My week? Goodness…
I knew something was wrong when I opened my apartment door and the Rottweiler shoved past me and started creeping down the hall.
I might have been on four hours of sleep and chugging coffee, but I finished my coursework for the semester.
Law school is DONE. Hallelu!
I leave the tax law clinic and walk the dogs. The dogs and I into Mel on the walk. She is high again and has trouble with her apartment building door. She grunts and kicks the door before seeing me.
Mel: “You didn’t see that.”
Me: “Of course not.”
Mel : “I tripped. Stubbed my toe.”
Me: “I’m sure.”
Mel: “Can I pet your dogs?”
Me: “Uh sure.”
Mel : “They don’t bite do they? Cus if they do then I’m gonna sue you!”
Me: “Heh. Then no. Bad idea. Bye.”
Mel: “WHAT? Then why the FUCK do you have them around people? If they gon’ bite?!”
Me (walking off): “I didn’t say that they bite. But let’s not take any chances.”
Mel : “Fuck you! You have some nerve you know that?”
I keep walking down the street and she follows.
Mel: “LOOK AT ME! I’m sorry. Fuck.”
Me: “That’s okay. We’ll be on our way, mam.”
Mel keeps cursing at me. I then receive a phone call from prospective tenants who want to see an open apartment. I meet them at the building and realize that I don’t have my keys.
We walk around to the back of the building and I see that someone tried to break into the building lockbox last night. It was is so badly damaged that it will not open.
I am horrified. I am standing in front of the building, holding two peeing dogs in front of two prospective tenants that think I’m a moron.
I eventually get a neighbor to let me into the building and we walk upstairs to the apartment.
The apartment is vacant but contractors are still doing repairs. The contractors that work for my landlord are notoriously messy, so I had the pleasure of trying to explain why there is a smashed light bulb in the middle of the apartment’s dining room.
I am embarrassed, but slightly too exhausted to care.
My keys were in the laundry room door. Sigh. I need to go to bed.
My first post-law school night consisted of laundry, taco bell, and Celebrity Apprentice. This is the life.
This week? Well.
I spent a lot of time in the car. Driving to work, school, and the burbs for Wal-Mart.
I am exhausted. I spent the majority of the today driving around town buying things for a redesign of my second bedroom. I went to Wal-Mart, Home Depot, two Targets, and made three trips to Ikea.
Yes, three trips to Ikea.
On the first trip I bought a huge mirror and plants, so I couldn’t carry much else. I still needed a futon cover, but I figured that I could get that from Wal-Mart or Target.
Minneapolis has a week of 50-degree temperatures, I run around in my funny shoes declaring that spring is here…and we get a snowstorm.
I get up at 6 a.m. to shovel the apartment building’s sidewalks but I run out of salt because I (foolishly) thought that we were done with winter.
Some days I love being a caretaker. Other days, the landlord wants you to pick up a winter’s worth of dog shit from the back and 5 potential tenants flake on showings.
One of my neighbors was snowed in at work, so I agreed to walk his puppy.
Peppito growled at me and refused to leave the kennel. It took three trips and the lure of dog biscuits to get him out.
Things didn’t get off on the right foot – the roof contractor couldn’t figure out how to work my building’s lockbox so he left the building’s master key in the back door.
You know, the one that opens every apartment. That key. In the door. Ah!
It was a potential disaster, but a tenant turned in the key to me before anything happened. I fixed the lockbox, returned the key, and moved on.
Then this afternoon I get a tweet from a tenant: “Any word what that white stuff is in the hallway?”
I come home to find this mess:
I think that’s insulation from the attic. I’m not sure. I just know that the entire back staircase is blanketed in this crap and I’m not touching it until I buy gloves tomorrow morning.
Sigh contractor. Sigh. I should blast the contractor on Angie’s List, or at least convince my landlord to can him.
The semester is over! Now I am busy working full time at the office and pummeling through the snow with the dogs.
Here’s an outline of what happened these past few months:
It is unrealistic to expect the tenants in my building to suit up to walk their dogs in the middle of the night. What happens is that people let their dogs out in the back lot and watch from the door. Sure there’s the whole “unleashed dog” and “pick up after them” issue, but those are not convincing concerns at 3am with a -20 wind chill.
So every few days I take the shovel to the back lot to pluck the frozen dog-cakes from the snow.
The week began quietly enough – I became an espresso snob, creeped the boyfriend out with my mouse catching, and attended my last formal law school class.
And then the “Minneapolis Blizzard of 2010” came.
Sigh.
The snow was so bad that the Minneapolis Metrodome collapsed. My friend Krämer moaned that Minneapolis only makes national news when something collapses, but I reminded him that we are also famous for Prince and recounts.
I completely cleared and salted my building’s sidewalks on Saturday, but everything was re-buried by Sunday morning. Apparently at least one tenant thought I that I had not shoveled at all:
Halvers wasn’t amused by the note.
Things got real bad on Friday night.
I come back from work around 10pm and find Mark, who lives on the second floor, waiting by the building door. Mark tells me that his sink kitchen clogged, so I call the emergency plumber.
The plumber dredges Mark’s sink while Alesus and I skip over to the Showplace ICON theater and watch the new Resident Evil1 movie.
We come back to my apartment, watch Jersey Shore, and go to bed around 2am.
I hear a knock on my at 4am. It’s Heidi, the tenant who lives under Mark. Her kitchen is completely flooded with stinky black water that is shooting from her kitchen sink. Heidi’s bathroom ceiling is also leaking.
The second day of orientation was epic. The 1Ls shuffled in at 8am, and left for the bar across the street around 5.
One of the most important things that happened today was the introduction to legal writing. Look at all those gleaming packets of knowledge:
Snazzy.
While the 1Ls were in hours (and hours) of sessions, I worked on less glamorous projects like stacking chairs:
