My Life in Pictures
LIFE IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK
My first big girl apartment
Okay, it wasn't really an industrial park. But man did we live in a weird area. We had industrial business surrounding our little enclave of
three small apartment buildings. After awhile, you get used to the constant semi-traffic.
The place was as weird as the neighborhood. It was $455 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. And it was actually rather large. For a crapshack.
A story:
There was a period of time during one summer living in that apartment that I had extreme insomnia. I couldn't fall asleep before
6 in the morning. If I tried to go to sleep, I'd just lay there. So I stayed up smoking cigarettes and watching TV until I was finally sleepy.
One night, I had actually been able to fall asleep around midnight. It was a fitful sleep, but it was sleep.
I was startled out of bed around 2 AM by a loud thud. I jumped out of bed and went in the direction of the thud, thinking it was
Ramona falling out of a window. But Ramona was sitting peacefully on the carpet. Confused, I wandered back to bed, decidedly not worried about
some random sound over actual sleep.
Ten minutes later, I heard Ramona wander into my room. Suddenly, it sounded like she was peeing in my room. I bolted upright,
flipped on the light, and tried to ascertain where Ramona was so I could kill her.
When a bat flew at my head.
I screamed.
One of those non-ending screams. The thing was swooping back and forth in my room, I was screaming, and Ramona was going crazy.
Still screaming, I dove under my comforter.
After a moment, I realized that screaming wasn't doing much for the bat situation. So I gingerly crawled out of bed and inched
slowly... slowly out of my room. I coaxed Ramona out, and then put barriers in the doorway so the bat couldn't escape. Not easy with stupid barn
doors.
I took up residence on the couch and nervously huddled there as the bat flapped against the barn doors, desperately trying to
get out. I finally fell asleep a few hours later. At 7 AM, I grabbed a phonebook and started calling exterminators. Turns out they charged several
hundred dollars just to show up, and if they didn't find anything, I still had to pay.
Screw that.
But there was no way I was going to go back into my room. I finally called my step-dad at work and made him come over and look
for the bat. He never found it. No one ever found it. Which is all well and good, but at approximately 9:30 I was on the phone with another friend
cajoling her into moving out of her parents' house and into a new apartment with me.
I don't do apartments with bats.
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