thump, stomp, puff, poo

Despite all the elapsed time and distractions, my brain is slowly recalling what life was like about, uh, ten or twelve or fifteen years ago when I lived in apartments and had a solid class-schedule of my own (not of someone related to me under the age of 9)... It's the upstairs people. For certain there's a guy in his twenties with shaggy hair and zit scars who somehow seems to have a hottie girlfriend with long dark hair and two fiercely yippy dogs. His car is the standard-issue dirty little black sedan with duct tape holding up the front fenders, parked next to my standard-issue no-frills green mamavan. There may have been another roommate in mid-August when we moved here but he loaded his weight-set and backpacks into his big red no-muffler-having truck weeks ago.
I knew what we were in for on the first night, when the kids and I tried getting to sleep despite the steady love-thumping directly above their bedroom. Since then there's been a drunk-vs-drunk knock-down drag-out butt-whoopin', glass bottles dropped three stories to the parking lot, loud music whenever and serious stomp-walking.
So now I'm the bitchy old mom with ugly clothes and no makeup, glaring at people in the parking lot, yelling out the window at the jerks from the next building smoking upwind of my windows. That's me.
Speaking of, after the chain-smoking lady downstairs moved in a couple of weeks ago, Dawn at the rental office slowly and kindly said that yes, smoking is allowed in all apartments (her eyes were saying you moron you live in a cheap [though deceptively respectable in appearance] apartment in Wasilla where everyone smokes and parties and has yippy dogs they drive around in monster trucks).
The real winner though in all this World of Apartment Wonders - something that I didn't see all those ten, twelve, whatever years ago- was the chunk of pet doo-doo I found in one of the coin-op washing machines tonight, obviously separated from its two partners on the floor of the laundry room. Wonders never cease.