There are so so many stories I could tell about what’s unfolded behind the thin, uninsulated walls of this apartment Ryan and I have been in since May 2011. I’m not going to try to stream them all together to make any kind of followable story line…I’m just going to run through them as they come. Some may be be actual stories, some just excerpts or quick moments.

I was walking to my car, headed out for the day. There beside my parking spot sat the oldest of the groundsmen in his golf cart…as usual really not doing much of anything…I nodded and said hello, hows it goin. And he just goes: “mmmm you smell good.” Yeah.
I laughed awkwardly, got into my car and drove away.

I went outside one day to go for a run in the middle of the day and saw a heap o smoke coming from the back of my building…then 4 firetrucks and police cars came zooming in….it was an actual inferno. So I ran inside, grabbed my guitar and stuck it in my car…went for my run…got back an hour later…and one of the maintenance guys was standing outside where the fire was. So naturally I walked up to ask about what happened…a concerned tenant. His response: “eh just a lil porch fire.” The end.

My carpeted bedroom floor has had a leak underneath from an unknown source…4 times…
maaaaybe from the water system that sounds like the apocalypse happening above my head on an hourly basis…
maaaybe not.
What was the solution to this sopping wet carpeted mess beneath my feet? Well..they pulled it all up and stuck an air sucking machine underneath it…blowing and sucking air, blowing and sucking mold into the air, while emitting the noise that a plane makes while taking off. for two days.
I slept on the couch while the mold grew. It’s probably a forest under there now.
They did generously give us one free carpet cleaning though after a heated phone call I made to the manager. thanks a heap.

Ryan chased down two kids trying to steal my bike. I stopped them in the street the next day. Gave em a good lil talkin to.

The same kids tried to steal my bike again. [we think] They just couldn’t get their over-fed bodies to drag it far enough up the hill because of the lock on the frame.

A prostitute got into my boyfriends car…..I am not kidding.

It requires a screw driver to actually fenangel-shut our dish washer every single time we use it because its installation was apparently crooked.

Ryan’s toilet is an ongoing, continuously running water bill.

Our upstairs neighbors are actually not the same people from month to month. The “parents” rotate out, a few months at a time, its all women…same kids…then the women disappear and it’s only men that are the adults living there with the 3 children, one of which is a new addition…not a baby, but a teenager.

Our caddy corner neighbors…have no furniture. And absolutely nothing on their walls. They have a coffee table at which they can be seen sitting at night, with their mac book…in the dark…with their blinds wide open and only the light from the computer on their faces. It’s 3 grown men living there. They smoke and talk on the phone outside their front door only..in another language. They never say hello. I would have suspicion that they’re terrorists if I thought Nashville has an appeal to terrorists.
They moved out at least 3 weeks ago but I never saw a moving van. disappeared into thin air.

In total, I believe our war on the mice that had made our apartment home ended in roughly 11 mice dead. Ryan and I survived, but my sanity did suffer…I do still have dreams about the mice…and I still jump and scream when something drops on or brushes my foot. For example, a hair tie.
We still have mice. I saw one yesterday.

I have cried due to spiders atleast 6 times since I’ve lived here.

My brother and his wife were visiting me one weekend. I let them sleep in my bed, and I took the air mattress on the floor. Mind you, this was still while the mice were afoot. So I was a little bit on edge as it was…
Around 6:45am, I awoke to something crawling across my face. [for those of you who do not know already, I have a petrifying, illogical fear of spiders] I grabbed for the first object I could reach, my iphone, and walloped myself in the face with it, knocking what I thought was a spider off and onto the air mattress..I could not touch it with my hand…it could have bitten me!
…all in the same moment of that swoop of my iphone across my face, I simultaneously jumped up 4 feet onto my bed where Anna and Casey were sleeping soundly…I landed on top of them…
I was screaming and crying at this point— hysteria had ensued.
I scared the living poop out of them. And then they started laughing at me…so it turned into a frightful cry-laugh-hysteria…when we realized it was actually a maimed camel cricket trying to scurry away with his life on the ground where my air mattress lay, deflated.

Maintenance guy: “You’re the runner.”
Me: “I run”
Maintenance guy: “You’re in nice shape”
Me: “…..” blank stare
Maintenance guy: “You run more than I’ve walked in my whole life”
Me: “hm. you ride the golf cart around alot though”

We’re packing up everything this week…closing one chapter of life in Nashville and moving on to another one. Feels good to leave this one behind. I’ll probably never see Nipper’s Corner again. Peace out Brandywine. I’m gunna leave little hidden notes in this apartment for the next person who lives here with clues about where the mice like to hide and what is falling apart.
<3

LAC