Monday, May 20, 2019

"It's Not That Bad, Mom!" Our First Apartments


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Youngest just reached another milestone this past week when I move her out of her freshman dorm and into her first apartment. Admittedly, her residence will be short - she's subletting from a sorority sister until late June, when she heads off on another first - studying abroad in Kosovo. She's staying near campus to work full-time until her away program begins. She's also taking two courses - as our friend Marcia Talley would say, she's tearing up the pea patch!Anyway, the move put me in mind of my first apartment, on Ithaca's East Hill, just below Cornell. Below being the operative word, since East Hill is STEEP and travel from the Commons (the main downtown area) all the way up to the campus was pretty much like strolling up the Matterhorn. I had thighs like iron that year, from the many times I either missed the bus or had been bar-hopping downtown and stayed past the bus's operational hours. Yes, youth of today, there was a dark age when you couldn't just call Uber at 2am - you had to beg a ride from somebody with a car or walk a mile home. The plus side? Even if I had been imbibing like a college junior in an era when the drinking age was 18, I sweated 75% of it out on the hike home.

The apartment itself was perfectly nice, probably because my roommate, Karl Schoen-Rene, was post-undergrad and was actually working for money before going to grad school. (Yes, my life IS interlaced with other hyphenated last names!) We were strictly roommates - I got the place because Karl's brother and I were in the same acting program at Ithaca College - but it was still a hard sell to my parents, who figured proximity = propinquity. They relented when I pointed out Karl had a girlfriend, I had a boyfriend (two, actually, they didn't know about the other one) and, best of all, my roommate was working 9 to 5 and didn't hold wild parties or keep late hours. If they had "quiet hours" at the IC dorms back in the day, I certainly don't remember them, and I was looking forward to being able to study in peace.

It was the standard two bedrooms, living room/dining area and kitchen combo, all furnished in Late Mid-Century Student: family cast-offs, stuff rescued from the curbside, and Patrick Nagel posters. I took advantage of having my own place to immediately start hosting dinner parties - another personality trait that's followed me through the years. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about cooking, I could boil hot dogs -that was it.

The most memorable occasion in the apartment was the afternoon I made Bolognese sauce for the first time. My mom had given me the most simple recipe in the world - saute ground beef, diced onions and garlic together, drain, mix in canned sauce. Voila! I could, by then, also boil pasta, and my friends were bringing a jug of red wine that evening, so we were all set. I diced the onions, minced the garlic (that took forever) broke two pounds of ground beef into a nice, wide pan, and stirred until everything was brown and tender.

Then I drained the entire pan into the sink.

Reader, I didn't know any better. Yes, I must have seen my mother's "grease jar" more than once at home, but it never occurred to me that the liquid remains of two pounds of beef - and it was all 75% fat in those days, baby - couldn't go straight down the drain. And Karl, who DID know how to cook, was away for the weekend at his girlfriend's place.
So while my friends and I made merry at dinner, drinking and stuffing ourselves with spag bog (the sauce was quite tasty) a good two cups of grease was hardening into an impenetrable plug. I was mystified when I tried to clean the dishes the next day and the water wouldn't drain. I can't recall if my error came out under close questioning from my roommate or in a frantic phone call to my mother, but I distinctly remember realizing I was Not As Smart As I Thought I Was. I also remember the plumber laughing quite a bit.

How about you, Reds? Any memorable stories from your first apartments?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Julia. this is so funny--I was just thinking about my first apartment this morning, for some reason. My freshman courses I did at community college, my sophomore year at Austin College (that's in Sherman, Texas, up near the Oklahoma state line) I commuted from home, an hour each way. That got really old, and I used to get really sleepy driving. But my parents, who were shelling out tuition for an expensive private college, were not about to pay room and board as well. 


At the beginning of my junior year, I found a garage apartment to rent in the historic part of town. It was behind a Queen Anne Victorian house that was lived in at that time by one of the philosophy professors--and, yes, he had some wild parties. The rent on my apartment was $75 a month!!!! Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and a screened porch. We furnished it with family castoffs and yard sale finds, and my parents and my aunt and my very artistic uncle came and painted and cleaned like crazy. It was adorable!!! 

