helped me got the spare tire out of the trunk (it's a '99 Cavalier and the spare is just as old, so I was pleased to see that there was more than a pile of dust and rusty rims in there as I was expecting a geriatric family of moths to fly out when he opened the hatch under the trunk!), put it onto the car and inflated it a bit. I was good to go!

Phew-- no sweat off my back.

Then I drove my grammy-mobile to the tire shop and (also amazing) they were able to patch the tire! As soon as it was all done I drove to my parents' house and traded cars again as by that time my dad was back from his trip.

Easy come, easy go-- and thanks, dad, for swapping cars with me in the first place!

A Good Roommate Is Hard To Find

I know that time seems to pass by so quickly when you're in the midst of a busy life, but it really is uncanny how fast a year can go without your ever realizing it. Such is the case with my first year in my (now not so) new apartment. I'd written about it in my last blog post (not the recovered tree one from 2007, mind you) and was extremely excited at the prospect of moving out of my parents' house again after having lived there since finally finishing with my undergraduate work at university in 2005.


Well, a year and some months later and that roommate, the girl I'd previously described as "a friend from work" that I was excited to be moving into an apartment with, turned out to be a dud. Actually, worse than a dud. The year itself was OK-- I mean, work was hard and with its own issues, and a lot of family stuff was going on, but my new living situation somewhat took up a lot of the free space in my brain. And I think it was a general toss up between what a relief it was to again be in an apartment on my own versus how crazy and ridiculous and borderline scary my roommate was.


Let me start from the beginning-- this girl, let's just call her Maria for lack of a better name, didn't initially want to live with a roommate. She was 30 or so at the time and her lease was going to expire at the end of June, so she needed a place to live. But she'd been living by herself for a few years and wasn't so keen on living with someone who wasn't a boyfriend, who she didn't have at the time. Knowing this, I groomed her into believing that splitting the apartment with me would be the best idea (so really the disaster of a year with her was all my fault!). After some coaxing and some budget proposing, she agreed. The entire place was $1600/month in rent and it was big. Not new or glamorous or particularly sturdy, but big. So for $800/month plus cable and utilities we each got two bedrooms and a shared living room, kitchen, bathroom and deck with street parking. Not too bad. Her two rooms were adjoining, and mine had a view of the Hudson river and the Tappan Zee bridge. Two nice touches that helped to seal the deal, I think.

Maria moved in at the end of June and I moved in at the beginning of July, and at first things seemed to go pretty well. I should have guessed, however, that something was "off" the first week we lived together when her sister called the cops and filed a missing persons report on her because Maria hadn't called to check in with her in a couple of days. So for three days the police came to my apartment, at all hours, to look for her. When I finally got in touch with her and told her to go to the police station to let them know she was OK, she refused, stating she didn't feel like it... what a naive idiot I was to think that'd be the extent of her craziness! But then I started to notice a few more little things the continued to bother me... like she never cleaned up after herself except for washing her own dishes. So our kitchen and bathroom got kind of dirty. And she never washed her dog or vacuumed the rugs, so there was black pet hair everywhere, and on the rare occasion that she'd attempt to clip her dog's toenails, she'd leave the little black bits of nail on the rug as well. Dirtiness wasn't her only flaw, either. She seemed a bit inhumane to her pet, we'll call her Jasmine for lack of a better name, who she kept locked up in one of her adjoining bedrooms for the most part, even in the summer despite not having air conditioners in her windows. She took her to pee in the mornings before work, often came home on her lunch hour to walk Jasmine, but then would come home and forget to walk her again at night, which would result in a puddle of urine or a pile of poo either on the kitchen floor or on the back porch.

And how can I forget the time she stopped wanting to take turns taking out the trash? It had been 95* outside for over a week and I had been out of town. When I returned, I spent some time cleaning up the disgusting kitchen just so I would feel safe preparing foods there again... and out of the corner of my eye I noticed movement from the window in the kitchen on the back deck. I saw that it was birds-- very sweet finches and doves and other small birds. How sweet! But then I remembered that we really didn't get birds on our back deck and wondered why we had them all of a sudden... and then I saw why. Maria had left a bag of trash out back for who knows how long, and an extended family of maggots had grown inside the bag, attracting all of the birds, which had pulled holes in the garbage bag to get at the maggots-- which were squirming all over the deck under the bag. Ugh.

Maria also had sticky fingers and a very creative imagination with how she seemed to procure items that didn't belong to her. For example, I had bought a ton of chocolates and candies in bright colors and filled up several clear glass vases that I have on display on the bookshelves in the living room-- it was so pretty that way, and passing through one could have a sweet treat. But within a week $25 worth of candy and chocolate was gone-- demolished by Maria. And then there was the episode with the hand soap in the bathroom. I had filled it for an entire year with soap refills and two months before she left I got sick of it, so I let it run out and waited for her to finally purchase a refill. Four days later soap appeared in the pump, but I recognized the smell and noticed the absence of a bottle of body wash that I had been keeping in the linen closet. When I questioned her about it she lied and said she filled it with "just some soap that I had lying around," which I clarified with her was *my* soap that *I* had lying around and why didn't she just go out and buy some instead of telling a lie about it and taking my stuff. She called me a petty bitch and asked if I was going to penny pinch for the rest of the time she was going to be living with me.

