Noises in the night and other complaints of the day

No, I'm not talking about creaks in the house, the heating/cooling unit turning on or off, or the hum of the refrigerator running. Those are all normal noises that people hear when they are trying to sleep at night. And those are precisely the noises that I heard most of my life in the middle of the night, with the exception of the occasional dog bark, thunderstorm, or the occasional car passing by.
When I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, I moved into a living situation that I thought would be "temporary." This temporary situation has been anything but temporary. Let me paint this mental picture for you...I will first start with the building itself. Picture an old 1960's era brick building with a flat roof on it. The shingles on the roof hang over the building sides for about 4 feet or so. Its a strange looking building to say the least. Not what you would picture as an attractive building. When I go home for lunch today, I will take a picture and post it for you to see. The front door to my apartment is faded green, and looks like it has been beaten in several times. There's a tacky plastic tag on the door that's black and reads #122. Cool. If you are exiting the apartment and open the door, you will see a huge power tower. Its enormous. I am sure that you would be able to hear the buzzing of all the electricity running through it, but there is no way you could possibly hear it, because about 40 feet straight out and down some is one of the busiest interstates in the country, I-40, which runs from Wilmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California. This is a major US east to west interstate, which is a staggering 10 lanes when it passes by my apartment building. Jake Brakes chug and emergency sirens wail at all hours of the day, and I can only recall a few moments when I haven't heard a single vehicle in passing. Sometimes the noise doesn't bother me, and I can block it out all night long. Some nights, however, most of the time coming at the end of an abnormally long and stressful day, all I can hear when I try to go to sleep is the interstate. I have to get the ipod out and turn it up some nights just to get to sleep. You know, it really wouldn't be all that bad though, if that were all I had to deal with.
Every night, my upstairs neighbor comes home at approximately 4:00AM. He works the graveyard shift at FedEx. Again, that really wouldn't be so bad if we lived in a contemporary building. However, I can hear him put the key in his door, open and shut the door, and then to top it off, I hear his 100-pound Doberman run back and fourth upstairs to greet his owner. And again, that wouldn't be so bad because it doesn't last all that long, but it wakes up my extremely territorial, Napoleonic, boxer that wants to show that he knows what's going on. He gets up, sticks his head between the blinds of the window and barks...and barks...and barks. And all I can do is quiet him down, then stare at the clock only to see that I have about 2 more hours before I have to get up and get ready to go to work. It's quite depressing.
So those are the noises that keep me awake at night. I have a few other complaints about this "temporary" living situation that I call home right now. I may as well get them all out while I am thinking about it...

A) I am not a smoker, my boyfriend is not a smoker. But for some reason, since the moment I moved in EVERYTHING smells like someone that lives there smokes like a chimney. I can even smell smoke on our clothes when I go to do laundry. All the candles, Febreeze and fragrances in the world don't help. Heaven knows, I have tried everything.

B) People who live in the same apartment complex flat out refuse to pick up after their dogs outside. There are even "pet waste receptacles" located conveniently everywhere around this pet-friendly complex, but for some reason, people prefer not to pick up, and therefore, I have to keep a steady eye on the ground when I take the dogs out to make sure that i don't get a surprise on the bottom of my shoes. Lovely.

C) Do you and your partner weigh a combined 120 pounds? Good. Then you will have no problem working together in the kitchen. Do you alone weigh much more than 120 pounds and have a dog that weighs more than 120 pounds herself that loves to sit in the kitchen for all the action like I do? Well, you are in trouble, because this kitchen is TINY. I have much of my kitchen items still packed in a box because there was only room for the essentials in this sad excuse for a kitchen.

D) I guess our upstairs neighbor had problems with his sink/ dishwasher. Water leaked through the ceiling into the cabinet where all our food was stored once. That was fun.