And it was QUIET. I learned to cook without any memorable disasters, although phone calls were long distance in those days and I ran up quite a bill asking my mother how to do things.  There was a huge pink crepe myrtle in the back yard, with a hammock under it, and an enormous fig tree in the landlord's yard hung over my fence. It was there that I learned to love figs. And learned to love sitting on porches. And cooking, and gardens, and old houses. I wish I could say I had wild parties, but I had to study too hard!

LUCY BURDETTE: I know I had apartments before the one I had as a grad student in Knoxville TN, but it was memorable because of the cats. My roommate Sheila had one white cat, and I had two tortoiseshell sisters, Gabriel Lee and Spearman's Rho (taking statistics at the time.) They both escaped that year and came back pregnant. I ended up with nine kittens, plus the 3 grown cats. It was a nightmare! 


One night I remember hearing a lot of noise and went out to find most of the cats circling one of the kittens, growling. I broke it up, but the quarters were simply too crowded. Another time I came home late and slid into bed and noticed--sniff sniff--the sheets were wet and smelly. Sheila's white cat was over the situation and let me know by peeing in my bed. Anyway, I learned my lesson about spaying. AND SHEILA, so sorry for being a lousy roommate!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Love this! And I had Patrick Nagel posters, too. Hilarious. My first apartment was a house, on Illinois avenue in Indianapolis. I shared it with Sharon Butsch, who is a still a pal of mine, and we were SO happy. I remember I was working at the radio station, it was 1970, I guess, and this house was terrific. Driveway, garage. (I had a Chevette and i think Sharon had a...Pinto? I could be wrong. ) It had a front porch, and a living room, a full dining room and kitchen and bathroom on the first floor, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. It was kind of ... dark wood and stucco? Sharon is an artist, and painted everything gorgeously, with hard-edged green and yellow arrows pointing upstairs. Which seemed cool at the time. 



Artist interpretation of cool apartment with shag carpet
We also had hand-me-over furniture, one piece of which was a huge blue Eames armchair from my mom which I bet was valuable.
We had lots of parties, but kind of.. nerdy. We played charades all the time, and word games, one of which was called "It's not the New York Mets," which always ended up with  M & M fights,. Fun, but disastrous for the luxurious shag wall to wall carpet we had (ridiculously) installed ourselves.  WHITE SHAG CARPETING!  


Anyway--the rent was $100.00 a month. $50.00 each. We scraped and saved for everything, and would buy, like, a pound of hamburger and share it. We LOVED it.

JENN McKINLAY: Six girls in a three bedroom apartment on Farnham Road in New Haven with ONE bathroom. What were we thinking?!! Halfway through the school year three roommates bailed - probably to live in tents in the park where they'd have more privacy - and it became not so bad. The next year, my senior year at Southern, I rolled into a second floor apartment on the Boulevard. Two guys, two girls, four bedrooms - but still ONE bathroom!!! 




We rarely saw each other as we all had frantic schedules. I was working FT in a bar called Toad's Place, had an internship in NYC all day on Fridays, and was taking seven classes just to get out in four. Small wonder I arrived at graduation hungover and with half of my ginormous hairdo (it was '89) singed from an unfortunate lighter incident the night before. Yes, I accidentally lit my hair on fire. These things happen, mostly to me, apparently.

RHYS BOWEN: my first apartment was after college. I was in a ladies residential college, part of London University. But after graduation two friends and I looked for am apartment in London. They were expensive unless we moved way out to the burbs and we wanted to be central, so we found top floor of an old house in a crummy area near Paddington Station. Three rooms plus kitchen. The bathroom was down one and a half flights of stairs and shared by the whole house, including the three women who lived on the ground floor and we soon discovered made their living as prostitutes. So going down to the loo in the night was hazardous! You never knew who you'd bump into.
As soon as we had a little money we looked for something better and struck gold. An attorney on a Queen Anne Street, great part of the city behind Oxford Circus decided they might as well let out their top two floors. Rent really low, lovely Georgian house, and for me, working at the BBC, steps from my studio. The only drawback was no heat and only one bathroom. But we had three great years there. A few parties, the other girls getting used to strange actors or rock singers wandering in looking for me or sleeping on my couch.

