Sometimes that chasm that lies between our hopes, and our reality, can be pretty wide. I have to confess I still have a ways to go on navigating that particular chasm, especially when it comes to something I so badly crave … travel.
Case in point: I wanted to get away for my birthday this year. You know, like people often do when they celebrate birthdays, especially milestone birthdays like 40, 50 or so. Feb. 17 marked my non-milestone 53rd birthday, but I wanted it to be more special than the non-events my 50th, 51st and 52nd birthdays had been. I KNEW I didn't want to spend it at work.
I thought maybe, just maybe, I could spend it away from home, too. Away from the city. Away from the state, as a matter of fact. I figured that such a trip would be the one stone with which I could kill two birds: (1) a desire to engage in fun, recreational birthday activities and (2) Dre's and my worsening case of general wanderlust, an itch we haven't been able to scratch much because of financial limitations … and, due to the society-reporter/photographer aspect of my newspaper job, time limitations.
Our last trips out of the state had both come in May of 2014: a ninth-anniversary Carnival cruise out of New Orleans (thanks, tax refund!) and a trip to Houston to my brother-in-law's annual Memorial Day Weekend house party. The year before that, we'd left the state only for an eighth-anniversary Carnival cruise, plus I attended a conference in San Diego. I know … these are far better opportunities than many people — especially, newspaper reporters married to full-time freelance writers — are afforded in this "recovering" economy.
BUT, argued my bratty side, those aren't not much to brag about when I have so many friends, coworkers, associates and acquaintances who seem to regularly travel the globe. And hey, it's February 2015. Those May '14 trips had long worn off, darn it.
For a while, a 53rd-birthday trip looked promising. We have a friend whose birthday is Feb. 11 and who — despite her own financial limitations — has managed to do a bit of traveling thanks to some good connections and some moxie. She'd paid a timeshare company a dirt-cheap price for seven nights' accommodation, during a week of her choice, at either its Orlando or Daytona Beach, Fla., property. In return for a stay with four other friends, she'd have to attend a 90-minute presentation. She and I discussed the possibility of celebrating our birthdays together in one of the Florida cities along with Dre, perhaps her sister, and whomever else we could throw in. We just needed to buy airline tickets, which, would be only a tantalizing $125 per person, round-trip, if we chose to fly out of Bentonville, Ark. (We'd also discussed the possibility of going with her to Los Angeles to visit and board with a friend of hers a couple of days, then Megabus-ing it to Las Vegas or some such itinerary. But the airline tickets were higher.)
Excited, I put in for eight days of vacation time at work. Unfortunately, that $250 in plane ticket money didn't leap out at us, especially as we were still suffering the effects of moving-related expenses. Also, Dre began to be concerned that once the timeshare sharks in Florida had us in their grip, they'd try to pressure us all into attending their presentation rather than requiring only our friend to go.
By the end of January, the trip was off the table anyway. The friend had taken two weeks unpaid leave from work and didn't have the plane-ticket money herself. And, it turned out, she needed to have an outpatient medical procedure … on my birthday. Florida was out.
Hubby and I tried to plan an alternative trip, an overnighter in Memphis with a male buddy and his new lady friend, to whom we'd helped introduce him. The game plan here: Reserve a two-bedroom suite at a hotel we found through Booking.com. (We were going to do things proper-like — Dre and me in one bedroom, the lady friend in the other, and our buddy taking the living-room sleeper sofa). We'd drive to Memphis on Monday the 16th and come back late the following evening. I whittled down my vacation-time request accordingly.
After we booked the hotel, the lady friend found out she would not be able to get off work. The buddy asked if we could switch the trip to Saturday-Sunday, Feb. 14-15, instead. We couldn't. I had to cover an event for the newspaper, and besides, I WAS DETERMINED TO BE GONE ON MY BIRTHDAY!!! Dre and I would just go it alone, we decided. I tried to downgrade us to a one-bedroom suite at the same hotel. These were all taken, so I canceled the reservation altogether. After some discussion, we decided Memphis might be a bit too expensive without our companions, and not so exciting on a couple of weekdays. Once again, the 53rd birthday celebration was downgraded — this time to a day trip to our own lovely-but-done-to-death Hot Springs. The Good Times Hurricane had shrunk to a tropical depression, and was not helped by a cold Dre had caught the week before.
