move

we moved from one hell to another hell.

we moved out of a large commercial building into a condominium owned by someone, who we of course rented from. the fiend that was lessing the place insisted on coming into the apartment, had repairs done on it, including sealing up the living room like in ET (supposedly to contain mold) and literally SAWED THE WALL DOWN. they repaired it, but over a month. naturally, we paid for our damn month.

moving is about power, it’s not about where you live. it’s about who runs your life, who can touch your things, and, I suppose, equity.

I’ve so had it with moving from one hellhole to another. gotta wait till the bottom drops out of this stupid market before we can even think about buying again.

We moved to another apartment in the same building. We tried very hard to justify moving to Clarendon (up the street from us), but the rates for even one bedroom apartments were absurd, and parking would have made it over $3,000 a month.

The only way we’re going to get out of the Charles E Smith shithole is to save up a giant pile of cash and buy a house somewhere. Maybe in Hawaii.

our building manager has become so antagonistic as to tell me i need to move the firearms out of my home. this is patently absurd, and illegal. i think we will need to move as soon as possible, but the new lease we signed forces us to pay the balance of the lease should we move before the end. this makes us move in exactly a year, not before, not after. i realize that the lessor is doing this specifically to make it very difficult to move. i can’t believe any of this is legal.

our neighbors, who have lived in a charles e smith building (this building) for fourteen years, are moving. our close friends, the martinez’s, have moved already. our new utility bill (it used to be free) is $110. everyone said i was crazy when i said it would be that much. i was wise. we now pay almost $1700 a month for a 1br apartment with less than 1000 square feet. and the staff in the building are completely hostile assholes. we pay to get accosted for living in a place we don’t want to be. but buying a house is hard, and very expensive. there has to be a compromise.

so the neighbors we liked are moving because they bought a pair of bulldogs. and our rent didn’t go down, but it didn’t go up, either. so i more or less accepted the static quo (and even bought myself a reserved parking place), and signed on for another year lease. the plan is to just save up some $$$ and see what happens with the housing market. maybe in a year or two, we’ll buy a house. until then, i don’t think we’re really moving (at least not out of this building).

We can’t really move because of the new job and all kinds of stuff happening. I think we’re going to start another 1 year lease and buy a house with the new income and the hopefully upturning stock market (at almost 10k now!) and downturning house market (everything on Oahu is for sale, I hear the same thing from California).

our apartment building is going to charge us “sewage, trash, electricity, and water” starting at the beginning of our new lease. Our rent goes down $40, but I imagine that bill will be right about $40. And those bitches can’t meter our trash output, nor can they meter our electricity usage. So this is just a matter of averaging the building usage and dividing by the number of units. I don’t like it. I want to MOVE. MOVE. MOVE. and I hate them. it’s too bad, i like my neighbors.