The Trip to Grad School Continues - 25-26 August 2000

"Sights Unseen & Unclean"

August 25: That morning I got up and made the big mistake of signing my lease before checking out the room in person. Whoops! You can be sure I won't do that again. After some deliberation, we got an arsenal of cleaning supplies (seen in the bags in the first picture) and did some serious cleaning. Even these pictures, which I consider "before cleaning" pictures, don't fully represent how bad the place looked when we got there. In the span of two hours (after we went and complained quite a bit), they had already sent a crew to paint the place and put up some new blinds (a pane of glass was still shattered and the bathroom was a mold laboratory, but the paint made a pretty big difference). To get the full effect, you'll also have to imagine a lot of gnats flying around and living in the sink!

August 26th - 12:35AM: We'd made a good amount of progress by now, and here's what it looked like:

The next day around 3:20PM, just before my mom took off, here's what we'd accomplished:

My mom then left, on an adventure of her own as flights got cancelled and right and left engines of her plane were announced to be on fire:

The tower out here in Madison as I begin anew:

Hung out down by Monona Lake as the sun set that evening:

August 27: Here I am just about to go to my first official grad school event:

And most importantly, after another week of cleaning, painting, etc'ing...here's how my room turned out. Not too shabby at all!

This guy visits occassionally outside my window:

Here's where I park (luckily I got a spot under the apartment building):

And here's the bike I picked from Williamson Bicycyle just down the street:

And here's my first official bill...it happens to be from Ameritech (they sure charge a lot for pressing a button and "installing" your service!):