HALLIE EPHRON: I got married right out of college, Jerry (my same Jerry!) and I spent 3 months (we were nuts) in Europe immediately after, and returned to move into a 1-bedroom apartment ($165/month, rent controlled) on West End Avenue on NY's Upper West Side. LOVED that apartment. But yes, we did plug a few drains with our cluelessness. Not grease, but cat littler. We kept our cats' litter box in the bathtub. And eventually, well, you know. Going to look for a picture of us, young and in situ...


JULIA: Now I'm wishing we had decided to discuss "most memorable hair styles" because damn, Jerry's sideburns are something else.

How about you, dear readers? Tell us about your first apartment adventures!

67 comments:

  1. Well, the apartment was a cozy little house. We had mostly hand-me-down furniture, but the rent was ridiculously cheap and it was close enough for walking to most of the places we needed to go . . . .

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    1. Joan, we all seem to remember crazy cheap rents. It would be interesting to 1) look at the prices in 2019 dollars (or in some cases, pounds) and 2) see what comparable apartments are actually going for these days.

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  2. I didn't know that about grease, and probably would have dumped it down the sink too. My first apartment wasn't anything special. It was cheap and close to campus, which was pretty much all that mattered to me!

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    1. Funny thing - literally as I was writing this blog, Youngest called me to help walk her through making a hamburger helper meal. On a hunch I asked, "You know you can't pout the grease down the drain, right?"

      Guess what the answer was. I see I wasn't any better than my mom in passing down kitchen arcana.

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    2. Ha ha! Well, at least you were there to prevent another disaster.

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  3. I love these stories! I shared a house with three other girls for my last two years at UC Irvine. But it was at the beach (Balboa Island, for those who know), so we had to move out for the summer. Two or three other houses on the same street were also occupied by good friends, all students, and we had epic vegetarian potlucks with our food coop finds.

    My first solo apartment was on the square in Bloomington, Indiana, when I started grad school. A hundred dollars a month, it was a one-room thing with a kitchen at the end and a platform above the kitchen I used as a sleeping loft. The floor was heated in the winter and I had to keep the window open to keep from roasting. Snow would drift in! But I could walk everywhere and loved it.

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    1. Balboa Island!!?!... *sigh* That is living the dream, Edith!

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    2. That's the problem with some student housing, isn't it? You get a crummy apartment in a dream location and spend the rest of your life realizing you'll never be able to afford to live there again in a non-crummy apartment.

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    3. UCI, Balboa Island, right in my wheelhouse, Edith, I was living in Laguna at the time.

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  4. Hallie, awww--love the photo of you and Jerry! First apartment was a ground floor unit a few blocks from campus--shared with three other girls--one of whom we never saw because she was always off with her boyfriend. "Um, no, Mr. X, Karen isn't home right now. I'll be sure and tell her to call her folks when she gets in." There was a prostitute upstairs with really loud bedsprings. And bikers lived two doors down--the kind of bikers where everyone grabs their kids/dogs/roommmates and goes inside and locks the door when you'd hear their bikes coming. Except for one of my roommates. "Hi, we're Beast and Chicken. Kathy said we should stop by sometime." Uh-huh.

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    1. This is the kind of place parents don't want to know anything about, Flora.

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  5. I love these stories, Julia, and aren’t you a brave mother to let her daughter have these experiences! I went alone to a totally new town to teach school and asked the school secretary where I could find a cheap apartment. She sent me to her brother, who owned a dilapidated mansion on Millionaire’s Row. He showed me the top floor where a drug dealer had been shot and killed by police during his arrest. There was still blood spatter on the wall, which didn’t phase him. But the landlord thought i’d love the curved windows,high ceilings, claw foot tub, and the beads hanging in the doorways instead of doors, which he installed after a decor inspiration. Uh, no. I took the apartment below, across the hall from a nice lady with a dachshund. Drug dealers all around, but my soon-to-be husband who visited frequently worked for the Federal Reserve and had all kinds of federal stickers on his otherwise very plain blue car, and he wore a raincoat with epaulets, so everyone assumed he was FBI. They avoided me! All for $75 a month.

