The New Apartment Checklist

On November 20, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home7 Comments

As I pack up my apartment and prepare to move for the fifth time in six years, I find that I have learned a great deal about what I don’t want in an apartment. I also have a short list now of things that I do want in a future residence.

First, there are a few non-negotiables:

A clothes washer and dryer in the apartment – The condominium that I owned from 2004 to 2011 didn’t have a washer and dryer. It didn’t even have hookups to buy them. I could have converted the front hall closet into a washer and dryer nook, but it would have been cramped and I would have lost a valuable closet. Instead, I spent more than seven years doing my laundry down the hall, using many, many quarters. Never again.
A dishwasher in the apartment – Most US apartments have a dishwasher, but my flat in Germany barely had a kitchen at all. For three years, I hand-washed all of my dishes. I’d rather not go back to that.

Most (but not all) modern US apartments have my non-negotiables, so I’m not too worried about finding them. What I really have to focus on while looking for my next apartment are these other niceties that come with having space:

Deep sinks – There are several things I do regularly that are hindered by shallow sinks. For example, I have an 18 cup Pur water filter on my counter, and another one inside the refridgerator. In order to refill them, I have to use a pitcher as a medium step. In my previous apartment, the faucet had one of those extendable hose things at the end, and I could use that. It would be nice to just be able to put the entire tank inside the sink and fill it right from the tap. (Or maybe just have a fridge with a water dispenser in the door- that would work well also.)
Lots of storage space – In the apartment before this one, there was a small walk-in closet off the bedroom and a mediocre amount of kitchen cabinet space. The space under the bathroom sink was tiny. That was it for storage space inside the apartment. It was a miniscule place, with tiny amounts of storage. The apartment I’m in now does well on that front- there’s tons of cabinet space in both the kitchen and the bathroom, with lots of drawers for stuffing things in. I even have one kitchen drawer that never really got used at all, except for a label maker and some kitchen gadget instruction manuals. This is the dream, folks- so much storage space that you can afford to mostly ignore an entire drawer for a year.
A wide bathroom counter – My bathroom in Germany had no counter around the sink- the sink attached to the wall and if I wanted a cabinet underneath it, I had to put it in myself. There was a five or six inch deep ledge set into the wall over the sink that ran the length of the bathroom. That’s where I stored all the things that you would normally have out, like a toothbrush, shaving stuff, and so forth. There was also no medicine cabinet there, so my regular pills were on that ledge. Anything I didn’t need often was stuck into the tall cabinet that I purchased for the bathroom.
A kick-ass shower – I never really take baths, but every apartment shower is also a tub. I hate having to step into a tub to take a shower. I would much rather have a dedicated shower. Maybe something like this:
Lots of counter space in the kitchen – I have learned that if I don’t have a lot of counter space in the kitchen, I won’t try to cook very much. It’s important to have room to prepare things. In my condo, I had very limited counter space and most of my cooking was of the nuke-and-eat variety. In Germany, I had no counter space at all, and I rarely even went so far as to microwave stuff. I brought fantastic cookware back from Germany that had barely been used at all.
A good layout – This is the sort of thing that you only figure out after a lot of moves, but the right layout is very important. A washer and dryer on the patio means going out into Florida humidity to get your freshly laundered but somehow already swampy clothing. A bathroom door too close to the toilet means never being able to step into the bathroom without some sort of interpretive dance. A patio that looks out onto a parking lot means you’ll never really get to open your window blinds in the evenings unless you want to entertain all of your neighbors.

Above all else, privacy and a quiet apartment are the things I hold most dear. I’ve lived in places where you hear the nearest road very clearly and I don’t ever want to endure that again- it’s a subtle, slow moving stress that builds up over time, until you’re ready to do truly nefarious things to loud people outwside.

What are your must-haves when seeking a new place to live?

Editor’s Note: I’m attempting to blog every day in November with CheerPeppers. I don’t expect to succeed because life be crazy, but any blogging in excess of my previous post-free month is a win, right?

Singular Sensation

On November 19, 2016November 19, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home3 Comments

During the summer before my 10th grade year, my father and my brothers and I all climbed into dad’s 1986 Honda Accord, and hauled ourselves up the interstate highway into New York. We stopped briefly to see dad’s cousin in Hyde Park, to visit dad’s cousin near the FDR Estate. My flawed thirty-years-ago memory insists that dad’s cousin was a care-taker of the FDR estate, but I may not be remembering that correctly.

Ultimately, this trip took us into the city of New York. We walked through central park more than once, due to mild lost-ness, and we also took in a show. We took in this show:

This was the original run of A Chorus Line, which started on July 25, 1975, and was still going strong in 1987 when my brothers and I saw it in 1987. I’m pretty sure dad was behind the camera on this one, because he was definitely with us.

A Chorus Line on Broadway ran until April 28, 1990. When it ended its nearly fifteen year run, the Schubert theater had held more than 6,000 showings. It held the honor of being the longest running show on Broadway, until Cats took the new record seven years later. (Cats has since lost the title to the Phantom of the Opera. There’s always something bigger.)

