With all the time I’ve freed up, you might be wondering what I’ve been doing to keep myself busy. I like to think it’s been a productive 4 5 5 and a half months, but I’ll let you be the judge.
June 5th: I resign from my job. This was a great day. I remember going straight to the golf course with a plan to consume a shot of fireball for every birdie made. I also remember making no birdies, so I had to amend the rules to include pars. I also also remember still remember being pretty sober by the end of the round. But that’s neither here nor there. My job had been fairly demanding, so I gave myself a month in the city of Madison to relax and hang out with the people I’d been postponing on for years. In this time, I developed a pretty solid routine of waking up, making breakfast, going to the gym, working on my side project, and playing golf…everyday. If you ignore the fact that my handicap went up during this time, life was perfect.
July 1st: The dreaded moving day. I feel like I’ve moved more than anyone I know – in four years of college, I moved four separate times. In Madison, I also moved four times in six years. And even now, I anticipate we’ll move again next year because our current apartment is a nightmare (I’ll go into more detail about this later), and again the year after that once my fiancee finishes up her grad school program. Being the frugal individual that I am, I’ve never hired movers before, despite telling myself that I will after each move. Our lease in Ann Arbor didn’t start until mid-August, so we actually had a fun month of a half of being homeless. We wound up living with my future in-laws for a bit, and I don’t mind to admit, it was awesome. I would move back in today if I could. Don’t knock it until you try it. We’d wake up to an empty house, get our workouts in, work on our projects, then start to prepare dinner for the parents. I’ve never felt more appreciated in my life – I swear it was like they hadn’t eaten anything other than baked chicken and veggies for dinner (this might actually be true). It was a great feeling to have dinner ready for our landlords that were allowing to live and store all of our belongings rent-free, as soon as they walked through the door. Everyday a beer with dinner, every night was a family movie night.
July 13th: I got engaged!
July 28th: My mom and sister had been planning a trip to Paris for the 2024 summer olympics for over a year at this point. With everything already planned, my fiancee and I decided to tag along.
Aug 6th: After a week in Paris, we returned to my in-laws place, and we quickly fell back into the routine described above.
Aug 13th: Moving day. Again. This one wasn’t actually terrible. With all of our possessions were neatly packed up in my in-laws garage, it was pretty quick to get everything into the moving truck, drive it an hour to Ann Arbor, and move it into the apartment. Little did we know, the drama was to follow. On just the second night, we were woken in the middle of the night to our upstairs neighbors in a screaming match. These screaming bouts have become a common occurrence, along with blasting loud music. I would say it occurs anywhere from 2-4 times a week, mostly on weeknights. Additionally, one week into our residence, we had a flooding incident. Property management still hasn’t done a thing to determine the root cause. I’ll share some recent, one-way email correspondence.
October 14th – two weeks after being ghosted after politely asking for an update:
Jeremy – we are at a month and a half since the flooding incident (August 30th), and there has been no progress. Is there someone else we should be talking to to get this resolved? On September 20th, I was told that the contractor would be coming on September 23rd to address the foundation issue. It’s now three weeks later and we haven’t received an update. After the foundation issue is resolved, we’ve also been told that the area behind the baseboards and the area underneath the carpet would be inspected for mold, since they were both soaked for over a week. We were also told that the baseboards would be replaced, as they are discolored and clearly water damaged.
To summarize, our concerns are:
- Root cause analysis of the flooding, as we have been told that this has been an ongoing issue, but since nothing has been done to remedy the situation flooding could occur again. We are worried everytime it rains that it may happen again.
- Inspection for mold behind the baseboards and replacement of the water damaged baseboards. As there is potential for mold, it’s worrisome that we’ve potentially been living with mold for over a month.
- Inspection for mold underneath the carpet.
Unrelated to flooding/potential mold problems, we also have complaints with our upstairs neighbors. They play loud music at all hours (they are currently blasting music now, at 10:30pm on a Monday), have screaming matches almost daily/nightly, and continue to smoke weed on the property.
October 23rd:
Can you please provide an update?
And as I type this, at 11pm on a weeknight, there continues to be music blasting above us.
We still have not heard from this guy. I hate it here.
Aug 22nd: I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but I grew up in Massachusetts, which is where my family lives. A true Masshole through and through. Anyways, since leaving for college, I have not had any opportunities for longer trips home, so it felt like a good time for an extended stay. It also coincided with my fantasy football league’s annual reunion and draft festivities. As is tradition with many fantasy football league’s, we like to have a fun competition to determine draft order. In past year’s, we have done a wizard staff, beer mile, beer olympics, and an NFL combine. Being in Boston for the draft this year, we decided to do a half mile kayak race on the Charles River.
September 5th: My mom was invited to Sweden for an award she won for her research in Alzheimer’s. I was third on the invite list to attend as her plus one.
September 11th: I never said it out loud, but I was definitely a little weary of flying on September 11th. But alas, I got on the plane and made it back to the great state of Michigan.
So, what have I been doing for the last two months? I’ll save that for next time.