House hunting

As you all know, shortly after Stephen's life-threatening move to Tejas, he moved in with me. He even signed the lease and everything so now it's all official-like. Now, don't get me wrong, our current apartment is just fine. But that's it - fine. It's fairly cheap considering what the normal apartment rate is in Austin, not a huge dump, and ridiculously close to the law school and Stephen's work. There are a few problems though:

#1 - I think I'm about to go all warrant of habitability on their ass. My building is only about 20 apartments or so, and it's owned and managed by one very tall old lady and her husband. They're very nice, but they're not, shall we say, efficient. My shower has been leaking for quite some time now, and the guy actually came to check it out, about, oh, 6 weeks ago. It was fixed on Thursday. Also, there has been some sort of strange funky mold growing on the ceiling of the bathroom, so if Stephen and I die of mold poisoning, feel free to sue them for me.

#2 - And this is the MAJOR problem - no pets allowed! I was okay with this at first - if you'll recall my poor kitty died about a year and a half ago, so I was cool with not getting another animal for a while. However, I've got the puppy fever. I want a dog! And alas, our building does not allow them. So we must persevere and search for a halfway decent place to live!

Apparantly, that's much harder than it seems. Any place we've looked at so far has gotten fairly crap-tastic reviews about management on apartmentratings.com or has reports about crazy drunken rich kids running throughout the halls at night. And I will be damned if I'm living in a dorm again! And if a place looks too good to be true, well, it is. We found a really nice apartment complex out by where I used to live last year, and besides the distance, there's also - surprise! We're selling off our apartments as condos. So, possibly someone will kick you out of your place. Suckaaa!

I think I might just resort to Craigslist.