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    1. File this one under: You can't make this stuff up!

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    2. Nancy, that sounds like the perfect beginning to a fun cozy series...

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  6. Love these apartment stories! Jenn, I can't believe we didn't meet at Toad's Place, though it sounds like you were there more often than I was LOL

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  7. Married grad student housing in NorCal: bikes on the balcony, under the counter fridge with a freezer the size of a shoebox, no car, food-shopping on my bike with baskets over the rear wheel. Many food adventures: an exploding angel food cake, Thanksgiving turkey with the bag of giblets left inside, pounds of pasta and gallons of tomato sauce.

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  8. I lived in the dorm and then sorority house while in school, first time around anyway. So I didn't move into an apartment until I got married. It was memorable only because it was in the Boeing test flight path for the B-52. Unless I kept the windows locked, the vibration of a low flying big bomber would cause huge vibration, causing them to slowly raise themselves. It was spooky. These were in the days when living on the ground floor was relatively safe, and no one locked up much of anything except the front door.

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    1. Finta, my mother moved from her college sorority house to married officers housing on Plattsburgh Air Force Base, she used to say something similar. She was glas she was there when she was still so young- she didn't know how older folks could sleep through the sounds of bombers taking off and landing.

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    2. How serendipitous. My father was stationed at Plattsburgh during the war. WW2. I’m sure your mother was there much later tho. I have vague memories of being there. Very vague. Almost as vague as the memory of what I had for breakfast

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  9. Oh, Julia, you are too funny! I wish our apartment had looked like that :-) But you have not tried to vacuum until you try to get crushed M&Ms out of white shag rug. Who wants to know how to play it’s not the New York Mets? It is a pretty good game.

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    1. Yes, that can be our Bouchercon game! First prize is a white shag throw rug. :-)

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  10. First apartment...wow! It was a one-bedroom, furnished, with one roommate. It was in Sierra Madre, CA, next door to Pasadena. It's a town which has consistently held a place as one of the "Best Small Towns" list for more years than I can remember. We could walk to anything we needed. The fire dept was all volunteer. It was SAFE!
    On my last visit to Pasadena, I stopped off at a favorite cafe in Sierra Madre. The apartment building is still there, looks to be in great shape. In fact very little has changed except the price tag.
    Now that I think about it...it was also the place where a "first kiss" took place.

    I of

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    1. Awwww. That could be another conversation topic, Lyda!

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  11. I did not have an apartment in college. Well, no, that's not true. I shared an on-campus apartment with five other girls my junior year. Three bedrooms, two baths. I'm still friends with the girl who was my roomie. But I bolted for a single the next year, so that should tell you something about my experience.

    My girl is living in an off-campus apartment next year. She moans about the blue, not quite outdoor but definitely high wear, carpet in the living room and shops around the Internet for furnishings. She is convince she will be able to skip the "use whatever your relatives are willing to give you" stage of apartment living.

    I will let life disillusion her. :)

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    1. They've been spoiled by Pinterest and HGTV, Liz. Tell her the upscale place to shop if you don't like the family hand-me-downs is Goodwill, not West Elm.

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    2. Hah! I have directed her to Goodwill and Craiglist.

      And Ikea, which is not entirely upscale, but as trendy things that won't break the bank.

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  12. Julia, the photos are perfect! You got my landlord's Queen Anne house just right except that it was white. Sadly, the house is now gone, replaced by a very dull 80s ranch. But the last time I drove to Sherman, my garage apartment was still there.

    Most of us started out with roommates--wondering if I really missed out on something. But I didn't actually want a roommate, and loved living alone. This was mid-seventies in a small college town, and I never worried about being safe.

    Hallie, the photo of you and Jerry is ADORABLE.

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    1. The roommates I had were always through financial necessity, Debs - except for Ross ;-)
      Housing was pretty tight in Ithaca even though there were lots of apartments - between IC and Cormell, the town swelled by over 20,000 every fall. The next flat and apartment were in London and D.C. respectively. I LIKE living alone, I could just never afford to (until now!)

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  13. Laughing so hard at all these stories! Remember the rakes everyone used for shag carpets? I guess that was for getting the M & M's out!

    I had one goofy apartment situation after another, but the worst was when I lived on the first floor, with a couple above me who were, um, shall we say sexually active? They did not have a carpet in the bedroom, and kept extremely regular hours, coming home just after my bedtime, and waking up just before I wanted to wake up. They were apparently big people (I never saw them in the entire six months I lived there), and would literally clomp into their bedroom, fling enormous shoes (platform, no doubt. It was 1975) across the room, leap onto the bed, and start pumping the mattress for the next twenty minutes. Naturally, the box spring was directly on the floor. In the morning, they would start the process in the reverse, half an hour before my alarm was set. I don't know why I bothered.

    I had to move out because I was getting no sleep, but couldn't afford to lose my deposit, so as soon as friends bought a house with a finished attic I moved in with them. Which was even worse. The wife waited tables at one of the nicer restaurants downtown, working late most nights. She was cheating on her husband and using ME as an excuse to stay out, if she knew I was staying over with my boyfriend at the time. All my furniture didn't fit upstairs, so they used my really nice faux leather couch, and burned it with their cigarettes. I couldn't wait to move out of there, either! It was an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" situation.

    My oldest daughter had even crazier apartment situations, as if she attracted them. The worst was when she moved into a four-unit trailer park in Lebanon, Tennessee, when she attended Cumberland University. She came home from her evening shift at the hospital (she worked as an admitting clerk for the 40-bed facility), and found her door hanging open, her place ransacked, and her best stuff missing. Not a single neighbor "saw" anything. She had moved there in the first place because the first house she had lived had actual crazy people for roommates, including one 20-year old woman who sucked her thumb in public.

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    1. Karen, I thank God the only time I've heard other people being amorous has been in inadequately insulated hotel rooms. Never in apartments.

      Ross and I did get robbed the first day after we moved into a new place in SW DC. Fortunately, everything was still in boxes and bags, so the only thing the thieves got was Ross's stereo, which even back in the days of stereo wasn't worth that much. A cop came by and managed not to laugh when we filed a report, but he didn't suggest we'd ever see the missing stereo again. Welcome to the neighborhood!

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  14. By the way, Julia, best of luck to Youngest. What an adventure!

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    1. Thanks, Karen! She was home again this weekend (by necessity) and when I took her back I dropped off the pots, pans, measuring cups and Tupperware her roommates had taken with them. She has one plate, one spoon, one fork and one knife - I'll expand her collection next visit.

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  15. Julia--studying in Kosovo? Is she still a Muslim? Was that a factor in choosing where to study? Is it safe there now? Acting like a grandma

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    1. Rhys, it's still labeled by the State Department as okay to visit with normal precautions - and in fact, she's going on a State Department scholarship,, the Gilman Award. Yes, she's still a Muslim, which was part of her interest - she's never been in a Muslim-majority country. The specific program deals with the wars in the 90s, re-building the countries legal structure, and the Truth and reconciliation process, all of which fit perfectly with her major (International Studies/Political Science.)

      One thing I was VERY relieved to hear is that the school provides complete medical insurance/coverage for all students abroad, and will fly a student back to the US if medically necessary at no cost to her or her family. Not that I expect anything to go wrong, but it's good to rest assured.

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  16. OH MY this subject brings back memories! 3 of us rented a beautiful, large home with a huge front porch. The bathroom had a window in the door and a clawfoot tub...friends would come over and scare us looking in the window at us! Rent was $135 a month in 1977. We lived across the street from "The Boiler Room" disco. We used to go there all the time dancing to the disco tunes of the day. I worked in a bakery that summer and had to be there at 4:30 a.m. It was really hard to keep that job, but I did until school started back up in the fall.

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    1. And this is why we go to university when we're young, Pauline...

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  17. We had a couple of connections with Kosovo. First, my son's Army unit went there in the fall of 1999. They were there for peacekeeping; every day a sniper shot into their camp at the same time. Never hit anyone but shades of what? MASH? The daily "attack." They worked with NATO troops. Prior to that my m-I-l started an outreach program in her little town of Wharton, Texas: they sponsored Kosovoan refugee families. Got them jobs, places to live, medical and dental care, anything they needed. Eventually they all returned home. One of the men asked at the base for my son to tell him thanks and offer any help he could provide. That was sweet of him but my son was clueless as to what prompted that. He didn't know about his grandma's project.

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    1. Fascinating, Pat! Not many Americans seem to have served over these during the Balkan Wars. (I suppose that should be Balkan Wars v5.0 or some such.) I'll have to ask Youngest if the NATO troop experience is part of her program.

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  18. I lived in an apartment my senior year of college. It was in an apartment complex, low-rise, built especially for the college crowd. I had some other friends living in the complex, one male who grew up behind me, and a female who grew up down the street. My roommate was from my hometown, too. So, it was a nice feeling of home with independence thrown in. I can't remember what the rent was, not anything too exorbitant, but not dirt cheap either. I wish I'd had the old house rental experience. My husband who was my boyfriend during the last semester of that year lived in a more run-down building that did have the cheap rent. My sister and I spent a weekend cleaning it while he was gone on a rifle team match, and the old place didn't look half bad. I think now how 70s that behavior was, cleaning up your boyfriend's apartment.

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    1. I cleaned up my boyfriend's apartment in grad school, Kathy, but it was for my own health and safety. I thought I was going to get a disease from his moldy bathroom and I won't even describe what his dishes and pots and pans looked like.

      Then I married him and wound up cleaning for him for the next several decades. Girlfriends, beware!

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    2. Hahaha, Julia! We both should have been forewarned with cleaning after them early on. But, being young and in love overrules worrying about those things.

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  19. Oh, and Julia, I think it's wonderful that youngest is going to Kosovo for that experience. You really have supported and encouraged your kids to spread their wings. Kudos to you!

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    1. Thanks, Kathy! I've always said living abroad was one of the best things I did as a student; I've encourages all my kids to travel. Since I'll have two out of three living abroad for a month this summer, I think I succeeded.

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  20. My first apartment was settled on at the end of my sophomore year of college. We picked out a fancy two-story apartment meant for 5. Come fall, only 3 of us showed up. One gal eloped over the summer. One broke up with her fiancé and wasn't good for much after that; she dropped out of school for that semester. So 3 of us had to pay a little more than we bargained for. It was fine for a while but eventually we all got out of the lease and went our separate ways. I finished the semester in a firetrap across the street from the football stadium (UT-Austin). AKA The Roach Arms. Then it was condemned and my new roommate and I found two other girls and rented an apartment for 4 west of campus. What a year. I haven't lived in an apartment since. My husband and I were in a duplex for the first month or two of our marriage, then we found a nice uninsulated house to rent.

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    1. Pat, you've clearly had some housing adventures! Is there any more typical student housing phrase than "Then it was condemned?"

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  21. My first apartment wasn't much, in one of those U-shaped two story buildings with a pool in the center. This was in Tucson, AZ when I was attending U of Arizona. Two bedrooms, my roommate a friend from high school who had transferred from a Junior College...oops...Community College. We had different schedules and work schedules so didn't get in each others way, but it was kind of gloomy and I never liked it. The next year I moved into a square, brick one bedroom "house", one of eight in a motel-like setup. It had a wall heater and a swamp cooler, and was fine in winter but in summer it got really hot, the swamp cooler kept it humid, but didn't do a lot of cooling. I had a motorcycle at the time, and to cool off I'd get in the shower fully clothed, then hop on the bike and ride around the block a few times. Thrillingly cold at first, but about three trips and I was dry.

    It was four blocks from campus and I lived there for almost two years before returning to southern California. As much as I loved the desert, I was glad to be back near the ocean.