It was weather that sounded the death knell on those final birthday plans. Sleet was heading our way, the weatherman announced. I did some work at the office the evening of the 15th. By the time I got off, sleet had started to fall. The streets weren't slick yet, but the car was iced over. It took a while to thaw it out to go home. By Monday morning, I was finally forced to face facts: The birthday that I'd once hoped to spend in Florida had dwindled down to a yet another non-event. I'd be spending my two days off iced in with a husband who was battling a stubborn cold. (Our timeshare-trip buying friend didn't her surgery. The clinic was closed on the 17th due to the ice, and she wasn't going out in it anyway.)
Consolation came in the form of myriad birthday greetings from Facebook friends; a card with a movie-treat IOU from my next-door-neighbor gal pal, and a salmon dinner my sweet husband fixed for me despite his own troubles.
It certainly wasn't the first time weather had messed up my birthday plans. It's a threat for any winter babies out there. Heck, Mother Nature still owes me for a canceled elementary-school birthday party. But you know how it goes: The grass always seems to be greener in the yards of friends and acquaintances. A number of mine have enjoyed birthday trips to various far-flung locales … a Facebook pal, also born in February, got to celebrate in Cancun just last week.
Don't get me wrong; I'm usually good at putting my Big Girl Britches on and shaking disappointments off. But this disappointment has lingered … and our general wanderlust continues to worsen. By the way, I also battle envy of married couples who have close "couple-friends" to travel with. For whatever reason, Dre and I have had no success cultivating such friendships.
Guess it's time to parlay those Notes to Self into Books to Self, complete with inspirational quips ("Count those blessings. Cultivate a state of gratefulness.") and stern self-lectures ("Stop sniveling and do some real planning for that 54th birthday." )
In the meantime, we'd better start seriously thinking about our 10th wedding anniversary — whose travel plans are still in the air, but for which hope at least still springs.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Now, for that entry on moving that I promised.
I thought back to all the moves I made in my adulthood and divided them up into "had to" and "want to" moves.
The "want to" moves include my 1986, all-too-belated move from my mother's and stepfather's home in Woodson, Ark., to a one-bed, one-bath apartment in downtown Little Rock, within walking distance to work. And although I wasn't by any means crazy about the small ex-rent house my ex-husband and I purchased in southwest Little Rock in 1991, I'll go ahead and count that as a "want to" move. A DEFINITE "want to" move came six years later; I relocated from the ex-rent house to my new bachelorettehood-revisited pad — another one-bed, one-bath, low-rent unit in downtown Little Rock. I lived on the top floor of this 12-unit, three-story, walk-up complex only two blocks from the office. I called my place the Penthouse.
My "dream" want-to move happened in 2002. I abandoned downtown Little Rock for a recently built home in North Little Rock's Lakewood Valley neighborhood. It marked my first time "owning" a number of the modern home amenities: a two-car garage with remote-controlled door. A master bedroom with a tray ceiling. Two — not one, but two — bathrooms, including a master bath with a jetted tub and twin walk-in closets and which was big enough for me to jump rope in it. A dishwasher. My own top-of-the-line washer and dryer, thrown in by the seller. A greatroom with a cathedral ceiling. Enough electrical outlets, doggone it. No signs of age or decay anywhere, although the home was built on the worst lot in the neighborhood … a lot featuring a crumbling, 20-foot cliff in the backyard and an unsodded, unstable, weed-dominated lawn. But I grew up poor and "wudn't used to nothin'."
I definitely wasn't used to the house payment I'd gotten myself into. I stayed house-poor and in trouble with the mortgage company the whole four years I lived in the place … Then came the first, and most devastating, of my "had to" moves. I lost the place. By that time I'd remarried, but my new husband, Dre, was getting his start as a full-time, self-employed writer. He couldn't help, and I was (and am) far more concerned about his character than what the man could do for me financially.
This "had to move" was to two destinations. For much of our stuff, a fancy midtown storage unit on whose rent I'd gotten a deal. For Hubby and me, another downtown apartment. This was a two-bedroom, one-postage-stamp-sized-bathroom unit in a five-unit complex recommended by my hairdresser, who'd been a tenant there. It was a cute place, with character, in a nice, quiet neighborhood. But the rent was only $300 less than the house payment had been. And the landlord had basically given up on keeping the place from falling to dilapidation and bugs. There was no pest control, and the big"water bug" roaches got so bad we were paying THEM rent. But hey, we still had a working dishwasher. And a balcony.
