malkav11

There are a lot of nice things about living where I do. I'm in a very central location, right on a major bus line, so I can get most places within a single transfer and it's not *too* long to get many useful places. It's a very pretty neighborhood, and while the street the bus runs down is crazy busy, none of our neighborhood streets are in the least. Of course, there's nothing convenient, either. Unless I have a mad craving for coffee or ice cream, there's not much in the way of commercial establishments for several blocks in any direction, which means I pretty much have to bus anywhere I go, and busses are never, ever convenient.

I'm not really super excited about having to share with the upstairs tenants (though it could be worse. This lot sometimes play loud music or make weird noises at odd moments, but nothing nearly as noticeable or annoying as small children or the dog that one set of tenants had that would bark literally for hours for no apparent reason.) Especially the laundry room. They do laundry whenever they happen to remember they had laundry in progress, so it can sit for days and meanwhile I can't do mine.

On the other hand, the basement is nice and cool, I have adequate space for my needs and a king-sized bathroom, and I only have to share the laundry room with three college students and not an entire apartment building. The biggest thing is of course: I don't have to pay rent or utilities.

I may be able to stay when I'm done with college, but I'm still considering moving, much as I hate it. It comes to this: I need a proper kitchen. I need a real stove, not a hot plate. I need an oven, not a toaster oven that barely fits the toast, much less anything else. I need a real full-sized refrigerator, as the mini-fridge I have barely stores a few smaller items of fresh food and a couple of gallon-sized beverage containers. And while I don't *need* a dishwasher (I only have four place settings worth of dishes and a few pots and pans), I have a sneaking suspicion it would get my dishes more consistently and thoroughly clean.

Really, the oven's the big thing. I had never previously tried to cook, so I really had no idea just how wide a spectrum of recipes require something or other be baked. Even if I don't get that ambitious (and frankly, I suspect I wouldn't very often), I can't do any sort of pizza other than delivery, and I can't cook quite a few other varieties of frozen food (which, along with boxed food, *ought* to be one of the staples of my diet as my cupboards and freezer both contain far more storage space than my refrigerator). Nor can I make any other sort of baked goods. Cookies, for example, would be lovely, but no.

Of course, I also wouldn't mind having control of my own damn thermostat. It might not be so bad if the upstairs people were male, but my temperature comfort zone and that of most members of the female gender that I have met do not mesh very closely.