Best Summer Ever Weeks 15 & 16: Summer’s End

With no school year to mark the time for me anymore, I guess summer ends with the Minnesota State Fair. There’s probably a meteorological date or something, but lamb on a stick is a better way to mark the seasons.

I’m ending summer with a new view of the skyline, but I’m still in Minneapolis.

Besides no longer being in school, the biggest theme of the summer was moving to Nordeast Minneapolis with Tader. The move was rough. I am still the caretaker of my old apartment building and I wasted the majority of August trying to rent out my apartment so I wouldn’t have to pay double rent.

The infestation problems in my old building are intense. Some people have mice, other people have bed bugs, one guy has bats, and another girl has roaches. There was also a paranoid schizophrenic tenant who I mistook as a prowler. He was from Wisconsin and off of his meds. His parents would occasionally show up and try to get him to go to the hospital for his crazy pills but that was usually fruitless. The guy would also show up at my apartment with a briefcase and tell me that he was a “refugee from Wisconsin where they did evil things to him.”

He also said that this “evil guy from back home” was breaking into his apartment at night. This is why he installed three extra locks on his door. The briefcase apparently had documents that proved the evil things done to him in Wisconsin. The briefcase also had directions to the compound.

And no, I did not ask about the compound because I thought he would kill me, eat my dogs and have a very good insanity defense.

That guy’s parents finally got legal custody of him and had him committed. This is right around the time when the mouse apartment was discovered and just before the second rodent den was found. In short – the old apartment was crazytown. And yes, there were days when I came home to five dead mice, mouse shit on my counter and a very real fear that the batshit crazy tenant would kill me. It was miserable.

The apartment search was also discouraging because finding a place that accepts Rottweilers is like finding housing for a pedophile axe murderer. Apparently she’s a killer.

Only one of nicer apartment buildings in the Twin Cities would rent to us. It was a little out of our price range and they rented the available apartments 10 minutes before we came for a showing. We looked at some slummy places and had another apartment rented from underneath us, so we settled on our current place in Nordeast.

Drama from my old apartment continued even after I moved. I had to pay an extra month’s rent because no one filed an application even after over 50 showings. I held out hope until the last minute so my “work from home” days were constantly interrupted by calls and showings.

Two guys finally filled out an application and they were approved today, but it is too late for me to receive any of my rent back for this month. Drats.

I still receive at least 10 calls a day regarding apartment showings because the person in charge of advertising for my old landlord messed up and there are ads in the paper for apartments that are no longer available. The pictures for the units are also incorrect on Craigslist which caused a random college German instructor to go off on me. She went off on me over the phone and then decides to show up to the building to tell me off in person. I’m not going to miss this caretaker job at all.

But these are all first world problems. The summer was also full of trips to the Minnehaha dog park, Lake Calhoun, Grand Marais, swank restaurants, and hours at my fabulous office.

I may have not lost the love handles or finished my album yet, but family, pets and a salary aren’t bad. The lack of mice and bats in my new apartment is just a bonus.