Train Whistles & Ice Cream Trucks

Have you ever gone on Craigslist and found your own apartment up for rent? Well, we did! Except it's not as crazy as it sounds, it is our old apartment, which we don't live in anymore. BUT, the pictures posted are of our apartment with our furniture and everything! I had a good friend email me, wondering if we still lived in Provo because she thought she saw our piano in a picture on Craigslist (she lived in our Provo ward and I taught her piano lessons) - so I took a little look and sure enough, there was our old apartment! Apparently our old landlord liked our cute apartment and kept the pictures that we posted online to sell our contract, and then used them again. I guess we shouldn't tell the new renters that we rented the place for about $150 less than it is going for now...right? :)

It was fun to look at the pictures again - I still miss that old apartment sometimes, we really loved living there! It was our very first apartment after we were married and it was located in the lovely area right between the train tracks and the freeway (I think I may have mentioned this in a previous post - about the knife thrower across the street and such). We have fond memories of the ice cream ("drug") truck (I can still hear that song in my head...), another strange and suspicious un-marked truck with a weird horn which we think sold produce...or something, the aforementioned knife thrower, our mailbox getting run over by a handicapped man driving a "stolen" car (it was seriously so crazy, he almost hit our car in the process!), the train whistle (which was incredibly loud but we got used to it and grew to actually love it!), waiting forEVER for the train to pass so we could drive home, riding the UTA bus to school with lots of interesting and crazy people (there was this one guy who rode the bus with me every morning who sort of mumbled/talked to himself and sort of to me - he wore these coveralls and carried a huge plastic bag full of aluminum cans, and he ALWAYS talked about the weather and the train while we waited for the bus...he was a bit crazy), lots of neighborhood cars with huge speakers playing Mexican polka music all night long, getting random knocks on the door by some interesting people (once this Hispanic guy came to our door and in Spanish asked Jonathan if we had any "gold"...hmm, not sure what he meant by that), trying to make our downstairs neighbors not hate us because of our piano (I can't say that I blame them too much, but we HAD to play it!), having our cute, elderly and I am sure well-meaning landlord drop in unannounced (in his defense, we liked him a lot and he was always very helpful and fixed anything that went wrong, and he reminded me of my Grandpa) - oh the memories.

Seriously though, we really do have great memories of living there, including our amazing ward where we met some really great friends (which I hope we will still continue to keep in touch with!) (not to mention our awesome game nights with the Thompsons, Clarks, Bastiens, etc.), my adorable and amazing young women I got to work with in our ward (not to mention the awesome leaders I worked with, Ashley and I could always find something fun to do, like raid the nursery for a snack...), our fun ward choir (which Jonathan conducted and I accompanied), our cute apartment (which was really very nice, despite the somewhat sketchy area it was located in...), having friends over to play games or watch movies (Janina and Matt! and Annie and Jordon! awww, we miss hanging out with you guys...), having Liz over for study parties, having Annie come visit via the bus every week, hanging out with Benjamin all the time (and doing fun and exciting activities such as throw hundreds of cards into a hat in our living room when the three of us were completely bored), and so much more.

I think that mostly it is fun to reminisce and I am just so excited to be moving into our own place very soon (hopefully! Jonathan has a few great leads and has a job interview tomorrow morning - once he gets a job we can start looking for a place to live!) and so excited to have a place of our very own again after living with my Grandma for over a year. It has been a wonderful year and we are incredibly grateful for the chance to live there with her, not to mention that living so near my family has been the best! But we are totally ready and excited to move on to our next great adventure! And we can't wait to get all our furniture and things out of the basement where a lot of it has been stored, and dust them off and make a new place all our own. And I bet it'll at least be as cute as our old one!

I am wondering, though, if anyone ought to warn the new renters about the knife thrower?