My epic battles in my apartment

I'm no author, in fact, I think my writing tends to be crap.  Regardless, I've decided to attempt a blog!  And my first post is this:  my current apartment.

I have lived in a few apartments in my time, one in St. Louis, MO, one in Springfield, MO, and now one in Waukegan, IL (not far from Chicago).  They haven't been stellar apartments with hardwood floors and walls of windows, but they've been pretty good until now.

This apartment wasn't my first pick, but being a poor graduate student moving to a new state, I decided the cheaper apartment (that I could still feel relatively safe in) was the best way to go instead of the nice, expensive one with a bathroom so big, I wanted to put a loveseat in there and have bathroom parties (granted, I don't know what a bathroom party is, I still wanted to have one)!  So, I ended up moving to this apartment on the second floor of a three story building.  This building is one that accepts animals because the plan was for boyfriend and I to live here together with our two cats once he found a job in Chicago.  He never did.  In order to keep costs low, he kept the cats with him and I moved here alone.

In retrospect, I should have known something was off when they didn't even give me the apartment they told me they would, they changed the room number and building number about a week before I moved (after I had changed my address already), so that was fun.  Once moved in, however, I thought it would be great.  It all started that first week.

During my first week of living here, I noticed some strange noises at night.  I wasn't sure if it was someone above me with an animal who really needed to dig or mice or maybe some kind of mini reindeer stuck in the ceiling, but something was making noises.  Upon further investigation, I found it to be squirrels in between the floor above me and my ceiling.  I tried numerous attempts at removing them and re-homing them to a nearby park, simultaneously asking the landlord to close the hole in the awning above my bedroom window where they come and go.  The apartment people kept feeding me empty promises of getting some man to come by and fix it, so the squirrels kept coming, so I've come to the conclusion that I will have unseen (yet very much heard) feral squirrels as my pets in this apartment.

Despite the ceiling squirrels (as I will continue to call them), I still had many hopes that this apartment would be everything I wanted and more!  I started cooking for myself more until I noticed that I don't have a disposal in my sink and the only dishwasher in sight was me.  I thought to myself, "that's ok, I didn't have a dishwasher in St. Louis and I managed not to kill myself and still have clean dishes (most of the time).  This will be ok!" Oh, how wrong I was.  When it was time for me to do my dishes, I realized that the sink was big enough for regular dish washing, however the faucet was inadequate for the task!  It does not ascend like a swan's neck like most kitchen faucets do, oh no, this faucet merely juts out from the base and aims downward.  There is physically no room under it to fit a pot, pan, or any other useful cooking vessel.  Therefore, I rarely cook.

On top of this, I have been at war.  It's not a pretty war, there are many casualties.  I have bugs.  Silverfish, centipedes, black bugs that I cannot identify, moths, and flies.  So far, my allies include paper, shoes, hairspray, and (my newest and unlikely ally) a spray bottle of nail polish remover.  I've had the exterminator come by many times to spray while I'm in class (oh, the joys of being a graduate student) and while after 5 visits, my crawlies have dwindled, I had to battle flies today.  This started with me entering my apartment with a migraine after being out at school and the getting my car fixed for hours.  I took some migraine medications and decided to lie down with a pop tart.  This was my mistake.  The fly I did not even know was here decided that he wanted that pop tart like his little bitty life depended on it (whether it did or not is unknown, but no longer under investigation).  I shrieked like a banshee and grabbed my handy hairspray (very useful for spiders and silverfish, FYI), and sprayed it like a madwoman.  To my dismay, it was unaffected by my amazing hairspray.  I had not been thwarted like this since I found hairspray to be an effective weapon against creepy crawlies, so I was shocked and alarmed.  This devil-fly was unstoppable by all intents and purposes.

I immediately turned to the only resource that could not steer me wrong - the internet!  My first search for "how to kill a fly" informed me that rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle was very effective at stunning flies and then you can squish them.  Unfortunately for me, I have no rubbing alcohol, but I did have nail polish remover.  So, I grabbed an old bottle of body splash, dumped it out and filled it a third full of nail polish remover.  The sprayer did not work, so I dumped the remover back into the bottle rinsed the body splash bottle and then poured hair detangler (that I knew had a working sprayer) into the empty bottle before filling that bottle with the remover.  Convoluted and possibly crazy way of getting things done, but it worked out ok for me in the end.  Then I prepared myself for battle.  My hair was put up and slippers were donned so I could easily squish after spraying (assuming my nail polish remover had more of an effect on the fly than the hairspray).

I then sat and waited for him to return.  It took a while of surfing the internet before he made his next attack on my pop tarts, but he made the mistake of landing on the computer before going in for the kill.  That was when I struck!  I spritzed him with the nail polish remover cleverly disguised in the detangling bottle and he flew away.  I thought all was lost until 5 minutes later when I saw him struggling to crawl on the floor by the window.  I made sure he wasn't just luring me into a trap before putting him out of his misery.  Then I thought I was safe.

I put my guard down all too soon because not half an hour later, another fly was after me for revenge, he found me washing my hands in the bathroom.  I couldn't believe the gall of this second fly, spying on me when I was vulnerable like that, so I decided to be offensive and spray him as he landed on my shower curtain.  He was clever, though, and landed out of my reach, so I tried spraying him, but missed.  About 10 minutes after that, he perched on my laptop (just like the last one) and spied my delicious blueberry pop tart (which had remained untouched since the first fly's attempt).  I sprayed him perfectly but he decided to then circle the pop tart (which I then sprayed) and then come at my face (causing me to scream, close my eyes, and spray until I felt safe again).  Upon realizing that he was no longer around, I donned the slippers once more, checked my hair and futon for him in case he went down there, and hunted for him.  He wasn't far, he had fallen about a foot behind my futon.  I sprayed him down so much that my living room smelled very much like nail polish remover and then decided that I could squish him without worrying about him escaping

And that's how I became an Amazonian warrior.