Internet and a New Apartment

Upon entering my new apartment building, one is met with two sets of stairs. One goes down to the laundry and storage areas, the other goes up to the apartments. At the first landing, there are 4 doors, each being to an individual apartment, and the second one being to mine. There are more stairs going up to more landings and more apartments, but I don't go up there because I don't live up there.

The people who live behind the fourth door have a dog. It is a small, white dog of the yippy variety. Every day, the people leave for work, recreation, seal clubbing, etc., and they leave the dog at home. The dog proceeds to bark the entire time they are gone. Now, the walls are quite good at blocking sounds, so I'm able to look at the entire situation with a sense of whimsy, as opposed to a sense of anger and annoyance. The dog mainly sticks with a standard set of four or five yips in quick succession, followed by a brief pause. Sometimes, though, the dog will let loose an actual bark, then follow up with two or three yips. It is all terribly exciting.

The layout of the apartment buildings has caused me to become a bit of a voyeur. Each building is in an 'H' shape and houses 12 apartments. Each apartment has at least 5 windows looking out over a parking lot. That means there are an ungodly number of windows that I can see from my window. PLUS, whenever people come into the building, I can use the peep hole in my door to see who they are and where they go (there's an old man who lives upstairs. He was wearing gloves yesterday!!!). I'm not a huge fan of the peep hole though. It is simply a hole in the door with a grate over the outside and a little piece of metal that slides in front of it on the inside. It is obviously from the economy line of peep holes. No box that requires you to press secret buttons, no fish eye lens, nothing to leave the person on the outside wondering if you're actually home. If they have a toothpick and an axe to grind, you're begging for trouble.

As with many apartments, they've slapped on a coat of paint after each tenant. None of the doors close easily due to the accumulation of layers of white latex house paint. They even painted over the bathroom tiles, which line the bottom four feet of the walls. We scraped it off to reveal 4-inch pastel yellow tiles, and a 2-inch border of black tiles. It was a bittersweet discovery. The plan is to finish scraping all of the tiles and then paint over it all with a high gloss black.