The Saga - Part II

As I was saying... We packed up the whole house, scheduled movers, and made plans to move on Saturday. Friday evening rolls around and we head over to the new apartment to sign the lease. As soon as I pulled up to the new place, I began to suspect that we had made a questionable decision. The only other time we had seen the apartment, it had been dark out so I had not yet been able to appreciate the Canyon of Despair in all of its glory.

{You remember, the Canyon of Despair...complete with vagrant boudoir.}

Once we were inside, the ten-foot, popcorn ceilings and tiny galley kitchen of which I had no memory confirmed for me that the decision to move in here was questionable at best. When the landlord told us that we should definitely make it a point to meet Hugo, our upstairs neighbor and the proprietor of a home-based massage business, I mentally re-categorized our decision as seriously ill-advised. 

 {I prefer picket fences to empty pill bottles. You?}

The thought of moving out of our white picket fenced house in order to spend the next twelve months gazing out the one living room window at The Canyon and avoiding running into Hugo's clients was a bit overwhelming at the end of a long week, and I may or may not have teared up a little in the inexplicably windowless guest room. All the same, we had movers scheduled for 11:30 the next morning and had already put down a full month's rent as a deposit. So we signed the lease despite serious misgivings.

 For the next twelve hours, every conversation that Tom and I had started with some variation of, "What the hell were we thinking?" The best thing we could come up with was that when we settled on that place, we were numb from looking at so many apartments...that and we are morons incapable of making sound decisions. Still, we figured that we had no choice but to make the best of it, and we probably would have had the movers arrived on schedule.

As it happened, the movers called at noon to say that they were stuck in traffic in Orange County and wouldn't be able to start moving us until mid afternoon. Normally, I would have found this incredibly irritating, but I was all for anything that put off my having to move into the Apartment of Doom on the Canyon of Despair. Turns out that Tom was thinking along similar lines; he had decided to interpret the unreliable movers as a sign and was already crafting ways to get us out of the lease we had signed less than twenty-four hours earlier. Knight in shining, lease-nullifying armor. For reals. 

Conveniently, there was an apartment for rent in the building that we lived in between the two times that we lived in Coronado.... And, yes, I do realize that our rental history reads like that of a schizophrenic gypsy. In any event, we seized on the idea of moving back into a place that, while not ideal, was not within spitting distance of Mission Hill's number one party destination for the area's homeless. Tom then spent the weekend making a series of awkward phone calls. 


Phone Call #1

 Tom:  Hi, Clint. It's Tom-my wife and I signed a lease yesterday? Yeah, about that... See, my  wife just inherited this armoire ... .bullshit, bullshit, bullshit ... family heirloom ... bullshit ... We really should have measured....won't fit down the hallway...more bullshit ... very sorry ... awkward silence

Phone Call #2 (actually an incredibly awkward voicemail that was followed by an equally awkward text)

Tom: Hi, my name is Tom, and I'm calling about the apartment for rent at 445 Not Despair Canyon Avenue. My wife and I used to live in apartment C in the building and we would like to move into whatever unit you have available. We don't need to see it since we used to live there and are familiar with the property, but we are in kind of a weird situation and we need to move today or tomorrow. Please call me back as soon as you get this. Thanks.

The fact that the leasing agent even called us back after that message leads me to question her judgment, but then again, who am I to judge? But seriously, what kind of whack jobs need to move within 24 hours and are willing to take a place sight unseen? 

Anyway, in the interest of bringing this tedious saga to a close...it all worked out. Meghan, the leasing agent, returned from her motorcycle vacay in Long Beach to meet us at the apartment on Monday morning where we signed the lease. I then went to work while Tom and two movers from a more reliable outfit moved us into an apartment that is two doors down from one we lived in three homes ago... If all goes according to plan, the place we billed on Craigslist as a "cozy apartment with canyon views" will be leased to some other poor bastards by the end of the week. 


And...scene.