It's been a long day. It seems like every moment is waiting, waiting, waiting for Friday, the day when everything must happen all at once, including signing a lease and getting keys, moving, catching a plane home, and going to a Hilary Duff concert (more on that later).

i'm sitting on the bedroom floor, laptop perched on the mattress, with a cat at each elbow. I think it might be time to tell the story of Saturday night. I'm tired, and I just deep-cleaned the bathroom, so bear with me.

Saturday evening, after I spent a good part of the day writing in this blog and the rest of the afternoon finishing last minute packing (i.e. throwing everything in my line of sight in pink plastic trashbags in no particular order), Brad and I went to pick up the U-Haul. Doing business at a U-Haul is just as much fun as standing in line at DPS waiting to get your driver's liscense picture taken. First the surly man behind the counter gave us the keys to the wrong truck. Then the surly man insisted that I had booked the smallest truck they had one way only, and when I said, "Actually, Surly Man, I did NOT book the smallest truck one way only, for I am not a moron," Surly Man actually called someone in the back office to check the "official record", and then told me that "they" said I was "wrong". He just wanted to prove me wrong. That's what I call customer service, Surly Man.

After Brad and I left, drove home, and backed the U-Haul into our driveway at home, it was 7 p.m. (That was our plan - to move at night so we didn't melt in the sun.) We had the foresight to pause for a moment before loading the truck and drive over to the new apartment to reserve parking spaces for the U-Haul for later. Brad went inside the apartment while I picked up Subway sandwiches. He called me a few minutes later with his Holy Crap voice turned on.

"They didn't clean the floors," he said, and I nearly drove off the road. I mentioned before that we saw the apartment the night before and it was still dirty, but there were cleaning people there, the lighting was bad, and we just did a quick, nervous walkthrough - not paying much attention to details. "It's really bad," he said, and I started to feel my blood boil.

I turned the car around and screeched over to survey the damage. I walked in expecting to see a minorly dirty floor in need of vacuuming. What I saw, instead, was this.

Dude, those pictures don't even begin to show how dirty the apartment carpet was, or how truly disgusting the cabinet doors and sink and water heater were. I was wrong. The place really was That Ghetto. There were unidentified stains EVERYWHERE, and by unidentified, I mean - please, don't even tell me what THAT one is, I don't want to know. How bout that track of dirt from the front door to the back door, ground into the carpet? Or the one next to the kitchen? Or the huge pinkish red stain in front of the water heater closet? There's not a steam cleaner in the world that would get that out, I know that much is true.

So, basically, it was a nightmare. Brad and I freaked out for a few minutes, then called the manager's cell phone several times - no answer. Cue Lucy leaving scary, pissed off messages. Then we tried the management office and the emergency maintenance pager, and left several 911 pages over the course of an hour and a half or so. No response. Finally, I called my apartment locator, to ask her if it would be totally insane if we tried to find a different apartment to move into. She responded by calling the manager herself, and guess what - he answered on the first ring! Imagine that. She explained the situation and asked him to call me immediately. Thirty minutes later, he finally did.

By then it was after nine o'clock, and I was so mad (and tired) I couldn't see straight. When I finally talked to the manager, he actually had the nerve to say to me, "Sorry, man, I was out really late at the Lance Armstrong thing and I fell asleep and didn't hear your calls. I'm pretty hungover." That's just exactly what you want to hear in this situation, right? It gets better:

"Oh, yeah, sorry about your carpets, man. The carpet cleaners didn't show up today so we had to fire them."

Thinking back, I'm surprised I didn't jump through the phone and strangle him. Brad and I both remained pretty calm, taking turns with the phone, saying things like "This is unacceptable and unprofessional and we demand a solution NOW," and "You either give us the keys to a different apartment or give us our deposit back" and "THAT IS NOT MY PROBLEM, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"

The best he could do was to offer to put us up at the trashy Ramada Inn next to the complex for the night, as though that would solve the whole BUT WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE problem. He couldn't tell us when the apartment would be ready, or if it would ever be ready. What he could tell us was that none of this was his fault, it sucked that this was ruining his Saturday night, and that his supervisor would call us back that night - which she never did.

Finally, the fact that we would NOT be moving into that apartment that night started to sink in, and we ran for the digital camera and starting making calls to people like Brad's Mama Jama and Bruce (his step-dad) and our current landlord. We were lucky to get really good advice that night; for example, did you know that in Texas, if you sign a lease for an apartment that is part of the Texas Apartment Association (most are) you have 72 hours upon signing to cancel that lease? Also, if the apartment is not ready for move-in (as in un-liveable), you can cancel then as well? Good to know, right?

We finally made it home, took the U-Haul back, and feel asleep with a nervous pit of "Holy Crap, we're homeless" rumbling in our stomachs. I got up early the next morning, uploaded the photos and burned them to disc to show the management I meant business, write the most detailed Termination of Lease Notice you've ever seen, and faxed it with the link to the photos. I can sound pretty darn authoritative on paper when I'm pissed off, I'll tell you that much. Brad and I got on the horn that afternoon and actually viewed the apartment we're moving into before five that day. Lucky for us, the whole thing was solved in its own way in less than 24 hours, leaving us with "which pink trashbag are the toothbrushes in" problems to solve instead.

Monday, we saw more apartments and finally chose the first one we saw to be our new home. You know the rest of the story.

The moral of the story? When the pit of your stomach asks you, "Is this place too ghetto for us?" just assume that the answer is YES.

Lucy loves you |