E) And the award for the cheapest carpet I have ever laid eyes on goes to....my apartment complex. The carpet balls up and creates what looks like dust bunnies all over the floor of the apartment. Every 4-5 times that I vacuum in there, I have to replace the vacuum cleaner bag. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

F) F is for my stupid bathroom. First of all, the hinges on the door in the bathroom have been painted so many times, that they don't work. They are stuck. Its so bad, that when I attempt to shut the door in the bathroom, the hinge plate pulls from the door instead of the hinge moving. The screws that hold the plate to the door frame act as the hinge. The floor of the bathroom is so warped from years of water damage, that the door cannot shut all the way. And its very tricky, because you have to close the door to the bathroom to access the shower itself. The knobs that you use to control the water temperature are so funny. They move in and out from the wall when the water is on and make a noise that sounds very similar to a jackhammer. And last but not least, the water doesn't stay hot very long at all. Maybe 1.5 to 2 minutes on a good day.

Okay, I am now done complaining. If you actually read all the way through this, leave a comment. I seriously doubt that anyone would really read all this complaining.

Goodbye Tesa

Before I tell you the bad news, which I am sure you have already concluded from the title of this post, I want to share with you the positive things that I remember about the eldest dog in my family, Tesa.
Back in 1995, I was in the 8th grade. My mom always wanted a yellow lab, and had a name picked out for years. We already had one dog, Maico, a black lab. We had always been a one-dog family for the most part, so when my mom and dad told me and my brother that we were getting a second dog, we were very excited. Around Christmas time that year, we got a fluffy, shy, beautifully blonde baby lab. Enter Tesa. Automatically the center of attention in our house, Tesa, became a family icon. I remember family movies my mom filmed with me and my little brother sitting on the couch holding this puppy like she was a newborn baby sister just being brought home from the hospital. We were arguing over who's turn it was to hold the puppy. My brother was 8 or 9 years old at the time, and especially took a liking to this dog. Being the entertainer and comedian of the house, he created the "Tesa Voice" which he used all the time growing up. Whether he was pretending to be the dog talking, or if he was using the voice to get out of trouble with my mom, which worked every time, we heard the voice more than we really ever wanted to hear it. To this day, when my brother calls me on my cell phone, the ring tone that he recorded on the phone is him talking in the Tesa Voice.
I remember Christmas a few years ago, when my mom worked very hard in the kitchen to make desserts for the family Christmas dinners over at my grandmother's house. I guess one dessert in particular Tesa liked, because on Christmas eve that year, in the middle of the night, somehow Tesa pulled that dessert (The Honey Bun Cake) off the counter where it was neatly wrapped up on to the floor and proceeded to drag it into the living room, under the Christmas tree, where she demolished the whole thing. We found the evidence of the honey bun cake (crumbs and some saran wrap) under the Christmas tree the next morning. My mom wasn't very happy about that, but we just chalked it up that being Tesa's official favorite dessert. Tesa also had many other favorites (picked out by my brother of course in the Tesa voice). Her favorite movie was Big and as you can probably guess from the movie, her favorite actor was Tom Hanks. Some other things that she enjoyed doing was running away from strangers (she was very shy) and crossing the street where I lived growing up into the neighbor's perfectly manicured lawn to "do her business." I guess she thought that she was a contributing factor to keeping their yard remarkably green.
As Tesa got older, she got bigger (as you can see in the picture) and the hip problems that we saw forming when she became younger became more of an issue. In recent years, she moved into the mountains of North Carolina with my mom and dad where she pretty much became a couch potato, but still an unwavering dedicated dog that our family loved very much.
Just last Wednesday, January 30th, my dad told me that Tesa had gone off into the woods earlier that morning (which was very unusal for her, she didn't like to go far from the house) and hadn't come back home yet. I was very worried about her, but had hope that she would show up later that night, and she would be dirty from playing in the woods with the other dogs. She never showed back up. Our family believes that she ran off to die, which isn't terribly uncommon for dogs. We will always remember Tesa, the sweet, shy, but mischievous lab that we loved very much. My mom made a Honey Bun Cake in her honor last weekend.