Move In
Note: I actually moved in at school last weekend, but, due to homework and other activities, have not had the time to tell you about this until now.
The weekend before the school quarter starts, the apartments where I live allow students to check in. Of course, there are only certain hours that we are allowed to check in during since the small staff likes to have some time off. I finally hit the road around 11:30, which should have put me at the apartments at around 3:30, or about a four hour drive. The trip was going pretty smoothly until I decided to stop for lunch at a Wendy’s north of Sunbury. When I went inside, I quickly noticed a long line, which consisted of mostly young girls. A few minutes later I realized that I was standing in line behind the Lincoln Middle School (Newark, OH) girls basketball team. I don’t know what they were doing up there since most of their opponents tend to be down closer to I-70. I’m just glad that they didn’t take forever.
After that the sailing was pretty smooth until I got up in to Michigan. I was surprised that most of the drivers on the road seemed scared of just a few snow flakes. Almost instantly the traffic slowed from 75-80 mph down to 60! I would have thought that, being Michiganders, they would be used to driving in snow, even though the roads were perfectly clean of the white stuff.
I finally got to the apartments at about 4:32pm. Normally during move-in, at least one of the parking lot gates is left open so that there is a place to park while you are checking in. I did an entire lap around the complex, but all three gates were closed. I was slightly puzzled since I thought that move-in lasted from 10:00 to 6:00. While I was driving up, one of my friends, John, called me up and told me that he had already moved in. I called him and had him come out and open one of the gates for me so that I could park my car in the parking lot overnight since it was still full of stuff and I did not have a key to get into my apartment or room. I ended up emptying out my back seat and putting all of the stuff in a spare bedroom in John’s apartment. I slept that night on the bed in that room, but I nearly froze to death since I didn’t unpack my bed sheets.
The next morning, I was the first to check in and immediately got to moving my stuff in. I went a quickly as possible since I had not bathed since early Saturday morning and I still had to go and purchase a shower curtain before I could take a shower.
Over the winter break, my apartment, along with some others, were renovated from standard apartments to premium. For our apartment, they replaced our half bath with a laundry room, replaced our old worn berber carpet with nice new cushy carpet, replaced the tile floors with linoleum, and redid all of the locks. Unfortunately, they did a bit of a rush job, so things did not turn out as nice as they should be. For example, the linoleum in my bathroom has a bubble/wrinkle in it, the door jam in my room got messed up when they redid the locks, they did a really poor job of caulking around the bathtub, and they left old door hardware and doorstops lying around. Hopefully this all gets fixed this quarter or next, or John might not be happy when he get to this new premium apartment and finds out that it is of lesser quality than his current apartment.
