I remember when I first signed the lease for this apartment — the two remaining months in my studio apartment seemed an unbearable amount of time to have to wait, and yet, four years ago today I moved into this place. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out of parents’ house, and it’s (duh) the longest my cats have ever lived anywhere. Tippy’s sleeping on my bed, Guy forced open the closet door and is snoozing on a hamper full of dirty clothes. I was idly wondering if they remember any of the other apartments we’ve lived in.

I remember once, many years ago, living at The Colony in Towson, when they were both at the screen door in the living room, looking out at the porch and the open sky and the walkway where fellow residents were passing past …

… when one of their dogs, a big nasty thing, broke free from its owner’s grip (nice job, ass) and threw himself against the screen door. Both cats broke quickly and darted onto the couch, then stood their ground as the dog’s owner grabbed his animal and wrestled him off my porch shouting “Sorry! Sorry!” as my felines hissed and hissed.

Good kitties.

Four years ago, it had been raining nearly non-stop for almost a month and a half. The day I moved, I woke up bright early in the morning and drove over to Gary’s house at 7am. I gave him the keys to my Jeep and he gave me the keys to his Ford pickup truck. I told him I’d have it back to him in the afternoon, but it wasn’t until much later that night I was able to return it to him.

I wanted nothing more than to take a long shower and have a great night sleep in my new apartment that night, but I couldn’t: the shower was broken! I was too tired to even try to figure out why it was broken and, as it turns out, the problem was that the shower knob had come loose, which I figured out and repaired the next morning literally ten seconds before the maintenace man knocked on my door to fix it. This is not the same problem I had a few months ago, where the shower knob literally broke.

The worst part was I had to go out that night to stock my fridge (well, I guess I didn’t, but I had a hankering for milk and ice cream, bite me). I must’ve smelled terrible. No wonder people were giving me a wide berth in the supermarket …

Technically, I’d started moving in the previous night. I’d talked the ladies in the rental office to give me the keys the previous day so that I didn’t have to wait until their office opened to begin moving in. There was some confusion (seems the maintenance guys had taken a while giving the apartment a “clean bill of health”), but I did eventually get the keys, and moved over a chair, a coffee table, my TV, DVD player, and my copy of “Big Trouble in Little China”, which I watched while eating an order of General Tso’s chicken (which, as the same way I spent the night I moved into my studio apartment, is my new “New Living Place” tradition).

My parents came up the next morning to give me a chest my paternal grandfather had made, and the dinning room table and chairs that had been my maternal grandmother’s wedding gift.

Now, if I could just keep my cats from sharpening their claws on that table …

Since I’ve renewed my lease, I’ll be here for at least one more year. Probably two. It’ll be interesting to see where I am then.