On the last day that A Chorus Line was running on Broadway, another much smaller production was doing its second to last day: Santaluces Community High School, in Lantana, Florida.

In this production, a certain seventeen-year-old future blogger was cast in the role of Gregory Gardner. Wikipedia hilariously describes the role as, “a sassy Jewish gay man who divulges his first experience with a woman.”

When I was a senior in high school, I didn’t know anything about gay people, so I had no idea that playing a gay person on a high school stage in 1990 was a big deal until years later. What I did know was that I’m a mediocre tap dancer at best, and that I looked damn good in gold lamé.

I’ve been able to keep track of a few of the cast and crew members over the years, mostly through the evil web of Facebook. A precious few of the folks in this photograph have been excellent friends to me for the entirety of the twenty-six years since the show (and high school) ended for me. If you know where to look, my good friend, fellow blogger, and Huffington Post overnight editor Jade Walker is in the cast photo below.

As for me, I’m in the front row, fifth from the left. And I still think I look good in gold lamé.

What was the first musical you saw on stage? If you were in drama in school, what was the first show in which you took the stage?

Lost Photo Post: Vaduz, Liechtenstein

On November 18, 2016January 26, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe1 Comment

It is once again time to add to my series of photo posts where I took a bunch of photographs, intending to make a blog post out of them, and then never got around to actually writing the post.

On April 24th of this year, I joined two colleagues from our German office for a car ride from Regensburg Germany to Zurich Switzerland to attend some meetings. The gentlemen in the car with me were kind enough to allow me to persuade them to detour very slightly, around lunch-time, into my 28th country visited: Liechtenstein.

The Principality of Liechtenstein is a tiny landlocked country that sits between Austria on the northeast and Switzerland on the southwest. The entire country is roughly 62 square miles in size, with an estimated population of about 37,000 people. That’s one-eleventh the population of Miami, Florida!

The fact that Vaduz wasn’t a very lengthy detour helped me to persuade my colleagues. Also beneficial to my request for a detour is the fact that both of them are fond of a good restaurant. We set out to Vaduz to dine. The choice was between Vaduz and neighboring Schaan, and I pushed for Vaduz. The food at Restaurant Adler was just ok, but the decorations were fascinating.

I preferred Vaduz to Schaan because Vaduz is the capital city. In this case, the city is less than seven square miles in size, with a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

Liechtenstein is a very wealthy city, and while walking through the city center, we saw several banks, a Superdry store, and this Botero sculpture:

Lest you think it was all ritz and culture, there was also this giant Weber grill.

Liechtenstein is also a constitutional monarchy, and the most prominent landmark in Vaduz is Vaduz Castle, home of the current reigning prince. The castle is sitting on a steep hill overlooking Vaduz, and you can see it from just about anywhere in the city.

Here’s a slightly more zoomed photo of Vaduz Castle, taken after lunch and just before we continued our drive into Switzerland.

Have you ever been to Liechtenstein?

No one can tell!

On November 17, 2016 By StevenIn Life At Home2 Comments

The other day, I arrived home to find this little tableau at my front door.

I have to wonder at the thought process of the delivery guy. Did he really think that nobody would think to look behind the out-of-place welcome mat to see the package? Is the delivery guy one-third possum on his father’s side?

Maybe this is an offshoot of the “fake it til you make it” approach to life, doing things a certain way in the hopes that nobody will call you out on how wrong you are. Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

Rentenversicherung? Isn’t that the musical with all the HIV stuff?

On November 16, 2016January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany6 Comments

This statement will only be understood by a few of my readers: I mailed my V901 form about a month ago to the Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund in Berlin.

Here’s what that means for those of you who don’t speak German Bureaucracy: Rentenversicherung is German for pension insurance. Every person who earns a paycheck in Germany contributes a portion of their check to the pension fund, and the German government does some form of matching. It is in this way that people create retirement funds in Deutschland.

While I was in Germany, I was “localized.” This means that I was on German payroll, German benefits, German vacation allotment, and so forth. My 401k back in the US sat, stagnant, with no contributions for those three years, but a part of every check went into the Rentenversicherung. Three years of monthly contributions is not a fortune, but it’s still a tidy little sum of money that I’m eager to reclaim.

While I could wait until I reach retirement age to get a tiny check from Germany every so often, there’s a way to get this money which is much more useful to me now. Americans who pay into the German pension fund have an option to file a form to request that their contributions (but not the matching funds from the German government) be paid out to them. The V901 is that form. There are a few guidelines:

You must not have stayed in Germany for more than five years.
You must not have lived in Germany for at least 24 months prior to filing your claim. Or anywhere in the European Union, I think.
You must not be averse to filing a really complicated eleven page document through regular mail. I wanted to go to the German Consulate in Miami to do this, but they said I just needed to mail it directly to Berlin.
If you’re not American, a completely different set of rules applies to you.

I mailed this out over a month ago, and my response was a letter yesterday from an office in Hamburg with, you guessed it, another form to fill out and mail back!

v901