One For the Birds

Hellllloooo! Well, I'm back from St. John, and I have a TON to share with you all . . . it's quite the work in progress. But for now, I must share the story of what Wilson and I came home to last night. I'm pretty sure you're not going to believe this, but I promise you it's true.

We arrived home at around 9:45 last night after an obnoxious tarmac "traffic jam" at Newark Int'l kept us from our gate for nearly 2 hrs after we'd landed--fantastic! We walked in the door, switched on the lights, and irritatingly realized . . . our apartment was a disaster site. Now would probably be a good time to mention that we did not leave it in such a state. Nope. We, for once, had actually made a point of leaving it pretty spotless, with the hopes that it would be easier to transition back into the "real world" upon our return. I know what you're thinking--Irish lives in the ghetto . . . obviously someone broke into her apartment while she was gone. I wish! No no, good friends. What went on in my apartment was far worse (not really, but I'm feeling all dramatic right now, so I'm just gonna run with it) . . .

In our brownstone, there are just two apartments. Our landlord and her fam occupy the bottom apartment, and Wilson and I occupy the top. Now, we're relatively friendly people, so we generally check on one anthers' pets while the other is out of town. Since the weather in NYC promised to be quite toasty while we were gone, we'd asked our landlord and her two girls (they're maybe 8 and 12 years old) to check on Nico every so often to make sure she had enough food and water, and wasn't dying of heat stroke. Well, I'm pretty sure that the girls took the duty of "checking on Nico" to a ridiculous extreme--it appears that they all but lived in our apartment while we were gone!

We are still discovering stuff they got into. The freezer door was open a tad, and there were tell-tale popsicle sticks thrown on the floor in the kitchen. They'd pulled DVDs off the shelf and carelessly discarded a couple onto the floor, outside of their cases. It would appear that they played dress-up in my jewelry and accessories, as there was a bunch of it strewn about the apartment. They'd pulled out the guitar hero. They obviously played darts, as the darts were found all bent up, in various parts of the apartment. They pulled out a little massage buddy thing we have from a drawer in the bedroom. They'd gone through our magazines and mail and spread it about the kitchen table, thus eliminating the neat "pile system" we had going on. One of our posters had been half torn off the wall. Ugh. The list goes on and on.

BUT. THE KICKER, my friends, was when I went into the bedroom and turned on the light in there, only to discover . . . BIRDSEED. EVERYWHERE. I'm not making this up. The broom was laying against the wall, as though they had attempted to clean the mess up, but their attempts obviously hadn't produced very fruitful results! The seed was covering the couch, and spread all over the floor in the bedroom, even reaching as far as the living room. It was ridiculous. As Wilson and I sat and tried to think of what possible explanation there could be for such a bizarre spill, we vowed to email our landlord the next morning, assuming she knew nothing of the mess her little hellions had wreaked on our apartment.

Turns out we were wrong. Her response? "I'm so sorry!! M--- (the girls' father) got a parakeet for father's day and we hid the bird in your apartment. Apparently Nico wanted to play with the bird and knocked the cage over. The good news is that the bird survived and Nico had fun but the birdseed got on your floor. I'm so sorry!! They said they cleaned up the mess - I'm so sorry!!" Yeah. Not so sure how I feel about an icky bird being chased all over my apartment by my cat (or the fact that my landlord didn't even offer to clean the mess up for us!) But I guess it's a good story . . . or it will be anyway, once it's finally all cleaned up--that sh*t is EVERYWHERE!

Oh well . . . there's renting in NYC for ya!