I like to gripe about the house I'm renting. While the rent is cheap, there's barely any insulation in the place. It also costs a fortune to heat, it's invaded by ants every February, the foundation is crumbling and my indifferent landlord continues to ignore my pleas to fix several small things like the hall light. Still, at least I don't have to deal with all of this:

Yes indeed -- we spent 13 hours on Saturday, Craig, Dean [not their real names] and myself, moving stuff out of my (old) place and Craig's into here, our new place. Among the events from that day: First visit to IKEA (awesome)! I lost my phone (less so)! I caused cosmetic damage to Craig's new bed (he was pissed, but I would've been, too)!

This place is totally awesome... except the boiler broke, so we have no heat and no hot water. Awesome!

Also, Dean is sleeping on our couch because the cops batter-rammed down his door on Saturday while he was at work and arrested all his roommates. The guy sleeping on their couch had crack. But somehow he got released, too.

This email arrived in my inbox last night from a colleague living in Washington DC. Over the past few months he's passed along tales of his friend Dean's apartment. Before the police raided the place, a roommate of his made a habit of hanging around with a group of low-level DC gangstas. One, a local dealer with a PCP habit who traveled under the alias of "Kermit" (not his real alias) didn't care too much for Dean but liked his stuff. One night Kermit made off with his work laptop. When Dean confronted him about the theft, the dealer told him to "watch his back" because he was going to kill him when the time was right.

The colleague that passed along this email has also had his fair share of run-ins with Kermit. One night he instantaneously wound up on Kermit's shit list when he made the mistake of not shaking his hand correctly. And now Kermit and company are back out on the streets and Dean has had to go into hiding on the couch of an apartment with heating problems in the middle of January.

All things considered, I think I'd rather deal with the ants.

Labels: DC