Apartment #7: 4457 1/2 Louisiana St., San Diego, CA, 1993 - 1994

This turned out to be my fourth apartment in the space of one year. But I would live at this address for about 11 months, longer than I spent at any other apartment I had in San Diego up to this point.

This was a two-bedroom, one bathroom apartment on the upstairs floor. It was considerably smaller than my previous apartment. Both bedrooms were about the same size. It was about a block away from the apartment where I lived on Texas St., so I had access to the same amenities as before. There was also only one parking space for the apartment. My roommate had staked his claim on the space and I always had to park on the street.

The roommate I had here (about whom I will go into detail in tomorrow's post) already had a lot of furniture in the living room, so there was no more need for me to have that sleeper sofa with the missing leg. I had tried to sell it, but couldn't find anyone to buy it. My old roommate Jadd had left out a bunch for stuff for Goodwill to come by and pick up, so we just left the sofa out there.

(A side note: Jadd had asked me if there was any of his stuff I wanted, since he was donating it. I told him I could use the typewriter. He let me have it. It came in very useful in the years that I didn't have a computer.)

We lived next door to the apartment manager. It made it easy to drop off the rent payments that way but we knew he could always hear us when we were making noise. The manager had a REALLY large apartment. His wife and child lived there with him. They were pretty easy to get along with.

The only unusual thing was that my roommate and his mother were once cleaning up the kitchen and she could feel that the stove was really hot. They looked behind it and found that the gas line had broken and there were flames shooting out of it. The apartment manager was able to get someone to come and fix it.

However, the manager had seen that we weren't keeping the apartment very clean, so he gave us a warning that we needed to clean it up or face eviction. We were able to get everything back to normal, but this was the only time I'd ever received a warning like that at an apartment. (At later apartments, I would receive eviction notices. But those weren't real. I'll give more details about those much later on.)

Once, I saw the manager waiting for a bus at the corner of 5th and University in the Hillcrest area. About a half-hour later, he saw me walking up the stairs. "Did you walk all the way from Hillcrest? That's crazy!" I was still receiving unemployment. I couldn't afford luxuries like bus rides.

Otherwise, there wasn't anything that really stood out about this apartment. When I moved out, I was finally able to get my own place.

I can't always compose 1,000-word essays on all my topics.