the moving saga

this is one story that needs to be preserved for posterity... i think. so i recently completed an across-town move due to my unsavory neighbors. i've mentioned them before -- they can't read or write and they don't have a car. well, our landlord was friends with the wife's family and he was really good about checking on them and keeping them in line.

well, the landlord died of a massive heart attack last summer (on july 4, no less -- he was at the lake with his family when it happened) and since then, things have gone steadily downhill. robert had taken to smoking inside, so i could occasionally smell smoke in my kitchen (yuck!) and they started having more and more unsavory visitors over.

when i say unsavory, i mean the sketchiest of the sketch.

anyway, robert and his, er, visitors liked to drink and fight, and more than once people would end up in my front yard screaming obscenities and threatening to kill each other.

meanwhile, robert's sister moves in and the fights and the yelling (occasionally punctuated by what sounds like a human body being thrown against a wall or a floor) continue. one night, i was awaked around 3 a.m. by robert's sister screaming "stop, robert, you're going t kill me." so i called the police and they came and arrested him. the women did not want to press charges, so robert was released the next day. needless to say, this led to a further deterioration of our relationship.

so in march i started looking for a new place to live. i didn't want to have to sign a lease (one of my new year's resolutions was to be back in atlanta by the end of this year), so that somewhat limited my options (plus, dublin doesn't exactly have a thriving rental market). but i did find a place -- a really great place, actually, owned by some friends of mine from church. good price, great neighborhood, close to work, no lease... perfect.

so i canceled my lease at my old place (i had gone month-to-month after the first year), changed my mailing address with god and country and the u.s. postal service, scheduled a cessation of all my utilities... was going to move to the new place after my trip to palo alto to hang out with sara and christina (which was, btw, quite a lovely vacation with two quite lovely people).

i get back into town on a thursday (planning to move that weekend) to discover that the house i'm supposed to move into has BURNED TO THE FUCKING GROUND. yes, it caught fire and burned the week before i was supposed to move in. i suppose it would have been much worse, though, if the fire had occured two weeks after it did...

so... i had two days to find another place to move. i found a place, but it is tiny. cheap, though, and i cancelled my DSL so i'm saving an additional $75 per month. the biggest problem is a lack of adequate food preparation space in the kitchen. overall, i'm just not happy with it -- but i don't want to move again in dublin. so this has accelerated my timetable for returning to atlanta. target is now august.