We managed to make the rent with the help of Hubby's freelance income, which had increased nicely and was steady for a time; two clients of his in particular were local magazine publishers who paid pretty decently. And then, the economy tanked and the Great Recession began. One of the aforementioned editors ceased publication. The other went through some personal issues and struggled to stay afloat. She couldn't pay what she used to. Other freelance income dried up. I found myself under a pay freeze at work, one that continues to this day. The rent was even harder to make, even in parts. We'd tried to get a discount by offering to keep up the grounds … something else that the landlord had let go by the wayside. But he'd only knock off $50 a month, and after a particularly grueling leaf-raking-and-gathering incident, we knew we were too old, and $50 wasn't enough.
The place continued to go to pot. Near the end, the roof not only begun leaking, it committed the cardinal sin (in Dre's eyes) of leaking way too close to our home computer.
Meanwhile, our rent at the fancy storage place was increased, so we moved to a smaller unit and got rid of some of our stuff. When the rent for the smaller unit was later raised, we were forced to move out of it and cram what we could into our apartment. I hate clutter, but it seemed to have become my lot of life.
The end of 2010 brought what I'll call our "had to, but also wanted to" move. I talked my husband into moving back with me to the downtown Little Rock apartment complex in which I'd moved when my first marriage tanked ... the place where my Penthouse had been located. Dre hadn't wanted to downgrade to one bedroom, but the rent here was still low — $325 lower than the leaky Water Bug Haven, and I wouldn't need to buy a monthly parking permit for work. This time around, home was on the first floor. Since we were losing a bedroom, we shunted some of our stuff to a very cheap ministorage unit in North Little Rock.
When I'd stayed in this building before, the place had been much better cared for, and living there had been fun. At that time, my coworkers and I occupied half the building. We were a family. In fact, every Christmas we all opened up our apartments for one big holiday party. Guests could wander up and down the stairs, poking their heads in one apartment or the other, munching and chatting. This time around was nothing like those good old days. I had a good friend on the third floor, and Dre and I became amiable acquaintances with several other tenants. But there were no coworker-neighbors. They'd all gone on to bigger and better things while "loser me" had to move back there (so the devil was hissing in my ear). And this place, too, was crumbling, not as well kept as in previous years. As was the case at the previous place, the landlord jerry-rigged things rather than fixing them. Our motel-style heating and air unit had to be replaced three times.
But at least here, the lawn was kept mowed. We also had pest control, although it didn't stop the pests; luckily we saw a water bug only a couple of times a year. The huge, flimsy windows failed to keep out the dirt and dust and at times, they let rain in too. They definitely didn't keep out the sounds … everything from traffic to drunken revelers after the bars closed to various "characters" who seemed to wait until they were right outside our window before cursing each other out. (Among the more interesting things we overheard: a guy preaching a profanity-laced sermon to no one in particular, and on another occasion, drunken hymn-singing.)
Many of our neighbors struggled — or seemed to — with their finances, job losses, shaky family relationships, health issues, and other aspects of their lives. Overall, the place had taken on a bit of a depressing air. And I became gradually more frustrated with our unit. The one thing I always wanted was a beautiful home, but we were stuck in a still-cluttered apartment with hardwood floors that desperately needed sanding/buffing and which we couldn't keep clean for love or money. Kitchen-floor linoleum we couldn't keep clean for love or money. An everything-in-general we couldn't keep clean for love or money. Not with all that dirt and dust and. Not with furniture that hadn't held up very well after all the moves. And not with the invasions of midsize roaches, then ants, ants, and more dratted ants.
But there were "big doin's" in the surrounding area. The River Market District, the downtown tourist district whose hub was directly four blocks north of us, had crept farther and farther south. The old gas-company building, which had taken up a city block across the street from us, had been demolished. A new Homewood Suites hotel was being built on half of the block, and a hot new apartment complex, MacArthur Commons, would soon get underway on the other half.
It was in January 2014 that we began to notice The Visitors … strange people touring the place, chatting with our landlord. The landlord sent out a notice saying there would be "apartment inspections," which had never been done before. We soon realized who The Visitors were: representatives of the city's leading real-estate development and management company. Eventually my third-floor friend, who'd lived in the building for 20-plus years and whose biggest concern was that the building would be sold out from under us someday, asked the landlord flat-out if he was going to sell. He simply said that no offer had been made yet.
