Apartment Search Complete

I achieved my goal of finding a place to live come July 1 during my past few days off from work. I settled on one of the mill apartments in the city; I chose the one with the stairs that go nowhere. That weirdness of that feature appealed to me (as those who know me might consider me weird anyway).

I almost took the smaller unit in the back of another building but decided that, despite the open kitchen and lower rent, the view onto the courtyard included too many basement-people patios. That many patios (and the number of bikes tossed about on the one directly below the unit in question) means that there will be plenty of assclowns yapping away at all hours of the night and day as well as the potential for screaming kids running around on some of the only available grass.

Besides, the allure of a half-twist of spiral staircase cut off at the ceiling is just too cool to ignore. That area with the staircase also has room for a small desk, so it would be a cool mini-office. The landlord also threw in a free month of rent for the stairs place, so that sealed the deal. I’ll be saving about $275 from the other mill place I was looking at (and it truly is worth the extra cash, but I’m just not willing to spend it now and they wouldn’t wait until July for the rent) and $265 from the third mill place (top floor and hardwood floors would have been nice, but too expensive). I’ll only be spending $183 more a month than what I paying now (and I’ve got a roommate), plus there are many more utilities included in the stairs-place rent (including the central AC, score!). Plus, I’ll be back in a city within walking distance to the city center and a Dunkin Donuts (Saturday AM breakfast bagels, anyone?).

As an added bonus, I passed a city cop entering his apartment right up the hall from mine. Considering that this city has a checkered history and still plenty of property crime, it’s nice to know that I’ve got a cop on the same floor/hall as me. That crime will certainly increase my insurance, but I’m hoping that the fact that my parking area has 24 hour security will help offset those costs a bit. It will be kind of cool to get out of the suburbs and back into a city atmosphere where you expect the trash as opposed to paying exorbitant rents for a “luxury community” and having the trash move in anyway due to Mass housing laws.

My belief is that I either have to live in the city or in the woods; this halfway-crap with the suburbs just doesn’t cut it for me. I either need utter solitude or the bustle of a living city to keep me awake and alive.

As far as city life goes, I’m looking forward to having a lot of things within easy walking distance again. Being able to hang out at a bookstore, get a cup of coffee, have a beer and still be able to walk home in 15 minutes is a favorite memory of mine from my days in Boston/Allston. And despite my hardline stance on immigration reform, I dig living someplace that has a lot of different cultural influences. My only real concern is crime and, given my size and my gender, I don’t generally get a lot of second glances by potential muggers (this will be even more true once I get back into my exercise habits). I checked out the crime rates and violent crime really isn’t that bad in this city; it’s primarily property crime. Neither my car nor my motorcycle are high on anyone’s value list, so I should be ok.

Of course, now I have to decide what to bring. The urge to get rid of all extraneous music, movies and entertainment devices has been strong. I’m seriously considering dumping the TV and selling my surround system to my roommate, who has come to love surround sound with movies/TV (it is great). I do like watching movies, though, and I’d considered starting up my Netflix rentals again. My concern is that I’ll spend all my spare time watching movies or TV-series-on-DVD because it’s so much easier that reading and/or writing. Getting rid of broadcast may not be enough, I may need to cut the cord altogether.

Of course, that pretty much negates my buying a console gaming system, but I’m not so sure that really bothers me. Plus, the money I’ll be saving on cable TV will be excellent, and if there’s a movie I truly HAVE to see, I can always watch it on my computer.

Losing the music is another story. I can rip a lot of what I want to hard disk and DVD backup, but those are volatile storage solutions. Home NAS isn’t up to snuff yet, IMO (who would want NAS without RAID anyway?) and I’m not buying a server for home. Dragging around 700+ CDs is just not worth the hassle when I barely listen to a quarter of them. I’ve catalogued all my CDs in a spreadsheet and I think I’ll make it available to friends and family and start getting rid of them. The big bummer of the CD purging is that I’ll no longer need the CD storage unit that my father built for me. I don’t want to just give it away because it’s something he spent the time to make for me and something that has been extremely useful to me over the years. But I also don’t want to tote it around with me if I’m not going to use it, as the whole point of this purging is to simplify my life and my surroundings. It’s a conundrum.

Ah well, I’m just happy to know that the apartment thing is taken care of with plenty of time to spare. Now I just need to deal all the hassles of moving. Maybe I’ll hire a moving company this time around?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 08th, 2006 at 4:37pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.