Thursday, April 7, 2016

Apartment #6: 4460 Cleveland Ave., San Diego, CA (1993)


This wound up being the fourth apartment I lived in during the previous 12 months. I never knew I could move around so much in the space of a year.

This wound up being an apartment I shared with a roommate. I'll write more about him sometime in the near future. With today's post, I'm just focusing on the apartment itself.

It was of a similar design as my previous apartment, especially on the outside. (Some would refer to it as a cookie cutter design.) The main difference was that this was a two-bedroom. It had two bathrooms, one of which was the en suite in my bedroom. The strange thing about the bathrooms was that mine had a shower stall and the other had a bathtub without a shower. My roommate had hooked up a showerhead that attached to the faucet in the bathtub.

The apartment also had a sliding glass door near the kitchen and was the only apartment on the ground floor to have this feature. The apartment above us had a balcony. I think the upstairs apartment on the other end also had a balcony, but I can't imagine needing that great a view of the alley. But that sliding glass door came in very handing when we were moving in the sleeper sofa.

My bedroom was surprisingly large, even more so than the bedroom in my previous apartment. I was actually paying more than half the rent because of the size of the room. This didn't bother me because it was still less than I was paying before for my own apartment. The living room area was also much larger. This was actually more suitable for a family of three than the one where I attempted to have that, but I couldn't afford a two-bedroom apartment. (Actually, I could have afforded it if someone were willing to share their welfare money, but that just was not going to happen.)

One of the nice things about the apartment was how closely it was located to the Hillcrest section of San Diego. If I got bored, I could just walk over there and hang out. The Ralphs grocery store was nearby, so I didn't have to drive to get my food. I could also walk north and find myself at the edge of Mission Valley. I could just sit there at night and watch all the activity of the traffic on I-8. (Without money or friends, I didn't have much to entertain myself with.)

The other residents were rather peaceful, but the younger one would tend to get somewhat loud on the weekends. I did have an issue one night when a friend of one of the neighbors parked their car right behind mine. I had to go to work late at night. (Yes, after I had gotten a job.) They figured that no one was going to need to move their car that late, so they just parked there. The irritating thing was that there was plenty of parking on the street, so they really had no reason to park in our lot and block the sidewalk. Fortunately, I was able to find the owner of the car and get to work.

There was an issue with a woman who lived in the apartment building next to ours. She appeared to be a single mother and there was always some kind of drama going on in her life. She was constantly yelling at her kid and there were always problems with her boyfriend. Sometimes, her neighbors would get involved in yelling at her and it just never seemed to stop sometimes. I recall hearing her end of a phone conversation in which it sounded like her boyfriend broke up with her. I could hear her loudly sobbing for about 15 minutes. The final day I was in the apartment, I could hear her yelling at her boyfriend. (I guess they got back together.) I went to the window and yelled, "Yee-hawwwww!" I found out later that the other residents of that building were taking her to court that day to get her evicted and that's why she was so upset. I never saw the woman, so I don't know what she looked like, but she did give me flashbacks from my previous life situation.

Because my roommate found a job that would have him travel across the country and I still hadn't gotten a job, I had to move out with one month's notice. I could not take the chance that I would be able to find a roommate for this apartment in a timely fashion, I knew I would have an easier time to find someone to move in with.

It was a very nice apartment and I hated to move out. I don't think I ever had another apartment that I liked as much as this one. It's too bad I only got to live there for three months.

And one more note: After tomorrow's post, I'll be taking another break for at least a couple of weeks. While I had planned to do new posts for three months in a row, an issue came up at work that will require most of my attention. Tomorrow's post will just be me sharing one of my YouTube videos and it seems like people typically don't read those or click on the embedded video.

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