Several weeks went by in silence. On March 26, just as we were about to relax again, it was announced online that the Leading Real-Estate Development and Management Company had bought the building, which would be renamed (it was my first time finding out it had an OLD name) and undergo a $1 million renovation. The new rents would be far more than what we were paying.
The times they were a-changin'. The day after the announcement, workmen showed up to start renovating the empty first-floor apartment. We all received reassuring notes shoved under our doors by the Leading Real-Estate Development and Management Company: "We're your new landlords. Bear with us, we'll be fixing up apartments and common areas. Please pardon our noise," blah blah blah.
"What are you going to DO?" I'd been asked by the panicked co-worker who'd brought the announcement of the sale to my attention. What Dre and I did was make an appointment to meet with our new property manager. She was quite nice, telling us that the company had no plans to make big changes anytime soon and that for the time being, we'd still be paying the same rent and operating under the same rules laid by our previous landlord.
Several of our neighbors immediately hightailed it out of the place, having already made plans to go. Gradually, others began to leave. Renovations would begin on each apartment that was vacated. The minute each renovation was completed, a new, upscale tenant would arrive. When I found out the new neighbor living above us was an airline pilot, I KNEW the times had "a-changed."
Finally, there were only five old-schoolers, including Dre and me, left in four apartments. Two other unrenovated apartments bore tenants who'd moved in under the New Regime. Dre and I were move-weary and, perhaps naively, thought that maybe the New Regime would work something out with us since they hadn't kicked us out yet. As the months passed, we frequently discussed the situation with current and former neighbors. We found out the new rents, instead of being the high three-figure rents that had been previously announced, had been bumped up to an even, four-figure sum.
I flashed back to my first time living in that building in the mid-to-late 1990s. A friend of mine predicted then that gentrification would come to the area, that the landlord would sell, that the new owners would fix up the place, and that the rents would go up. He even predicted, down to the dollar amount, what would eventually be charged for our apartments.
But nobody was kicking us out. We began to relax again.
Then came mid-October … and the email from our property manager to us and the other old-schoolers. She lauded us as being good tenants, but told us that the investors wanted the building renovation to be complete in early 2015, and that she'd have to ask us to relocate. The note didn't end there: The company had taken over management of a building that, as it happened, was located in our dream neighborhood, the Quapaw Quarter Governor's Mansion District. We were offered the option to move there without being required to go through a new application process or put down a new deposit.
This was another "had to" move, which we completed Nov. 15 of last year. To say we had mixed feelings would be an understatement. We felt the sting of gentrification, which Google defines as "a general term for the arrival of wealthier people in an existing urban district, a related increase in rents and property values, and changes in the district's character and culture. The term is often used negatively, suggesting the displacement of poor communities by rich outsiders." But we also felt grateful to be given an option, especially an option in the neighborhood in which we hope to someday own a home again.
Our new home is located in an old girl that was built circa the 1950s (or at least, had its bathroom tile done then); it had been empty 12 years and was being gradually fixed up. Here, we could have a new beginning, we decided when we saw the second-floor, one-bedroom unit that we came to choose. The tan walls with white trim, the walnut-stained hardwood floors, the huge, made-for-multipurpose living room, the quietness of the beautiful neighborhood, the nice second-floor view … it was attractive enough for us to resolve to store, throw or give away everything necessary to have an abode that wouldn't end up looking like a city dump. The rent would be only $130 more than the low rent we'd been paying. And yay, our third-floor neighbor at the old place would become our next-door neighbor at the new place.
The downside: This was by far the toughest move Dre and I have ever gone through, together or separately.
Move before last, we paid a stepfather and stepson $200 to move us. Last move was a five-block undertaking we handled gradually by car, then with two volunteers and my brother's truck on a rainy Moving Day. This time around, being a couple of 50-somethings, we knew we needed professional help. We paid College Hunks Movers the equivalent of a months' rent at the new place. And we still had to rub each other down with fake Icy Hot nightly due to all the packing and lifting we did ourselves, especially Dre's efforts to move what is basically an entire library of books. Not to mention the energy we expended on all that stuff we gave away, sold, took to storage or tossed.
