Bloomington

I have been saving up this post for an afternoon such as this, nothing to do, sweating from every pore of my body while the maintenance guy looks at our air-conditioning. This adventure started when our computer arrived last Wednesday, and we set off for Bloomington. Now I have to preface the rest of this post by cluing you in on a conversation that happened a few months ago. Seth was telling me about a place he found to sublet, but there would be female roommates, although we would have the basement to ourselves. I responded, "I can live anywhere for two weeks, I don't care, just get whatever is cheapest. What I failed to comprehend when I made that statement was, I was going to have to LIVE in whatever rat's nest Seth found for two weeks. I learned this last week that yes, I can live anywhere, but I will have to sacrifice my sense of sanitation, not to mention a decent nights sleep. We ended up in an apartment with only one other roommate (a dude), but what our sub-leaser failed to tell us until our arrival was that the other roommate also had a dog. When Seth asked what kind, the kid said "I don't know, a big one". We signed the last of the paper work, and got our keys and headed off to our summer home in Bloomington. Oh Marni, if only I could go back and warn you what you were about to walk in on. We opened the door to find a Gigantic Black dog, who was terrified of us, and immediately peed on the floor. So my first act in this new place was cleaning up our roommates dog pee. The apartment smelled like every dude apartment that I have ever been to; old food, mildew and sweat. The combination of smells that only occurs through months of never really cleaning anything, and forms a super smell, the likes of which , are unmistakable. There were dishes in the sink and on the stove, stains on the carpet and an unreasonable amount of beard hair in our bathroom. Seth kept saying, "You are going to be humbled when you go to India." The difference is, I signed up to go to India, full on expecting to live in sweaty filth and squalor for three weeks. But while I am in the states, I would like to enjoy a meal without burning my fingers on the one pot in the cupboard, that as it happens has no handle. On the plus side, the apartment in Lafayette started to look like a five star hotel, which is saying a lot considering we are next to the cemetery, up the road from the dump and a waste-water treatment plant. I actually have good things to say about the town of Bloomington, but I have to ration my activities so that I don't spend an entire day watching Lifetime movies on Hulu. So that is a post for tomorrow. As for now, here are some pictures of what I walked in on and promptly sprayed with bleach a week ago. Oh, and the dog, his name... is Achilles.