roommate posts

Dwight moved out

in

After a year and a half of living with me, my roommate Dwight finally moved out. His girlfriend got a “real” job in Texas, so he moved down there with her. His stay here was supposed to be temporary, but he liked the low living expenses so much he decided to stay.

This has been quite a change for me. The change in my cost of living is quite significant: My basic expenses will increase by an estimated 34%, not a small number. This is at a time when I’m about to lose my job. I have money saved, and could easily get a job at a restaurant in no time I’m sure, but it still could be rough, especially on some of my planned extra type expenditures.

Living alone is quite different from living with someone. There was someone there most of the time to do stuff with before, but now I have to put effort into finding someone to do stuff with, especially since I no longer have any real friends (he was the only one that I actually did stuff with excluding family). He had a good collection of movies and frequently rented some, so we often watched them. We also played card and other games. It was nice to have an additional person to help with some stuff: It meant I didn’t have to always be there to look for and deal with everything. It can be very lonely sitting at home alone.

Of course, it can be nice as well. I can have lots of alone time without worrying about someone popping in. Dwight could be quite the talker and sometimes would talk for hours, sometimes about things I wasn’t especially interested in. The dishes were a shared duty and they ended up being quite a mess as well as a lot of work. My house is much cleaner now and I plan to keep it that way.

On the cleaner note, I have moved some of the stuff from my front room into his old bedroom. The front room had been piled with stuff and virtually unusable, but now it is rather clean. It will be an entertainment room (video, board, and card games, chairs to chat, etc). His old room is rather clean still as well, and may become an office. I hope to get rid of a lot of stuff and make the house cleaner still.

We’ll see how this works out.

New roommate

in

Toby Manor will soon have a new employee. Dwight Henson, my roommate and bandmate for several years in the past, will be living here temporarily for a few months or so. He wants to stay to look for a job in his desired field (TV or film). He’s had no luck in the two years or whatever it’s been since he graduated, so who knows how long that’ll take.

The preparation for the move has been very rough for me. I’ve had to move all of the junk from my back bedroom to my living room to allow it to become his bedroom. I have a lot of junk, and it really fills up the living room. There is a narrow walkway between stacked boxes and piles of stuff. This of course took a while to do. I’m intending on having a large and long series of garage sales once the weather turns nice to get rid of a lot of this, and hopefully pare my stuff down to a much more minimal amount.

I’ve also had to clean up the bathroom, kitchen, and hallway, known as the communal areas. These have taken a good bit of time and are still not especially ready for their planned roles.

And of course, as is a tradition here at Toby Manor, I’ve had plumbing problems. I went more than a week without water because a pipe burst after freezing for maybe the 5th time this year. That plumbing is a pain and takes some time, since it is outside and underneath my house.

I’ve got lots of schoolwork to do as well. It seems quite overwhelming. I’m feeling enticed toward dropping a class or something.

Anyway, I’m worried that the new employee will want me to do all sorts of work to get the house up to his germophobic and more normal person standards. I won’t be able to do much at least till school is out. We will no doubt get into arguments about how to run things. Living with two people should theoretically be less work than one, but I fear the opposite will be the case.

There are bright notes of the move, though. This will provide me with some much needed social interaction, even if just with Dwight and his girlfriend. It could be cool playing cards and the like. The costs of living here will hopefully go down a good bit. I’m expecting utility usage to go up noticeably, but it shouldn’t overtake the savings of splitting the costs in half. And this whole thing will hopefully motivate me more to do things to get out of this rut I have dug myself into. It’s getting harder and harder to stay in this rut.