fourth house crumbling

According to my marketing class this past Wednesday, we should be blogging every day. If not every day, why bother. I have a tendency to write too much, wait too long, then become inconsistent. So really, I am going to keep it short tonight.

I have been looking for an apartment since April. That's nothing in New York minutes, but it seems like a long time, especially when you consider that every day my kids are breathing death (we all are, but lead dust is just a bit more toxic, a bit more insidious, a wee bit more unsettling). Today we got kicked off the possibility list of an apt we almost had because I wrote the reason for leaving was due to lead poisoning. It turns out that the owner of the building got sued for the same thing recently and just couldn't think of that happening again. It was a large building two blocks from where I live now, up four flights of stairs. I guess it wasn't the one.

Taking my chances, I looked at another apartment that was in a private house. Four blocks from here. Perfectly nice block (all west indian–my hoe they moved to Brooklyn at the right time). The apartment was downstairs. Someone was supposed to meet me at five. My girls and I got there a few minutes before and waited until seventeen after. I took them around the block. Someone sitting on the porch of a lovely large home, smoking a sick cigarette started hollering and swearing up and down that I looked just like Joyce. She probably had just downed a glass of what I am drinking now (but not such a nice brand) and may have had a few hits of something else. This made me wonder why all these people have been able to do it and I haven't.

That's what frustrates me the most about NY. I mean do these people "deserve" what they have? I don't know. But what I do know is that I don't know how to do it.

We went back to the house and I forgot to mention the first time we went there, someone upstairs poked her head out and shook it no that she was not the owner but whomever it was that was supposed to meet me would be there in a few. Mind you that mysterious show person still wasn't there after our one block tour, so I decided to force the flimsy front door and of course it opened easily. I left the kids on the sidewalk since I decided to run in and out. To no one's surprise, my three year old started bawling, causing the only white couple in a two block radius to stop in concern until they saw me running back down the stairs.

The apt was a hodgepodge of crappy thin grey carpet, hardwood floors, and cheap linoleum squares. In desperate need of one of those home improvement reality show crews, just to get it rented, let alone sold, I now know why the house had a FOR RENT sign in the front window and $1450 monthly fee is usury.

I decided to really check the house out before bailing so I towed the girls up the front steps and my older one was still bawling. Looking at the rooms and kitchen led me to wonder if the seriously overblown price might have something to do with a backyard being part of the package. There was a key in the deadlock on the kitchen door, so what the hell, I turned it and walked down the precariously high steps to the backyard. Of course the Chumpette grabbed hold of a very splintery-looking slab of wood and started stirring it in a tub-looking container full of muddy water. For her, the next logical step would have been to put her hands in the same water and put that same hand in her mouth. All this was going on while I was distracted by the dead cat carcass on the ground right next to my feet. Masses of hair had fallen off the deceased beast and its bleached white bones were there, completely intact. The whole skeleton. Ah what a lovely image. But somehow, someone had a means of buying this house. Someone who seems completely illier illiterate and as completely aware that this place was just not going to cut it.
And some asshole didn't even bother showing up.

Now I said I would make this short, so I wouldn't put off coming back tomorrow. All this is to tell you that I really hate that damned venus (in its fall, very aggressive but bellicose) conjunct sad saturn (gloom and doom, fear) and moon in aries (quarrels and contention all over the place) in my progressed fourth house of foundation, home and family. However, the nice thing about aries is that they keep going (even if its like the tarot's infamous Fool).

Tootles. BTW, just leave me a comment if you read this. Maybe its better if you don't....