Oh, I wanted to add that our old neighbors were out taking their kids to a party yesterday and their five-year-old was a squid. Awesome. Their three-year-old was the smallest and smiliest Sperm Whale ever.

Yay, new house!!!

I remember cleaning my old apartment after the movers were done, and just grabbing a small gym bag for all the cat toys and other assorted junk I found on the floor after the big stuff was gone. Good thing was that that place was gutted for condo conversion and they started immediately after I left (not even giving the manager enough time to verify I had cleaned it for the deposit, so he had to give it to me anyway); bad thing was that I had spend a few hours cleaning it thoroughly even though I didn't need to.

Has this been mentioned yet? Real life superheroes:

[link]

Yay New House Robin!! I gave up on cleaning rentals after I got charged for bullshit in my first post-college rental (a room in a townhouse) and didn't get charged after leaving my next place a pigsty. Now I let the chips fall where they may, and I've always gotten the money back.

Yeah, for my last place, I basically gave it a half assed sweeping and rolled out. I'd been living there for six years, they were going to have to do a major overhaul anyway.

Yeah, by "pigsty," I mean I didn't clean the oven or clean under where the furniture used to be, like that. On the flip side, I moved into an apartment in college that the landlord didn't clean -- and apparently neither did the tenants, for a year. A year of stir-frying. The bathroom and kitchen in that place were the nastiest things I'd ever seen.

My cousin is a landlord who owns a bunch of properties in our little podunk hometown. He says he gives the security deposit back unless the damage is more than would be fixed by what they normally do between renters. They deep-clean, and fill in nailholes and re-paint, and replace the carpet, anyway. After he told me that, I quit fretting about leaving apartments pristine, and I've always gotten my deposit back.

Our first university apartment....whoa. We made the mistake of trying to clean a splash on the wall near the stove and had to scrub all the walls, as it soon became apparent that the room had originally been white, not beige.

My roommates have tended to be very unconcerned with dirt--in university there were cats they didn't clean up after properly, and when I was in MI my roomies would rather put 2 dirty dishes back into the dishwasher that had just finished running and run it again, rewashing all the STILL PERFECTLY CLEAN dishes they were too lazy to remove. Which, I guess, was better than letting the dirty stuff pile up in the sink. Except not so good for the environment or utility bills.

I got charged once for not vacuuming out the window sills. That's when I figured out that It was arbitrary. so I just did what I felt was reasonable.

I totally feel that anyone here could have written a better MCSL essay than that one.