Apartment Hunting

Finbar is apartment hunting again. Which means that I am apartment hunting vicariously though him. Now, that's OK with me. I really like looking at different places to live. In fact, as dork-a-licious as it sounds, I would find a tour of all the local open houses an appealing way to spend an afternoon. It's a little bit vouyeuristic, I suppose. I like seeing the insides of different houses. In fact, when we go for walks in the evening, I like to look in through the windows of the houses we pass. I don't want to see the people. I want to see the wallpapers, the lighting fixtures, the built-in bookshelves (drool). I like imagining what I would do with the space if I lived there. I like thinking about sitting on the front porches or weeding the flowerbeds. It's a kind of sickness, I suppose. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking. I am so tired of renting. I want to own my own little piece of real estate where, if I spend the money to buy elaborate moldings or take the time to paint the rooms, it's taking care of my investment, not embellishing a property that I'll be relinquishing to its real owner sooner or later. I long for a washer and drier that I don't have to share with anyone else-- and that I can use at anytime of the day or night and even leave the clothes in the drier or washer while I go to the store because I don't have to worry that someone else will need to get in there and will throw my stuff on the floor of the laundry room. I can't wait for the day when I can rip out all the cheap carpeting and either refinish or install wood flooring.

But I digress.

The problem with apartment hunting with Finbar is that it's like looking for a dog with my dad. My dad has always been a hunter, and when I was a child, he always had one or two dogs that were trained to rabbit hunt. (And before any of you decide to go off on a rant about how evil hunting is-- spare me. I don't hunt personally and don't like to even look at guns. My father doesn't hunt any endangered species, or any animal that we or our friends don't eat. He never shoots an animal for trophy pieces or leaves it to die in the woods.) These dogs were always working dogs, not pets. They were well-fed, groomed, and exercised each day. But they were not animals that my sister and I were allowed to play with and were NEVER ever allowed in the house. They had special kennels behind the house. Nonetheless, we always got attached to the dogs and it would cause many tears when a dog that could no longer hunt or was too old or sick to live in a kennel without being cruel would be moved to my aunt's farm or to a friend of my father's home, where it could live out its remaining time being spoiled by someone else. And then the process of finding a replacement would begin. This usually meant visiting a series of breeders and people with "Puppies For Sale" ads in the newspapers. My dad, who I'm sure thought that this was a good way to spend time with the girls doing something fun (I mean, we loved dogs, right?), would line up appointments on Sunday after church and we would drive all over the county looking at dogs in people's basements. They were always beagle pups, and anyone who's ever seen a beagle knows that 1) they have the cutest little puppy faces, 2) they have the saddest puppy dog eyes, and 3) they are very friendly dogs who just want to be looooooooved. So, my sister and I would be practically shaking with delight at the wriggling, yelping puppies. We'd always fall in love at first sight with every single one of them. My dad would stand around talking to the people selling the dogs, looking for whatever magic qualities that he wanted in the dog, giving us just enough time to cement the bond with the puppies, aaaaaaaand then he'd decide that this dog wasn't just right. We'd be crushed-- and he'd be totally mystified at the tears. In all the years before we got Dottie (the last hunting dog he's owned in a long while), he never once understood why we were so incredibly upset by this whole process.

Finbar does this exact thing with apartments. He takes me to a place with lovingly maintained hardwood floors, original turn-of-the-century hardware, built -in bookshelves (drool), and low rent, lets me fall in love with it, aaaaaaand then decides that it's not exactly what he was looking for. He did it again today. I loved this apartment so much that for one insane moment I actually considered moving out of my very nice living situation and renting the apartment myself. I want this apartment so bad, it makes me want to cry. And now he's hemming and hawing about maybe it's too small, maybe he can find something cheaper, what if he gets that job in North Carolina (God Forbid), what if, what if, what if. It makes me want to kill him.