After spending an almost completely sleepless night, I've come to the conclusion that no matter what, my wife and I must move in January. Our current apartment should probably be burned down and pushed into a hole. Now don't get me wrong, we're not the tidiest people in the world. It's probably worth our time to consider hiring a cleaning service wherever we move to next, now that we can afford it. But we're not slobs. There are some things that I just absolutely cannot stand when it comes to a living space, and this place has all of them, no matter how hard we try to clean it. Of course, it really doesn't help that I spend so much time at work these days, but with Christmas right around the corner it would be nice to be able to just throw the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and get some serious cleaning done.
Unfortunately, the dishwasher is broken to the point that replacing it would be cheaper than repairing it, but the apartment complex has chosen to do neither. Their strategy appears to be to wait us out, and unfortunately, it's going to work. They've ignored countless requests (including formal, written requests) to fix the damn thing, and the pump is dead. And, while we're on the topic of dead appliances, the washing machine is dying. It will only spin dry on the "delicates" cycle, but won't actually clean things on that cycle, so we have to start clothes on the "cottons and sturdy" cycle, and then run them through again on the delicates cycle to get the water out. The dryer is the only major appliance that works semi-well-ish, but it will only dry clothing when set to its longest run time, at which point it takes two hours to dry a load of laundry. So much for doing more than one load a night. The refrigerator works pretty well, which is a nice change for us, except that it sometimes does a better job of freezing things than the freezer. Only one of the two toilets works. The other had the chain in the tank corrode and we've never gotten around to fixing it because the water in that tank feels a little... electric-y. And also because, before the chain corroded and snapped, it was coated in very pretty greenish-blue crystals that Google tells me is most likely caused by a copper water pipe being exposed to an electric current, and with the number of electrical problems this place already has, I don't want to chance being electrocuted by my toilet.
None of the sinks or tubs drain appropriately, they all just have a tendency to leak out onto the bottom of whatever's below them, which contributes to the other massively bad problem - mold. Black mold, green mold, white mold, grey mold, you put a description to it, we've got it. We can't leave a piece of food on a counter-top in the kitchen for more than 24 hours without it looking like a science experiment gone wrong. We have mold coming out of the carpets, the walls, the ceilings, the door jambs, the tub-caulking; there's mildew in the washing machine that won't bleach out, it's in all of our clothes no matter how quickly we get them into the dryer, our pillows, our blankets, our mattresses, all full of mold. Which, consequently, was the reason for my almost completely sleepless night. After two nights at a very nice boutique hotel for our anniversary (which is actually today, but I couldn't get today off), it was nearly impossible to breathe in our bedroom last night, with a window open and a fan blowing the only-slightly-moldy night air directly at us.
And then there's the other issues of apartment complex living. The fruit flies that won't go away even when I am able to completely clean my kitchen and both bathrooms. And I mean, "bleach the kitchen once a week" clean - it's a lost cause, there's no way to get rid of absolutely all of the flies, they'll just come back within hours. There's also the flees which are bewilderingly hard to find the source of. We've laundered every piece of laundry, vacuumed ever square inch of carpet, used carpet poison everywhere (one room at a time), bathed the poor kittehs multiple times (and I have the scars to prove it), everything shy of boarding the cats at the vet, getting a hotel room, and hiring a professional pest control company to come fumigate the apartment; and each time we think we've gotten rid of them all, they're back within days. Oh, and in the summer, we also get mosquitoes.
And of course, there's the crime. Everything from fights in the parking lot (happens multiple times a day), to shootings (about once a month), to people barricading themselves in their apartments and lighting said apartment on fire (only happened once, so far, but that was over Thanksgiving weekend), to meth-cookers (several apartments), dirty cops (I wish I was joking), drug raids (three in the past two years), constant fly-overs by the King County Sheriff's Department Air Support chopper with its look-down infra-red capability hunting drug dealers in the swampy green-space behind the complex, to a combination of most of those all in one fell swoop. An argument started in the parking lot and ended with someone being shot at by a drug dealer with a shotgun after the intended shooting victim attempted to break into the druggy's apartment and steal his weed plants, which resulted in a drug raid that miraculously didn't find any other drugs aside from the 2 pot plants, but might have had better results if the guy leading the raid hadn't turned out to be dirty. The officer in question was later put on administrative leave by his department while they investigated claims that he might be stealing drug evidence from crime scenes and using them, whereupon he promptly shot himself to death in a park, and that night we had a really real drug raid by agents of the DEA where quite a few more drugs were discovered than in the first raid.
I don't know how we've managed to live in this apartment for so long (5.5 years) without going completely insane, but I do know that all of these issues are contributing to some pretty serious health problems, not to mention some pretty serious depression; and that the fact that we can actually afford to move next month is the only thing keeping us moderately sane right now.
