Or, as one former building manager put it, "The Nightmare Continues..."

- Flies. And bats. The first autumn we lived here, this place was infested with flies and bats. Though no bats ever entered our apartment, the flies came in, literally by the thousands. They'd cling to the windows, and every morning I'd awake to their buzzing and go around to kill them. To put this into perspective, every day there would be around 10 flies on each window, and we have seven windows. That's seventy flies per day, for about three or four weeks. It was pretty biblical. Now, the exterminators come out at the end of the summer and hose down the entire exterior of the building with chemicals. The bats were eliminated by a bat specialist, who actually put little one-way doors on all their holes, which allowed them to leave the building but not to get back in.

- Speaking of windows, sometimes it's nice to have seven 10' x 4' windows. But there are four or five days every winter when the wind blows really hard at just the right angle, so as to make it seem like you are living outside. Last winter, there was a week when if we shoved foam into all the cracks around the window, turned the heat up as far as it would go, and turned on all the stove burners and the oven, the temperature would rise to about 56 degrees, during the warm part of the day. At night, forget about it. You have to pile on all the blankets and sleeping bags, and cling to your partner. In the morning, you rush to the shower, turn it on, rush back to bed while you wait the 5 minutes for the water to heat up, and then rush back into the shower. When you're done in the bathroom you leave the apartment immediately. In the summer it's the exact opposite, of course. Those windows turn this place into a greenhouse.

- On a final note, I would like to thank all the people who stole our clothes from the laundry room, all the people who stole our mail, all the people who pulled the fire alarm for fun, all the people who wrote gang signs on the walls, and all the people who smashed eggs on and/or shit on the carpet in the common areas. God bless you all.

I've been focusing on the horror stories, but here's some of the best things that ever happened in our building.

- We've had quite a few homeless people sleep on the benches outside the building or just hang out on the lawn. But one time, two old, old men sat on the patio all day and got drunk. The great part about this was that one of them, a scrawny, ancient, filthy guy, was wearing a skin-tight Mr. Bubble t-shirt.

- I wish I had a picture of this, but I'll try to describe it. There used to be a little kid who lived down the hall, who'd wear a towel safety-pinned around his neck like a cape, and a Honey Nut Cheerios box, with eyeholes cut into it, over his head as a helmet.

- Speaking of kids, once we came home with a giant 10-pound bag of apples from Bayfield. Two little girls thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and started taunting us. "What are you gonna do with all those aaaaaaapples? That sure is a lot of aaaaaaapples. You must liiiiiiiiike to eat aaaaaaaapples. Maybe they're gonna have an aaaaaaapple party where everyone bobs for aaaaaaapples."

- We had this great couple who lived next door to us once, and one night they had themselves some screaming, wailing, headboard-slamming-the-wall sex, over and over all night. At one point, the little kid (about age 5) who lived on the other side of us came out of his apartment, walked up to their door and yelled, "we can hear you."

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