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When you throw a party for yourself and 200 of your closest family and friends, it's easy to slide into a little bit of debt. Especially when a bout of pneumonia creeps up on you in the midsts of all this planning. As a result of these little setbacks, January and I decided to go cheap during our first year before we get ourselves into massive-house-size debt. That's how we ended up in our "starter apartment." The shining feature is really the cost-to-space ratio. Because our landlord was in the process of moving to Florida when we looked at it (he was actually leaving that night) we were able to talk him into knocking $25 off the rent and throwing in one month free. Add to that room for an home-office (because sometimes it's just too cold to walk the 3/4 of a mile to the real office) and an extra room for all of our stuff, and it seemed like a good place to start out. Without a doubt, the worst feature has turned out to be the neighbors. Not the ceiling that leaks when the tub is too full, not the basement that collects puddles whenever it rains, but the two grad students in the other half of the double. It started out with polite phone calls at 11:00 at night asking us to turn the music down a little. That's seemed reasonable, so we didn't have a problem agreeing with their suggestion that we both keep our music down after 10:30 on a weeknight. That's what do you do when you share a wall with other people; You compromise. I won't bore you with the details of each and every encounter we have had with them in the days since that first complaint, but they do include several complaints about the volume of noise coming from our half, veiled accusations of theft of things that they left outside, and lectures about our responsibility to call them and the police whenever we notice anything "shady" going on in the neighborhood. We live half a mile from the Ohio State University campus, I don't get enough minutes on my plan to call the police every time I see something "shady!" The highlight of our conversations came this afternoon, however. In passing on her way out, one of the neighbors said that she felt like she needed to tell me something -- that the wall between her bedroom and ours was "paper thin" and that she can "hear a cough" through it at night. I was dumfounded, and at first I couldn't believe she was actually going to say it!? I had always operated under the "unspoken rule" that, yes, we all hear "things" through walls at night... but you don't BRING THEM UP TO YOUR NEIGHBORS!? She went on to tell me that she knows we're newlyweds, but she thought we would like to know. She thought we would want to know that she's sitting on the other side of the wall listening to us?!? Maybe I'm in the minority on this one, but I really would have been quite happy going the duration of my lease without having a conversation with my neighbor about what she can hear in my bedroom! I can sleep a little better, however, with the last little disclaimer that she left me with before we went our separate ways: "Just so you know, I don't sit there and, like, listen. I put in earplugs. As a courtesy."
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