Moving to Pasadena

Oh, what can I tell you? We had great hopes for the Villa Montanic apartment complex. It used to be an attractive, quiet place.

I'll go ahead and say it - I didn't like the landlord. Life at Villa Montanic was like the old Soviet Union, both the just and the unjust suffered but there was centralized control. Last spring, after we endured a particularly annoying battle with the landlord over a small fee that he had no right to demand, he promptly died.

Suddenly the hitherto quiet and cowering neighbors became barnyard animals. The next door neighbors would bellow at each other morning, noon and night (this was particularly evident during my struggle with hyperthyroid and stomach flu when I would be blundering around the apartment at all hours listening to the ignorant, bestial peasants shouting at each other). I would pound on the wall with my hickory stick and they would have the effrontery to curse back in their own coarse foreign language. The new landlord turned a deaf ear, decent folk began moving out and anyone was invited to move in as long as they were loud, filthy, and enjoyed entertaining on their patios.

What put Nicole over the edge was when I gave up trying to clean my bathroom and started using hers. I couldn't help it, the fan in my bathroom would pull in all manner of filth and sprinkle it over every surface. The shower was tiled so unskillfully that the drain was at a summit, the water would pool in the corners. I was constantly fighting the slime. After years of previous abuse, the drain itself was chock full of human detritus. Even after repeated flushings with Drano I still had to cut circles of window screening to put over the opening to prevent several of my hairs from going down there and clogging the pipes. I quietly moved into Nicole's bathroom and she quietly began looking for another place to live.

In record time she found this lovely condo in Pasadena. At first I balked at the stairs ("When we have babies they're going to take a swan dive off of the top step and then I'm going to have to write a book about Fulfilling Your Destiny Despite Life-Shattering Challenges Because of Bent Children") but I can honestly say that this condo is the highest quality of life I've enjoyed since my last apartment in La Jolla (and I loved that place!).

That old landlord at Villa Montanic could inspire a whole series of uncharitable blog posts. I'm never going to rent from a human being again, only rental agencies from now on.