I wondered if I was still being a petty bitch when I felt anger and disgust after discovering that she'd been logging onto my computer to print out school materials for herself and had exhausted my printer ink completely, leaving me unable to print out a boarding pass the morning of a flight. And when I'd discovered naked pictures of her that she'd downloaded to my computer's hard drive, evidently to email to a boyfriend, of whom I also found naked pictures. I guess she thought she had gotten rid of them, but the recycle bin on the computer doesn't empty itself! So I got to see her boyfriend's erect penis, Maria's spread-eagle vagina (the X features in red were added by me to keep this blog from being too XXX rated!), and a bunch of other nauseating displays all over my 19" flat screen monitor. Blech.

And then the month before she moved out, she cancelled the electricity account. Sigh. I didn't feel like living in the dark or in the 100* weather we were experiencing this past summer, so I opened up another account, but she refused to pay her part.

When she finally moved out, I made plans not to be around as things between us had become somewhat strained. So Susan and I went to Virginia for the weekend... but not before I put locks on both of my doors. I didn't know what she was planning, but I didn't want her touching any of my stuff on her way out.

On returning home, I discovered that Maria had shorted out the power by leaving the microwave running without any food in it... as I noted by seeing the dial time down from 25 minutes on high when I flipped the switch on the fuse box. In shorting out the apartment's electricity, the fridge had shut off, ruining hundreds of dollars worth of my food. I figured it was her parting gift and was just glad for a fresh start and to be rid of her.

But I was mistaken! One more grand interaction which culminated in a visit from the police-- complete with her screaming and banging with all her might on the front and back doors to the building, honking wildly on the car horn, getting a neighbor to let her into the building by scamming them about what she was doing at the apartment, and then climbing out the window on the landing outside of my front door, climbing onto the roof of the front porch and banging on my bedroom windows, apparently trying to push her way into my room via dislodging the air conditioner perched in one of the windows. All because she'd left her computer router and a bag of dog food in the apartment and she wanted them back. At 11 o'clock at night. With no advance notice.

So yeah-- that basically sums up my year with Maria. I'm glad it's over... but it sure does make for some good campfire stories.

Goodbye Big Tree

[NOTE: I just found this post and realized I'd written it in July of 2007 without ever publishing it. So for posterity, here it is.]

I moved to the house I currently live in sometime around the 9th year of my life. Before that I'd lived in a condominium a quarter mile away and before that, a roach-motel of an apartment in Mount Vernon, NY until I was about one year old. The house itself was built during the early 1950s and the trees that are/were on the property have been there since the inception of the neighborhood.

Sadly, about 8 years ago the big Maple tree in our back yard got sick. Despite nitrogen injections and heroic efforts made by my mother and the people at the tree-rescue company, the tree died and had to be cut down so it wouldn't fall onto the house during a heavy storm. That was a sad day as not only was the tree beautiful, but it's leaves provided tons of shade for the back yard, it's roots a grave site for many of my childhood pets, and a lovely branch from which my tire swing had hung.

Then, in the last few years we started to notice that the Japanese Maple growing in the front yard wasn't as robust as it had been in the past. Fewer and fewer leaves were coming back spring after spring until finally, this spring, nothing grew back-- this tree had died, too.

Sigh. It was really unexpected, as you can imagine, when the town arborist made a visit to our front lawn to inspect our "sick" tree. No, not the dead Japanese Maple. The arborist told us that our beloved gigantic Ash had to come down-- the only remaining of the great living trees in the yard. My whole family was shocked-- this was a gorgeous, healthy looking, leaf-laden tree which appeared to be thriving where it was next to our driveway. For days my mom argued with the town about the fate of our tree, but in the end, they told her that it was afflicted by some kind of blight and that it was a public hazard.

So, on July 8th, the men from the town came and cut it down. The three of us went into the yard and tried to stop them, but the guy basically told us that if we resisted their work, he'd just call the cops. So we stepped aside and let them do their dirty work of ridding our front yard of shade and beauty. Ugh.

Since then the yard has been noticeably sunnier (and uglier). I've been looking in planters' catalogs and wildlife books trying to pick out the types of trees we should plant in the next year or so. Maples are always a good choice for this area since they're hardy and beautiful and provide a good amount of shade... but we're also considering some more ornamental types of trees. Who knows what we'll decide, but when we do, I'll post pictures of that.

UPDATE from 2011: My parents and I never did replant in the front yard, and it remains uneven and extremely sunny (uncomfortably so in the summer). I tried adding a few small flowering shrubs in the planting beds we have in the front and back yards, and it does look a little better with the delicate hot pink flowers in the spring and summer, but they don't provide any shade and nothing compares to the majestic beauty of an old growth tree. Hopefully at some point in the future the front yard will again be the home for some beautiful shade trees. Perhaps when I move back in... I guess only time will tell.