10. Waking up at 5 a.m. to the sound of a transient pushing a shopping cart full of empty Pabst cans.
9. Having to cut through packs of roaming teenagers on my way to the grocery store, because the fastest way to get to the grocery store after work was to cut through the Lloyd Center Mall.
8. Memories of the six months my youngest sister spent living with me and Robyn in The Original Crap Pit, and that she spent most of the time in a consistent power struggle with my cat.
7. The 48 minutes it took me to travel 2 miles (one way) to work on TriMet.
6. Crazy Neighbor Jane@
5. The Original Crap Pit*
4. The crazy ex-roommate’s sex noises
3. Crap Pit Part Deux^
1. The property owners of Crap Pit Part Deux.%
@ Jaimee swears that she caught 60-year-old Jane sunbathing in the nude (complete with ‘70s bush) the first month we moved into the house. Plus, every time Jane would take a vacation, she would give us a business card with her contact information and a different business listed (pilates instructor, opera concert organizer, author of an organic ice cream cookbook, etc.), who never seemed to work but always had time to tell the property owners with whatever new ways she thought we were breaking the terms of our lease (e.g., having a black roommate, having one or more men repeatedly stay the night, or having a 4th of July barbeque).
* Think: Moving in to a broken window that took the entire summer to fix, and was only fixed after calling the property management company every other day; black mold – in the closets; discovering that the only thing that had kept the black mold at bay was the drafty windows, which were sealed up with window insulation kits for the winter; a bubbling floor under the second floor toilet (conveniently located right about the kitchen stove), which turned out to be a pipe that had rusted years ago; basement walls leaking combining with an overflowing floor drain to create a kiddy pool in the basement. This place had it ALL!
^ After moving out of The Original Crap Pit, I made sure to move into a house that had been renovated within the last three years and a place where I wouldn’t have to deal with a property management company. So, I moved two blocks down the street and into Crap Pit Part Deux where the walls made of sheetrock and the bathroom caulking in two of the three bathrooms was “decorative.” Luckily, I no longer had a property management company to deal with. Instead, I had a whole family to deal with. And, this particular family included a mother, her three grown daughters, and one of the daughter’s husbands.
% The cherry on the top was that these five individuals contradicted each other, and sent me e-mails and mail signed with each other’s names. Even when I would be dealing with what I assumed was my primary contact, her e-mail signature rotated through to include at least three different limited liability companies in the one year that I communicated with her. The piece of mail containing one part of the returned deposits was especially interesting, given that the envelope had the mother’s return address in Hood River, Ore., a check with a company address in Carbondale, Colo., the fact that the check was signed by the sister who had supposedly moved to California, and a letter signed by a second sister who was allegedly in Hawaii.
I’ve seen United States of Tara. I know what’s up. And, I can’t help but imagine that all of these people are really just one person with dissociative identity disorder, a compulsive liar and an old lady with alzheimer's disease. After all, I’ve only really met three of them, and they all seemed off to me.
But, really, the reason why I want to believe that the ex-property owners are one big crazy person is because that’s a half way reasonable explanation for all of their behavior (e.g., holding themselves out to have years of experience renting a variety of properties and then asking me to sign a lease that I had to redraft because simply having roommates would have violated the terms of the lease; contradicting each other when it came to simple things like how they wanted to reimburse me for paying the city leaf removal bill that was more than 30 days overdue because they would not come to a decision; not making sure that when the mother moved out of the house she did things like remove her series of Balzac books from the shelves or pack up her silver penguin candle holders; not believe me when I told you that the basement carpet was SOAKED to the point where I spent a month wearing rain boots in the house, and when you finally did believe me – each of you had a different way that you wanted to deal with it; and hint at the fact that you planned to keep our $600 refundable pet deposit two months before the lease was over and before any of the owners had seen the rental property or evaluated any “damage”).
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