Mouse update

Those fucking mouses came back the very first night Kate and Charlotte were here. They kept me up all night and several times I got up to chase them away, all of which the girls slept right through. Anyway, it was a good thing I got so annoyed, because that gave me the bloodthirsty impetus I needed to buy a bunch of goddam traps and fill them with goddam organic 365 creamy all natural peanut butter and put them under the goddam sink. Of course, there has been no sign of mice since.

Yeah, it's finally happened

The other night I came home, and there was a very particular kind of rustling sound under the kitchen sink (mouse), and I –– yelled... at.. it.

Oh, I also clapped. But I guess neither of those things worked, because I heard it again a few nights later. There are no mouse poops in my house, there's no evidence of any food being eaten - it's pretty clear this bastard doesn't live here but in the walls or with my neighbour. So what do I do? Should I set traps and kill it, or should I just try to deter it from visiting? Bear in mind when formulating your answers that I am a coward.

You have no idea, people

No idea.

That place I had? I was thinking something along the lines of that scene in Coming to America where Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall move into that shithole in Queens, with the guys out front warming their hands around a fire in an oil barrell, and the apartment has missing plaster exposing raw wood, and cockroaches and a brown stained sink and a door that doesn't lock. I was thinking that, and then I was thinking of the scene in Coming to America where Eddie Murphy comes home and Arsenio Hall has tricked out that apartment with a Jacuzzi and neon lighting and a mini bar.

Yeah, well. Ain't happening. I have come crawling back to Craigslist. And I can tell you, just when you think you've swallowed every last compromise, in terms of nearby transportation and full kitchen and on-site laundry and closet space and windows and not a fifth-floor walkup, NY real estate laughs in your face, doubles the rent, and asks for a 15% broker's fee.

I shit you not, I saw a place today about 300 sq ft with NO KITCHEN SINK and it wanted a $7000 broker's fee.

Thank heavens sweet christ for little girls boys

Who will vacuum the cockroaches out of the kitchen cabinets of your new apartment and pull up the disgusting lino in the bedroom and carry trash bag after trash bag of crap to the curb.

I started a new job today. My job is to file files in a filing system without a system.

I moved today. The Russian movers tried to shake me down for more tips. I refused.

I broke my full-length mirror when lugging my boxes out of my upper-tier storage compartment. Pray for me.

Get out your, um, calculators...

And sort this puzzle out for me, before I get kicked out of residence in five days.

I need an apartment, but I have to avoid:
a) brokerage fees (which are somewhere in the order of 10% of your rent for a year, that is, thousands of dollars)
b) the kind of place that wants first and last months' rent and a damage deposit up front (that is, thousands of dollars)
c) a scary neighbourhood
d) living with a pervert or an actor
e) paying more than, say, $1000 for a room [note: incompatible with mandate (c)]
f) living in Coney Island, or Queens, or Jersey City, or anywhere else that none of my friends will ever want to take four trains to come and see me (also: where I will have to take four trains home from the LES when I am drunk) [note: incompatible with mandate (e)]
g) paying to subscribe to a listing service (and so instead having to use craigslist to find the place) [note: incompatible with mandate (d)]
h) nah, fuck it - I'm not even going to list cockroaches.

On wingless pigeons

Before I moved to New York, I asked anyone I ran into who had lived here - because this was my main concern about housing - whether they thought I would have to deal with rats where I lived. Rats or cockroaches. I figured there weren't any in those pre-war apartments on the Upper East Side, but in a student dorm downtown, you know, I thought it might be an issue. So I would ask this, and they would always laugh and condescend and say, "You're so cute." And I would say, "No really, I'm honestly asking, because I don't know." And they would laugh again and smile and pat me on the head. And I would say "So will I?" And they would say "I dunno."

Well, the other day I watched a gaggle of my male neighbours in the dorm try to catch a rat (probably just a mouse, actually), with, let's see, there was a broom, a tupperware container, some books, a bottle of whiskey... They eventually got a sheet of that mousetrap sticky paper, and the next morning found the ratmouse on it. The sticky paper doesn't kill it, of course, just traps it. None of them wanted to kill it, so eventually one of them just threw it out the window.