Annnnd the building wasn't quite ready for prime time. We walked into a number of cosmetic and "working order" issues, thanks to the obvious haste with which our apartment was prepared; a couple of the cosmetic issues still await resolution. We were forced to cancel our AT&T home phone and Internet services because there was no AT&T wiring whatsoever in the apartment ... a fact of which we weren't made aware beforehand. Even after we resigned ourselves to going without a home phone and using Comcast for Internet, we were offline for month, partially because our Comcast wiring had to be redone. The wires in the attic were old, plus they had been cut by the heating/air installers. (Not good for Dre, who couldn't work. Not good for our AT&T cell-phone bill, which went up $30 due to extra data we burned, having no wifi.) And then there was Mrs. C. (See previous post.) To say we stayed tense and upset in varying degrees from October through the New Year would be an understatement.
The complex continues to manifest maddeningly bizarre issues I won't go into here, for maddeningly bizarre reasons I won't go into here. (I will mention, however, that our levelized electric bill shot up at winter's end because the rocket-scientist HVAC installers had not hooked up our heat pump. The unit, which blew hot and cold air and kept Dre sick, borrowed from its emergency heating strips and ran our electric meter nuts. We didn't realize this until spring, when we discovered the air conditioning hadn't been hooked up either, and called Maintenance.) Despite the remaining issues, we're grateful to at least have updated kitchen and bathroom fixtures; pests that, for the most part have been tiny and manifest infrequently (one water bug and no ants so far), windows that at least keep out dirt and rain, and a living room that has supported my efforts to make it beautiful. Best of all … no more Mrs. C.
Our next move? We hope it will be our happiest "want to" move yet: one to a renovated historic house in this neighborhood, via movers we'll be able to pay to pack and unpack for us.
I thought back to all the moves I made in my adulthood and divided them up into "had to" and "want to" moves.
The "want to" moves include my 1986, all-too-belated move from my mother's and stepfather's home in Woodson, Ark., to a one-bed, one-bath apartment in downtown Little Rock, within walking distance to work. And although I wasn't by any means crazy about the small ex-rent house my ex-husband and I purchased in southwest Little Rock in 1991, I'll go ahead and count that as a "want to" move. A DEFINITE "want to" move came six years later; I relocated from the ex-rent house to my new bachelorettehood-revisited pad — another one-bed, one-bath, low-rent unit in downtown Little Rock. I lived on the top floor of this 12-unit, three-story, walk-up complex only two blocks from the office. I called my place the Penthouse.
My "dream" want-to move happened in 2002. I abandoned downtown Little Rock for a recently built home in North Little Rock's Lakewood Valley neighborhood. It marked my first time "owning" a number of the modern home amenities: a two-car garage with remote-controlled door. A master bedroom with a tray ceiling. Two — not one, but two — bathrooms, including a master bath with a jetted tub and twin walk-in closets and which was big enough for me to jump rope in it. A dishwasher. My own top-of-the-line washer and dryer, thrown in by the seller. A greatroom with a cathedral ceiling. Enough electrical outlets, doggone it. No signs of age or decay anywhere, although the home was built on the worst lot in the neighborhood … a lot featuring a crumbling, 20-foot cliff in the backyard and an unsodded, unstable, weed-dominated lawn. But I grew up poor and "wudn't used to nothin'."
I definitely wasn't used to the house payment I'd gotten myself into. I stayed house-poor and in trouble with the mortgage company the whole four years I lived in the place … Then came the first, and most devastating, of my "had to" moves. I lost the place. By that time I'd remarried, but my new husband, Dre, was getting his start as a full-time, self-employed writer. He couldn't help, and I was (and am) far more concerned about his character than what the man could do for me financially.
This "had to move" was to two destinations. For much of our stuff, a fancy midtown storage unit on whose rent I'd gotten a deal. For Hubby and me, another downtown apartment. This was a two-bedroom, one-postage-stamp-sized-bathroom unit in a five-unit complex recommended by my hairdresser, who'd been a tenant there. It was a cute place, with character, in a nice, quiet neighborhood. But the rent was only $300 less than the house payment had been. And the landlord had basically given up on keeping the place from falling to dilapidation and bugs. There was no pest control, and the big"water bug" roaches got so bad we were paying THEM rent. But hey, we still had a working dishwasher. And a balcony.
