I haven't, perhaps, always had the greatest luck with apartments. I had the time to reflect upon that in the middle of the night the other day when I was awoken by something large crawling on me. Now this freaked me out a lot more than did my la or encounter with creepy-crawlies, in my last apartment but one. Then, it had only been crickets. Admittedly, crickets are not the usual type of insect you expect to find in abundance in homes Francisco, but if you could get over their unfortunate hopping, there was something rather comforting about their chirping, particularly on cold, rainy nights.

So, as I was saying, I was awoken the other day by something larger than a cricket, and it gave me such a shock that I was awake, with the lights on, for a long time afterwards. I'd been fast asleep at the time, but something brought me up to half iousness, a touch on my arm. In my half sleep I imagined it was my book, open on the bed, the pages slowly turning against my skin. But as I opened my eyes in the darkness, I saw a large, solid, dark shape, at least an inch-and-a-half across, on my a leaped out of bed, and slammed the light on. But whatever it was, it had instantly sought refuge in one of the nooks and crannies of my apartment. Whether it was a particularly large and agile spider, some monstrous bug, or, more likely, a small mous e yet to find out. But it's the not knowing what it was that was disconcerting.

In other ways too, this apartment has proven to be far from the perfect abode. I soon found out that I had three neighbors living in the apartment above me, and I hear their every footfall. The little Chinese girl seems to engage in some kind of p pinning challenge which requires her to dash around from one corner to another, to keep all the plates balanced; or at least that's my interpretation of her incessant pedestrian activity. The very first day I moved in here, I had to knock on their do ask them to play their music more quietly. Since then, I've established a nice communication with the two gay roommates (one of whom is darned cute), and the noise coming from the apartment has ceased to be such a nuisance to me. But the Chinese girl keeps up with her plate-spinning.

A worse problem is the shaky electric circuitry. I'm not talking about sparking wires or anything, but there's one of the circuits which keeps breaking, and it's the circuit on which I have my computer and my TV/VCR. It would be bad enough if it j ant that my computer would be cut off in mid flow - computers aren't keen on that. But what actually happens is that the circuit goes to half power and appliances switch on and off several times per second. My computer definitely doesn't like that.While the electrician is coming on Monday, I'm far from optimistic that he'll be able to fix the problem. I just hope the experience won't be as bad as the horrible day I've spent today with a troll-like, angry, cursing plumber in my basement. Mid I went into my bathroom, intending to take a shower, only to find the bottom two inches of the bathtub swimming in green muck. The next day was even worse, when I found a fresh discharge in the tub, this time looking like the regurgitated contents of ilet. Or it could have been someone else's toilet, for the consistency wasn't recognizably my own.