Moving stories

For the past few months, the wife and I have been searching for a new home in the Ann Arbor area. Nothing terribly glamourous; just a little place to call home for a couple years while she completes her MFA at U of M. We didn't think this would be terribly difficult - granted, we expected to find some apartments that we didn't like, but we weren't expecting the level of crap that we encountered.

For the most part, our search centered around Ypsilanti. Apartments there were affordable, and, from the pictures we saw, look to be of reasonable size and cleanliness. It was also a prime location, being close enough to Ann Arbor without contracting the expense of Ann Arbor properties.

This, we later learned, was mistake number one. All of the properties we viewed in Ypsilanti suffered from a few major deficits - either they were too small or in poor condition or both.

It wasn't too bad until we traveled there last weekend to check out apartments. I had scheduled an appointment with a very nice person to check out a two-bedroom apartment. As we turned onto the street, we noticed a police car at one of the houses. At this point my wife jokingly remarked, "I hope that's not at the place we're going to see." Nervous laughter ensued as we drew closer to the cops, while checking house numbers. As we passed one house, we saw three cops (one with his hand on his holstered gun) arguing with a very vocal woman on the porch.
"Oh, no," my wife sighed. "I think that's where we're supposed to be."
"Sonuva," I replied, and checked the house number.

Indeed it was where we were supposed to be.

We quickly drove off, and parked in a nearby lot. Without any real need for discussion, I called the property manager and left this message:
"Hi, yeah, we were supposed to check out a property with you today. We just drove past said property; there's some cops and yelling and bad craziness going on. I think we're going to pass on this."

As it turned out, the property we were going to check out was in one of Ypsilanti's many ghetto areas. Like Grand Rapids, they're ghetto by block, but in Ypsilanti the blocks are closer and occur with greater frequency. We did find an apartment in a decent area - small, but with great neighbors. That same day we found a place in Saline (another "suburb" of Ann Arbor). While the Ypsilanti apartment was decent, we decided to go with the Saline apartment. It's more expensive, but it's larger and will hold all of our stuff. As an added bonus, it's rather like our current digs - hardwood floors; fireplace - and it has large enough area to hold all of our art stuff.

Now comes the fun parts: schlepping all of our stuff to the new place sometime in August, and paying for utilities again.

Now I just need a decent job to pay for all this...