We managed to make the rent with the help of Hubby's freelance income, which had increased nicely and was steady for a time; two clients of his in particular were local magazine publishers who paid pretty decently. And then, the economy tanked and the Great Recession began. One of the aforementioned editors ceased publication. The other went through some personal issues and struggled to stay afloat. She couldn't pay what she used to. Other freelance income dried up. I found myself under a pay freeze at work, one that continues to this day. The rent was even harder to make, even in parts. We'd tried to get a discount by offering to keep up the grounds … something else that the landlord had let go by the wayside. But he'd only knock off $50 a month, and after a particularly grueling leaf-raking-and-gathering incident, we knew we were too old, and $50 wasn't enough.
The place continued to go to pot. Near the end, the roof not only begun leaking, it committed the cardinal sin (in Dre's eyes) of leaking way too close to our home computer.
Meanwhile, our rent at the fancy storage place was increased, so we moved to a smaller unit and got rid of some of our stuff. When the rent for the smaller unit was later raised, we were forced to move out of it and cram what we could into our apartment. I hate clutter, but it seemed to have become my lot of life.
The end of 2010 brought what I'll call our "had to, but also wanted to" move. I talked my husband into moving back with me to the downtown Little Rock apartment complex in which I'd moved when my first marriage tanked ... the place where my Penthouse had been located. Dre hadn't wanted to downgrade to one bedroom, but the rent here was still low — $325 lower than the leaky Water Bug Haven, and I wouldn't need to buy a monthly parking permit for work. This time around, home was on the first floor. Since we were losing a bedroom, we shunted some of our stuff to a very cheap ministorage unit in North Little Rock.
When I'd stayed in this building before, the place had been much better cared for, and living there had been fun. At that time, my coworkers and I occupied half the building. We were a family. In fact, every Christmas we all opened up our apartments for one big holiday party. Guests could wander up and down the stairs, poking their heads in one apartment or the other, munching and chatting. This time around was nothing like those good old days. I had a good friend on the third floor, and Dre and I became amiable acquaintances with several other tenants. But there were no coworker-neighbors. They'd all gone on to bigger and better things while "loser me" had to move back there (so the devil was hissing in my ear). And this place, too, was crumbling, not as well kept as in previous years. As was the case at the previous place, the landlord jerry-rigged things rather than fixing them. Our motel-style heating and air unit had to be replaced three times.
But at least here, the lawn was kept mowed. We also had pest control, although it didn't stop the pests; luckily we saw a water bug only a couple of times a year. The huge, flimsy windows failed to keep out the dirt and dust and at times, they let rain in too. They definitely didn't keep out the sounds … everything from traffic to drunken revelers after the bars closed to various "characters" who seemed to wait until they were right outside our window before cursing each other out. (Among the more interesting things we overheard: a guy preaching a profanity-laced sermon to no one in particular, and on another occasion, drunken hymn-singing.)
Many of our neighbors struggled — or seemed to — with their finances, job losses, shaky family relationships, health issues, and other aspects of their lives. Overall, the place had taken on a bit of a depressing air. And I became gradually more frustrated with our unit. The one thing I always wanted was a beautiful home, but we were stuck in a still-cluttered apartment with hardwood floors that desperately needed sanding/buffing and which we couldn't keep clean for love or money. Kitchen-floor linoleum we couldn't keep clean for love or money. An everything-in-general we couldn't keep clean for love or money. Not with all that dirt and dust and. Not with furniture that hadn't held up very well after all the moves. And not with the invasions of midsize roaches, then ants, ants, and more dratted ants.
But there were "big doin's" in the surrounding area. The River Market District, the downtown tourist district whose hub was directly four blocks north of us, had crept farther and farther south. The old gas-company building, which had taken up a city block across the street from us, had been demolished. A new Homewood Suites hotel was being built on half of the block, and a hot new apartment complex, MacArthur Commons, would soon get underway on the other half.
It was in January 2014 that we began to notice The Visitors … strange people touring the place, chatting with our landlord. The landlord sent out a notice saying there would be "apartment inspections," which had never been done before. We soon realized who The Visitors were: representatives of the city's leading real-estate development and management company. Eventually my third-floor friend, who'd lived in the building for 20-plus years and whose biggest concern was that the building would be sold out from under us someday, asked the landlord flat-out if he was going to sell. He simply said that no offer had been made yet.
