Apartment Living Sucks
Living in an apartment isn't like it is in "Friends", at least not so far. As most of you will know we have plenty of very good friends here, all through people we know or have met through my work. Lorraine would like to meet people in the apartment complex, but so far that is proving tricky.
Everyone is friendly enough to say hello to in the street, but so far getting beyond the Hi, nice day, nice dog, etc is just not happening. The longest conversation we have had so far was with a woman who lives upstairs, with three dogs. She in herself seems quite nice, but she seems incapable of stopping her dogs from barking at all hours of the day, as early as 6:15am and as late as 11:30pm. They would appear to live on the balcony, and bark at their own shadow, so you can imagine how few quiet times there are. Hopefully a few words in the right place will encourage her to revisit her dog management skills, but only time will tell.
We have also had to resort to taking storage space across the road at one of these specialist storage locations, which, at $28 PCM is not a huge cost, it is almost 3 times what it should cost us where we are living, but they have not got the storage lockers ready yet. Thankfully they have been concentrating on the pool. Which officially opened today, so guess where I was after work? A few people were more talkative down by the pool, so we are hopeful that it will help with the building relationships.
It seems that the apartment set are also pretty transient, so really we want to get our own place as soon as possible and become part of a proper community, but of course we are still struggling with the whole problem of not having a credit history, having only just been dropped on the planet, or at least that's how the financial institutions here view it. I did just get a credit report which told me that my credit score is 9388 or something, although not knowing what makes a good or bad score means that I know squat, if I had $9388 then I would be quite happy, but if I weighed 9388lbs then I probably wouldn't be.
The long and short of it is that we will probably have to stay here for at least a year to make sure we have a good enough credit rating to get our own mortgage, unless of course we win the Illinois State Lottery!
Everyone is friendly enough to say hello to in the street, but so far getting beyond the Hi, nice day, nice dog, etc is just not happening. The longest conversation we have had so far was with a woman who lives upstairs, with three dogs. She in herself seems quite nice, but she seems incapable of stopping her dogs from barking at all hours of the day, as early as 6:15am and as late as 11:30pm. They would appear to live on the balcony, and bark at their own shadow, so you can imagine how few quiet times there are. Hopefully a few words in the right place will encourage her to revisit her dog management skills, but only time will tell.
We have also had to resort to taking storage space across the road at one of these specialist storage locations, which, at $28 PCM is not a huge cost, it is almost 3 times what it should cost us where we are living, but they have not got the storage lockers ready yet. Thankfully they have been concentrating on the pool. Which officially opened today, so guess where I was after work? A few people were more talkative down by the pool, so we are hopeful that it will help with the building relationships.
It seems that the apartment set are also pretty transient, so really we want to get our own place as soon as possible and become part of a proper community, but of course we are still struggling with the whole problem of not having a credit history, having only just been dropped on the planet, or at least that's how the financial institutions here view it. I did just get a credit report which told me that my credit score is 9388 or something, although not knowing what makes a good or bad score means that I know squat, if I had $9388 then I would be quite happy, but if I weighed 9388lbs then I probably wouldn't be.
The long and short of it is that we will probably have to stay here for at least a year to make sure we have a good enough credit rating to get our own mortgage, unless of course we win the Illinois State Lottery!
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(oh, I kid. It's what I do.) :-)