Tag Archive: apartment


(Submitted by anonymous reader)

I was living in Santa Fe, NM and was dating a boy who lived in Boulder, CO.  He usually came to visit me but one spring weekend, I decided to drive up and surprise him.

I’d never driven to Colorado before.  I was 18 years old and the year was 1997, so there were no Maps apps or iPhones.  I have no idea if cars had GPS systems at this point, but mine certainly didn’t.

All I had to find him was an address.  The plan was to follow highway signs to Boulder and then ask gas station employees for directions until I found it.

I arrived in Boulder at dawn.  I drove down the main highway, hoping the street he lived on intersected it.  It looked like I’d passed all of the gas stations in town so I pulled over in an apartment complex so I could turn around and look again at the address I’d written down.

I glanced down at the paper and then up at the building directly in front of me…the addresses matched.  I had somehow driven directly to my boyfriend’s apartment without ever having been there before.  The main highway actually was the street he lived on, it just changed names once you get to town. (Something I never saw on any of the street signs.). I drove straight to him.  Amazing.

[EDITOR: I love this. We passed this one by Barbara who noted how many missing details and unknowns (including how much information she might have remembered, even subconsciously, that helped get her pretty close) make it difficult to quantify. But I can’t imagine how startled she had to be when she ended up in exactly the place she needed to be with no apparent guidance. Talk about what seems like an amazing sense of direction. Do that a couple more times and there’s no doubt you’d start to feel like you had some sort of superpower. – Jarrett]

(Submitted by reader Thomas Brown)

In the fifth grade, living in Seattle, WA, my best friend and I were on the same little league team and one Saturday had hopped on our bikes and rode down to the park for our game.  Typical of the times and our age, we just let our bikes drop in the grass near the dugout and proceeded to warm up and then played ball.

After the game, to my friend’s dismay, someone had stolen his bike.  I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I vowed to find it and hopped on my bike and started riding in no particular direction.  I came to one of many apartment buildings some ways away and went in and around the back where, lo and behold someone had locked up my friend’s bike to a railing (it still had all my friend’s decals on it — it was really his bike).  I pedaled like crazy back to my friend’s house and his dad drove us back out, with a pair of bolt cutters, and we simply stole the bike back.

Out of all the homes and apartment buildings in a two or three mile radius of that park, I somehow picked the exact right direction to go and right building to turn into (I was not methodically searching and none of us saw the bike being take and ridden away).  The Odds were truly Crazy that day!

[EDITOR: Vigilante justice combined with sheer dumb luck, or was our submitter IN ON IT THE WHOLE TIME?!?! Nah, probably just sheer dumb luck.]

Doggone Perfect

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Kathleen Scott)

We’ve been talking about rescuing a small dog for about a year. Problem is, neither of us have dealt with a dog in an apartment or ever owned a small dog.  Would we be able to deal with daily walking, greater need for attention, and all the other not-cat traits that come with dog ownership?

One day we were running errands, talking it over in the car.  We decided that what we really needed was a test-dog but it had to be perfect – small, liked cats, house-trained, didn’t chew up the house, etc.

Got home that day to find a Facebook message from a friend. She’s going out of town and needed someone to watch her Pomeranian – who is small, sweet,  likes cats, is house trained and doesn’t chew on things.   We decide what we need, it happens!

(Although it must be said that we had been talking about rescuing a dog for a long time.  We really want a dog in our house and the subject is raised weekly.  It took an entire year before an ideal situation presented itself.)

[EDITOR: Personally I’m shocked at the odds of a small dog who’s house trained and doesn’t chew on things. I have enough gnaw marks around my house to be impressed by that one.]