Several weeks went by in silence. On March 26, just as we were about to relax again, it was announced online that the Leading Real-Estate Development and Management Company had bought the building, which would be renamed (it was my first time finding out it had an OLD name) and undergo a $1 million renovation. The new rents would be far more than what we were paying.
The times they were a-changin'. The day after the announcement, workmen showed up to start renovating the empty first-floor apartment. We all received reassuring notes shoved under our doors by the Leading Real-Estate Development and Management Company: "We're your new landlords. Bear with us, we'll be fixing up apartments and common areas. Please pardon our noise," blah blah blah.
"What are you going to DO?" I'd been asked by the panicked co-worker who'd brought the announcement of the sale to my attention. What Dre and I did was make an appointment to meet with our new property manager. She was quite nice, telling us that the company had no plans to make big changes anytime soon and that for the time being, we'd still be paying the same rent and operating under the same rules laid by our previous landlord.
Several of our neighbors immediately hightailed it out of the place, having already made plans to go. Gradually, others began to leave. Renovations would begin on each apartment that was vacated. The minute each renovation was completed, a new, upscale tenant would arrive. When I found out the new neighbor living above us was an airline pilot, I KNEW the times had "a-changed."
Finally, there were only five old-schoolers, including Dre and me, left in four apartments. Two other unrenovated apartments bore tenants who'd moved in under the New Regime. Dre and I were move-weary and, perhaps naively, thought that maybe the New Regime would work something out with us since they hadn't kicked us out yet. As the months passed, we frequently discussed the situation with current and former neighbors. We found out the new rents, instead of being the high three-figure rents that had been previously announced, had been bumped up to an even, four-figure sum.
I flashed back to my first time living in that building in the mid-to-late 1990s. A friend of mine predicted then that gentrification would come to the area, that the landlord would sell, that the new owners would fix up the place, and that the rents would go up. He even predicted, down to the dollar amount, what would eventually be charged for our apartments.
But nobody was kicking us out. We began to relax again.
Then came mid-October … and the email from our property manager to us and the other old-schoolers. She lauded us as being good tenants, but told us that the investors wanted the building renovation to be complete in early 2015, and that she'd have to ask us to relocate. The note didn't end there: The company had taken over management of a building that, as it happened, was located in our dream neighborhood, the Quapaw Quarter Governor's Mansion District. We were offered the option to move there without being required to go through a new application process or put down a new deposit.
This was another "had to" move, which we completed Nov. 15 of last year. To say we had mixed feelings would be an understatement. We felt the sting of gentrification, which Google defines as "a general term for the arrival of wealthier people in an existing urban district, a related increase in rents and property values, and changes in the district's character and culture. The term is often used negatively, suggesting the displacement of poor communities by rich outsiders." But we also felt grateful to be given an option, especially an option in the neighborhood in which we hope to someday own a home again.
Our new home is located in an old girl that was built circa the 1950s (or at least, had its bathroom tile done then); it had been empty 12 years and was being gradually fixed up. Here, we could have a new beginning, we decided when we saw the second-floor, one-bedroom unit that we came to choose. The tan walls with white trim, the walnut-stained hardwood floors, the huge, made-for-multipurpose living room, the quietness of the beautiful neighborhood, the nice second-floor view … it was attractive enough for us to resolve to store, throw or give away everything necessary to have an abode that wouldn't end up looking like a city dump. The rent would be only $130 more than the low rent we'd been paying. And yay, our third-floor neighbor at the old place would become our next-door neighbor at the new place.
The downside: This was by far the toughest move Dre and I have ever gone through, together or separately.
Move before last, we paid a stepfather and stepson $200 to move us. Last move was a five-block undertaking we handled gradually by car, then with two volunteers and my brother's truck on a rainy Moving Day. This time around, being a couple of 50-somethings, we knew we needed professional help. We paid College Hunks Movers the equivalent of a months' rent at the new place. And we still had to rub each other down with fake Icy Hot nightly due to all the packing and lifting we did ourselves, especially Dre's efforts to move what is basically an entire library of books. Not to mention the energy we expended on all that stuff we gave away, sold, took to storage or tossed.