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    1. Re: "got in the shower fully clothed": see my above response to Pauline, Rick. This is why we go to university when we're young. Grown-ups are too soft and finicky.

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  22. Julia -- I've just finished THROUGH THE EVIL DAYS. Now what?

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    1. Re-read the whole series? Actually, I'm going to be announcing news about the pub date this Friday; stay tuned!

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  23. As to clogged drains--A married couple who were our friends offered to let us use their apartment while they were away for the weekend.
    We found that the toilet wouldn't flush, at all. No plunging in the world was up to the task.
    The woman had made candles (didn't everyone in 1969?) and poured leftover wax into the toilet!!!
    I risked creating other problems with my solution, but ignorance is bliss. I kept pouring really hot water into the toilet bowl until enough melted to flush.

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  24. You saved them both a bill and the experience of having a plumber laugh at them, Libby!

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  25. I don't have any apartment horror stories of my own to share, so I'll share my sister's. And technically my mom's, since my mom was staying at my sister's to watch my niece while my sister was out of town. My mom was laying on the bed reading and she hears gurgling. Looked up & there are streams of water flowing down the wall from the ceiling. Called the emergency apartment maintenance who had to get into the apartment upstairs. Those tenants had turned their toilet into a homemade bidet with a garden hose & forgot to shut off the water before they left for the day, so the toilet overflowed. Luckily some friends of my sisters were able to quickly come over & help my mom move furniture & other things so they wouldn't be ruined by all that water.

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    1. That's every renter's nightmare, Jana. Both your sister and the people upstairs - how could you look someone in the eye after your toilet overflowed into their bedroom? (But seriously, who forgets there's a freaking garden hose running in the john?!?)

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  26. It'a amazing to me we all survived out first apartments! LOL!

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  27. Rhys, in England, would your apartment have been called an apartment or a flat?

    Diana

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    1. Diana, Rhys may be betwixt and between and not see this, but I can say having lived in London for part of my college years, I never heard anything referred to as an apartment. There were rooms (no kitchen, communal bath), Bedsits (like a studio apartment in that it had a kitchenette, but the bath was still down the hall) and flats, which were self-contained. As students, my friends and I all lived in rooms or bedsits, the only people I knew who owned flats were professors.

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    2. Julia, thanks! I remember reading about bedsits or flats in the UK. When I lived in England, I lived in a room at Oxford while I was studying a semester abroad. I did not know that you could own a flat in England. I recently discovered that you can own an apartment in New York, USA. When I think of apartments, I think of a rental unit in the USA.

      Diana

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  28. Got to this late today and my first thought was the Houseboat moored above Battersea Bridge. But then I remembered; my first flat was in Earls Court, London. A couple of mates from my boarding school broke me out of the truly terrible hostel that my parents had placed me when they left me in London for office studies. I never did master shorthand. This flat was on the ground floor of a huge Victorian house in Earl’s Court Square. Three rooms plus gall kitchen and small bathroom. Five girls and assorted men now and then. I shared would would have been the parlour, in more gracious times, with two girls. The room was so large we hardly noticed each other. The second bedroom slept two, and the third room was the sitting room which must have been 30 or more feet long. I remember a classic party. Each of us invited at least 20 friends, who, of course, invited more. At one point the police were outside as we had received the fall out from a local night club they had raided. The sideboard, a massive piece of Victoriana, was strong enough that some ‘guests’ were dancing on it. I learned to cook there and only left once my classes were finished and I joined my family in Africa. I’ll have to tell about the houseboat another time.

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    1. Celia, this needs to be turned into a BBC series right away.

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  29. My first apartment was "arranged" by my soon to be step-father. I got his apartment, which was over the pool, while he and my mother moved into my grandparents, Mom's former in-laws apartment across the street. When ownership changed and my sister needed some help,I moved. The neighbor at that apartment always watched who was coming and going, especially when Mom and John were dating. Plus my Mom was trying to avoid being seen my her former in-laws so she kind of had to walk sort of bent over to avoid detection. I never had any adventures, everyone else did.

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    1. Deana, are you saying your mom invented...the walk of shame? :-)

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