Weird-Ass Little Coincidences

Eve has been scouring Facebook Marketplace for stuff for her new apartment. Oh shit, I haven't blogged about the new apartment.

Okay, SO, we had looked at two apartments in two days while we were down for grad. They were okay-ish, but not great, and a little too far from the bus route to compensate for other cons. We had had trouble booking a lot of appointments for the weekend because a lot of places don't show apartments on the week-ends, which seems weird to me because when do people who work full time find a place, but anyway. There was one place that looked pretty good, and I managed to make an appointment to see it Tuesday morning just before we headed home.

It was quite nice. It had a washer and dryer in-unit, which the others didn't (one had them on another floor, one had them in the basement (gross) and you had to pay for them. It had air conditioning, which the others didn't - both of these things weighed in, because this one was more expensive but we would have had to spend a few hundred on an air conditioning unit (Hamilton gets HOT) and laundry. The building had nice common areas and good safety features, and is on the exact street her bus would travel on coming home in the evenings (she's have to walk a couple streets over to catch the bus to campus, but being closer to home in the evenings seems more desirable). And the hallways were only moderately murder-y.

So there are homeless people in downtown Hamilton, some with drug issues. I don't think any of this is funny in the least, and yet the way this went down is funny - please know I fully acknowledge that the presence of unhoused people results from poor public policy and structural inequality.

We had done the tour and were standing just outside the lobby vestibule while the lovely Greek woman who had shown us around was going over the application process (Eve is extremely close to her BFF's Greek family, so we felt like this was a good omen). A fairly disheveled-looking man wandered in to the vestibule and started pushing all the buttons trying to get in. We heard him say "I forgot my key" a couple of times and Eve whispered "oh yeah, he'll get them with that one". The Greek woman, Lola, was trying to be cool about it, but finally said "even if he gets in, he can't go anywhere, you need a key fob for the elevator."

He finally wandered off and she visibly relaxed a little. Twenty seconds later a handyman from the building walked in and said "that crack-head was trying to get in". We could just see her thinking "thanks, Gary, I'm trying to rent to these nice people, read the room". Eve said at the apartment she looked at with Matt there was a memo in the vestibule with a photo of a man and a message begging the residents to stop letting him in. (Side note: Eve was showing me pics of the apartment in the hotel room and I asked "is that the vestibule?" and she side-eyed me and said "what the hell is a vestibule?"

We talked in the car and decided that this was the unit we would apply for. It went through by Wednesday, and I am massively relieved that we found a place so relatively easily, and in our budget (the top of our budget, but still!)

ANYWAY, she's been looking for stuff for her apartment. She developed a passion for these very nineties little hanging shelves with heart cut-outs. The first ones she saw were quite far away, and she messaged the guy to ask if he could ship them at her expense. He said they were still available but he was too busy to ship them, which, fair. The other two were in Perth, an adorable little town about an hour away, very near to where Matt's grandparents used to live. I said I would be willing to drive out there with her and we could have lunch and a wander. The seller was willing to wait a few days, so we booked it.

"Why does Perth randomly have the most beautiful sign and bench ever?" Eve asked.

The day BEFORE we were supposed to go, Matt texted us at lunch and said his aunt and uncle,who we love and used to see much more often before the grandparents died, had been on a cross-country trip and were now nearby and wanted to know if we could drive out to meet them for dinner. In -- guess where -- PERTH.

Eve pinged her shelf woman, who wasn't able to meet that evening, so we resigned ourselves to Perth-ing twice in two days, after not having been there for years.

We had a really fun dinner and catch-up with Kate and Fraser, and Eve and I had a wonderful time the next day. We went into one darling little boutique and didn't buy anything but Eve fell in love with the owner's one-eyed dog who was very happy to be loved on. We found a weird little everything store with a sale table out front and Eve bought a horse mug, sort of ironically but sort of not, for four dollars. 

Matches her eyes AND her dress!

We went to River Guild Pottery, where I always used to go with Nana and where they bought our wedding gift pottery, and I bought Eve a heart pottery mug for her place for considerably more than four dollars. She commented that we had thus covered the spectrum of mug-ness over the course of the day. 

We had lunch at a little Mexican place on the water. It started raining really hard as we were finishing, so we moved under the restaurant overhang for a few minutes and then ran for it. Eve paid for parking because surprisingly for a gentrified little town, it still had Small Town parking prices - fifty cents an hour. 

Besides two Perth events in two days, there was a cellphone thing. My husband loses his cellphone constantly. He will have been in the house for ten minutes and have to search the whole house for his phone - it's like he comes in, finds the most remote place to put it, leaves it there and then forgets. 

Eve and I don't, as a rule, lose our phones. I keep mine in the same pocket in my purse, and when I come home I take it out and put it on the stairs if I'm going upstairs or on the table by the couch if I'm not. But when we got home from dinner, I did a couple of things in the kitchen and then realized I didn't know where my phone was. The only good thing was that I had texted Sonia to say we were coming to pick up Lucy when we left Perth, so I knew I had brought it home. But where was it? 

It's on sometimes, but often not, so I knew Matt trying to call it might not work. I double-checked my purse, the car, the table by my computer -- nothing. I checked everywhere again. Eve had gotten in the shower, so I couldn't ask her to help, but as a Hail Mary I went into her room, and sure enough, she had picked up my phone from the stairs and it was on her bed. This has literally never happened before. I told Matt I had no idea how he does this all the time, I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. Should my phone hold this high a place of importance in my life? That's a question for another post.

The next morning, Eve and I were ready to leave (for Perth again, in case you need me to say Perth again, Perth Perth Perth) and suddenly she couldn't find her phone. WHICH NEVER HAPPENS. She had been downstairs to make breakfast, so we checked the kitchen, the bathroom, her bedroom (a couple of times, of course). This was equally as baffling as mine the night before. I was heading downstairs to check again while she started to lift the blanket that was on her bed, and I heard her say "Like what the hell, did someone..... oh, there it is". It was so far under the blanket it was basically in the center of the bed. I would think Lucy had punked her if I didn't know better. Wait, do I know better? `

Anyway, that was our funny little two-day couplet of coincidences about things that start with the letter P.