Oh, boy. Where to begin?
Life has been a bit hectic in the new apartment. First of all, we’ve gone from a 400-square-foot studio to a 2-bedroom apartment. This probably isn’t a huge deal to most people, but as a slightly OCD neat-freak, this just means I have a lot more to clean! I’ve spent most of the past week cleaning and organizing and cleaning and organizing and cleaning and organizing…
Aside from all of the cleaning, we’ve also been breaking things. Several wedding gifts have met their demise over the past few weeks, due to the moving process, precarious placement on the counter, and general clumsiness. We’ve broken a few drinking glasses, a coffee pot, and the blender. It’s a tough time to be a kitchen appliance. Allow me to explain the coffee pot fiasco, as it’s probably the most entertaining of the breaking stories.
I was making toast in our apartment one morning. This set off the fire alarm. Our landlord lives above us, and I didn’t want her to think I was setting the house on fire during the first week of living there, so I frantically raced to find my stool to take down the smoke alarm. I get the alarm turned off and then go to unplug the toaster. The toaster was plugged into the same outlet as the coffee maker, so I had to move the coffee maker out of the way. Apparently I moved it too forcefully or pulled it too close to the edge of the counter, but the coffee pot fell and shattered all over the kitchen floor, which I had just mopped 20 minutes earlier. Bummer.
So, after two weeks of breaking everything we own, we thought things would calm down a bit. I spent all day Thursday cleaning and organizing. I mopped every floor in the apartment. That night, and into Friday afternoon, it rained 4 inches in Lexington. Apparently, when it rains, our apartment floods. I was home on Friday morning, when I walked into our entryway to get something. I saw a big pool of water. I followed the pool of water into the utility room and then into the extra bedroom. I started sucking up the water with a wet/dry vac, but each time I finished up one area and moved onto another, the first area would fill up with water again. Eventually, I drove through the monsoon to pick Eric up from work so that he could help me. He spent the next two hours sucking up water, filling up the vacuum six times (Eric approximates 36 gallons of water)! There was a lot of water in this place, folks. I think I had a minor panic attack while all of this was happening. I don’t really know what a panic attack feels like, but I imagine that a rapid heartbeat, a throbbing headache, and a constant desire to throw up could add up to one of those.
The water is all cleared out now, and our landlord is hoping to get whatever allows the water to leak into our apartment fixed, but Eric and I are still a little weary. I just keep thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t been home to start clearing out the water. Would our whole apartment have been flooded? Is this something that could possibly happen every time it rains? What about when it snows? So we’re contemplating another move. The thing is, we really love the location of this apartment. And we have no desire to move all of our furniture out of this place and into another. Plus, there are so many things we really like about this place. We have a great outdoor space with a table and chairs. And we are within walking distance of so many wonderful things!
We have taken long walks the past two evenings, strolling through Gratz Park and my favorite streets, Second and Third. I love how close we are to all of these awesome places. And we spent this evening sitting outside, playing Scrabble (I lost, of course) in the perfect summer weather.
We’re going to check out another apartment on Tuesday, but we’re still not sure what we should do. Any advice?
In other news, we’ve been eating a lot of really awesome food this week. I’ll have lots of recipes to share with you over the next few days, and I promise to be better at blogging! For now, here’s a link to the vegetable lasagna we had earlier in the week. I followed most of the Pioneer Woman’s instructions, except I used shredded mozzarella, rather than slices, and whole grain lasagna noodles. And we switched up the vegetables a bit to use the random summer squash that we got in our CSA last week. We included a red bell pepper, an onion, zucchini, zephyr, pattypan, and eggplant. A little word of advice: If you are going to make a whole lasagna, invite friends over to eat it. A lasagna is a lot of food for two people. We ate it several times this week and ended up freezing the rest of it. Does lasagna freeze well? I hope so. I’m not including any photos of our lasagna because you should just check out the Pioneer Woman’s awesome pictures instead.
Along with our vegetable lasagna, we had bread and an EVOO/herbes de provence (thanks to Becca Campbell) mixture for dipping. Seriously delicious and simple.
Anywho, here’s hoping you all are having less stressful weeks!
-Ally
Robert says
My advice: pay your rent into an escrow account and tell your landlord you will part him once the problem has been totally fixed. Then, determine how long you are willing to wait. If it takes longer, leave your place. Also a good plan: feed me dinner.