camp

so i realized, going over my entries to date, that i never wrote about my new digs. to fill in...

i found a one bedroom apartment for next year, but the lease doesn't start until september, so i'm subletting for the summer. i found a room in a house near campus. 8 bedroom house, filled (currently) with me and 7 undergraduates. fun. the house was built in the beginning of the 1900s, and was, at one point, beautiful. there's lots of ornate woodwork, mouldings, etc, plus some stained glass windows. beautiful. recently, it has been inhabited by undergraduates, and is therefore pretty run-down.

for the last month, there has been a horrible smell (rotting dead mouse) in the kitchen. some mouse managed to die in the motor of one of the refridgerators. it was impossible to remove the carcass, so it was just rotting there. the slumlord was stalling on getting a new fridge. finally, that fridge just gave out. the freezer stopped being able to freeze things. so finally yesterday, we got a new refridgerator. blissfully, the smell is gone, and it no longer makes me gag to be in the kitchen.

there is also a roach problem in the house. so there are glue traps everywhere, most with several dead/dying roaches on them. lovely. there's been a roach on a trap in the 3rd floor bathroom for days, dying. it's stuck, but occasionally struggles to get loose, and pathetically wiggles its antennae around.

my housemates are all fairly interesting. there's rachel, a physics major who is evenually going to grad school (schmart!), natalie and wu kwan, two sweet asian girls, jenny, a less sweet asian girl, kim who i've never talked to, nikolai a flaming gay man who is living life hard and fast, but is exceedingly interesting to talk to, and duncan, a laid back frat boy who is a fabulous cook and not a bad artist.

several nights have been spent drinking/smoking with my housemates, and loving it.

last night, after dinner, duncan, jenny, rachel and i were on the porch, polishing off 2 bottles of wine and some white russians. we decided to go over to the graveyard across the street and lie in the grass looking up at the stars. not that there are that many stars one can see from philadelphia. but it was a beautiful night, and we had quite a nice time.

living with a bunch of unrelated undergraduates is kind of fun. like camp--just for the summer, people i don't know, bugs and mice... you get the picture. i am going to enjoy having my own place in the fall, though. especially after living with john in our own apartment for 3 years, where all the stuff was mine (or john's--whatever), and i didn't need permission to go anywhere in the apartment, or use anything in it, or lock my bedroom door, this is kind of a shock. but fun, at least temporarily.