Lori and I look back on our time in the condo with an honest sense of gratitude. It was a nice place to live, in a great school district, close to work, and at an astounding price that helped us save aggressively for the new house.
That being said, we don't miss it. Not one friggin' bit.
At the risk of beginning to appear reliant on formulaic, Cosmo article gimmickry (i.e. The 12 Ways to Know Your Lover is Lying or The 17 Ways to Fight Water Retention), here are The 25 Things I Don't Miss About the Condo.
1) Closet space you can meter with a ruler rather than a tape measure.
2) Communal garbage. I'm not sure who's worse: the new renters who insist on cramming old recliners, nightstands and entire entertainment centers into the dumpsters or the 300 year-old Chinese women who can barely muster the fortitude to set their McDonalds bags on the ground beside them. I shall not miss the overspill, the cling-clang of glass bottles hitting steel bottom, or the fragrance of baby shit on the air.
3) Sliding, glass closet doors.
4) Filthy fluorescent light boxes with the silhouetted corpses of moths and roly-poly bugs baked to flaky, brown ash since 1989.
5) A front door so ill-fit to the frame that you'd swear Smaug from The Hobbit was sleeping on the front step snoring soot beneath it.
6) A pantry only Bilbo Baggins could fit in.
7) The "great room" concept gone haywire. Kitchen, pantry, dining room, living room, office and laundry room in one? Are you kidding me? Did Mattel mold this house? Does it have handles on the roof and a hinge so you can close it and go?
8) Quiet hours that start at 10pm for everyone except the furry, club-crawling, day-sleeping, bass-thumping, wine-drinking, pot-smoking, incense-burning, bimbo-nailing, my-friends-at-the-bottom-of-the-stairs-whistling-and-occasionally-puking, if-I-had-an-honest-job-I'd-be-working, realtor who lived next door.
9) A master bathroom door that never latched, forcing you to barricade yourself in with extra rolls of toilet paper and bottles of Clorox bathroom cleaner in order to have a private bowel movement.
10) The goofy kitchen box window thing that got so permanently caked with grime you'd wake up every morning thinking it was the Apocalypse, certain you'd be greeted by swarms of locusts upon going outside. It got so bad that we were actually delighted when the air conditioner went on the fritz, raining cleansing, overflow condensation down onto the window. "That's what the sun looks like, kids!"
11) Carports.
12) A "yard" no bigger than our king-size bed. Ahh, I'll always remember the days of the kids inching wildly across the concrete, handing balls to each other and leaping the spiderwebs during the lazy quarter-hour when the sun angled across the patio.
13) A snail population fifty times that of Irvine. Each step along the nighttime sidewalk began sounding like the glass-stomping finale of a Jewish wedding. Crunch...Mazel Tov!
14) Toilets that ran no matter how many handles were jiggled, seals were resealed or pumps were replaced.
15) A possessed garage door opener that forced you to literally count 30 seconds after closing it to make sure it didn't spring open again.
16) A nonfunctional fireplace that served no purpose other than to further limit usable floor space.
17) Vertical friggin' blinds. Who knew Rotten Eggshell was a color? Beyond being perpetually grimy, they precluded you from ever leaving the windows open at night. Even the subtlest wind would set them to clattering. If you were lucky, they'd wake you up. If you weren't, the sound would meld into your dreamstate, giving you either visions of receiving a standing ovation or being trampled by the Budweiser Clydesdales.
18) Living space so small the only way to get away from each other was to put a pillow over your head.
19) The Al Qaeda sleeper cell that moved in across from us whose idea of being neighborly was to blare Nick At Night as loud as they could out of living room windows they refused to close even in the dead of winter.
20) Popcorn ceilings and the shadowy spots that seeped to life in the rain.
21) Cabinet space that rivaled the Matchbox carrying cases I had when I was seven.
22) Dirty, threadbare carpet. "High traffic areas"? More like "six furlongs at Pimlico."
23) Dark, treacherous beanpot shelves where few dared to probe. I'm pretty sure I found Jimmy Hoffa in Emelie's room.
24) The creaky floor at the intersection of our bedroom and bathroom doors, loud and impassable enough to ensure that Lori gasped awake every night upon hearing my feather-light footfall – convinced I was surely the rapist or bogey man that apparently had it in for her.
25) Rent.
Next up, The 14 Reasons Why Lists Are a Lame Excuse for a Blog Entry.