Annnnd the building wasn't quite ready for prime time. We walked into a number of cosmetic and "working order" issues, thanks to the obvious haste with which our apartment was prepared; a couple of the cosmetic issues still await resolution. We were forced to cancel our AT&T home phone and Internet services because there was no AT&T wiring whatsoever in the apartment ... a fact of which we weren't made aware beforehand. Even after we resigned ourselves to going without a home phone and using Comcast for Internet, we were offline for month, partially because our Comcast wiring had to be redone. The wires in the attic were old, plus they had been cut by the heating/air installers. (Not good for Dre, who couldn't work. Not good for our AT&T cell-phone bill, which went up $30 due to extra data we burned, having no wifi.) And then there was Mrs. C. (See previous post.) To say we stayed tense and upset in varying degrees from October through the New Year would be an understatement.
The complex continues to manifest maddeningly bizarre issues I won't go into here, for maddeningly bizarre reasons I won't go into here. (I will mention, however, that our levelized electric bill shot up at winter's end because the rocket-scientist HVAC installers had not hooked up our heat pump. The unit, which blew hot and cold air and kept Dre sick, borrowed from its emergency heating strips and ran our electric meter nuts. We didn't realize this until spring, when we discovered the air conditioning hadn't been hooked up either, and called Maintenance.) Despite the remaining issues, we're grateful to at least have updated kitchen and bathroom fixtures; pests that, for the most part have been tiny and manifest infrequently (one water bug and no ants so far), windows that at least keep out dirt and rain, and a living room that has supported my efforts to make it beautiful. Best of all … no more Mrs. C.
Our next move? We hope it will be our happiest "want to" move yet: one to a renovated historic house in this neighborhood, via movers we'll be able to pay to pack and unpack for us.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
So why did I choose "The day before payday" as a blog name?
For many years I'd said that whenever I wrote my autobiography, The Day Before Payday would be the title. I haven't gotten around to that autobiography yet, so I thought it would be as good a blog name as any.
The phrase has its rather unglamorous birth in my struggle to handle my finances. A regular indicator of said struggle: the utility shut-off notices that came in the mail. Back in the day, it always seemed to me that the "last day to pay" on the shutoff notices fell on … you guessed it … the day before payday. That was a major source of frustration to me — until I saw the humor in it.
"The day before payday" also represents, in the "concrete," or natural, a day of what I'll call desperate anticipation. It's akin to the feeling we harbored as children when it seemed that Christmas Day was taking its sweet time to arrive and deliver us our cool presents. The day before payday is the day before the weekend (for many in the workforce); the day before we can finally pay our bills or afford to have that lunch date or go to that movie or go shopping. In the "abstract," or spiritual, it represents the Christian's hope of the eternal reward that awaits the end of our journey as strangers and pilgrims on earth (Hebrews 11:15), and, for those of us who keep up with Bible prophecy, Christ's imminent return to earth.
As I've matured, I realize that we can't spend the day before payday merely sitting around and pining for payday. In the natural and in the spiritual, we'd best be making the most of our wait. To borrow from Jesus' parable, God gave us however many minas/pounds He chose to give us, and said, "Occupy till I come." (Luke 19:13). But there's nothing wrong with looking forward to the coming. It motivates us in our occupation!
For many years I'd said that whenever I wrote my autobiography, The Day Before Payday would be the title. I haven't gotten around to that autobiography yet, so I thought it would be as good a blog name as any.
The phrase has its rather unglamorous birth in my struggle to handle my finances. A regular indicator of said struggle: the utility shut-off notices that came in the mail. Back in the day, it always seemed to me that the "last day to pay" on the shutoff notices fell on … you guessed it … the day before payday. That was a major source of frustration to me — until I saw the humor in it.
"The day before payday" also represents, in the "concrete," or natural, a day of what I'll call desperate anticipation. It's akin to the feeling we harbored as children when it seemed that Christmas Day was taking its sweet time to arrive and deliver us our cool presents. The day before payday is the day before the weekend (for many in the workforce); the day before we can finally pay our bills or afford to have that lunch date or go to that movie or go shopping. In the "abstract," or spiritual, it represents the Christian's hope of the eternal reward that awaits the end of our journey as strangers and pilgrims on earth (Hebrews 11:15), and, for those of us who keep up with Bible prophecy, Christ's imminent return to earth.
As I've matured, I realize that we can't spend the day before payday merely sitting around and pining for payday. In the natural and in the spiritual, we'd best be making the most of our wait. To borrow from Jesus' parable, God gave us however many minas/pounds He chose to give us, and said, "Occupy till I come." (Luke 19:13). But there's nothing wrong with looking forward to the coming. It motivates us in our occupation!
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