Up too early (again)

Once again, it's a Saturday morning and I'm awake much, much too early considering it's my day off. No odd dreams or loud noises from next door or outside, so I'm not sure what kicked me awake at 5 a.m.

Until recently there'd be noise from the apartment next door, footsteps up and down their stairs, for example, or yippers barking first thing in the morning, but that apartment might be empty now. The occupants -- who a former neighbor was convinced were hookers -- have been in the process of moving into a two bedroom unit in one of the other buildings. The former neighbor was also convinced that there were "fifteen Mexicans living in there!!"

I'm not sure why he thought the number was that high, unless there's some sort of tacit assumption that any time you have Latinos in an apartment there has to be at least a dozen of them, all with their clothing still damp from swimming the river, but he'd tell this bizarre story about the younger guy living there being a really cold-hearted pimp who kept a whole herd of undocumented women and had them out working the streets of Atlanta until dawn. I kept wanting to ask "And how do you know this," especially when his apartment was several doors down from them, and ours was right next door. If there were 15 people in that unit, there'd have been a lot more footsteps up and down the stairs -- because the bathroom's on the second floor and the staircase is on the common wall. As far as I've ever been able to tell, the "fifteen Mexicans" consisted of four people, two chihuahuas, and a cat, all of whom seemed to keep perfectly normal hours. I doubt if there were more than that, because one of the first things they did when they started to move into the two bedroom place was throw a hide-a-bed sofa away.

I do find myself wondering if the management is going to have to replace the carpeting in that unit before they rent it out again. The people who just moved out weren't in it very long, maybe 7 months, but they did have those little yippers -- and yippers are notorious for being impossible to housebreak.

There seem to be several empty townhouses here at the moment. I'm not sure why as the rents in this complex are quite reasonable for this part of Atlanta. It's probably a combination of this being an older complex, it's not gated, and most people are looking for two bedrooms, not just one. Personally, I'd rather live in one of these older garden apartment complexes with some green space around than in a (theoretically) more secure, modern gated multi-story sterile human habitrail complex where the chief architectural feature seems to be a humongous parking deck, but that's just me.