Big Baby Bunting

About 6 years ago, when Grace, my friend Alicia, her boyfriend Ryan and I lived in Boston, we rented a two story house near the Museum of Science. We loved the house but we weren't very fond of the landlord. When she alerted us that she was going to sell the house and start showing it to potential buyers, we were annoyed because even though we were moving out anyways, it was a nuisance on our part. What made it even move of a nuisance was the fact that our landlord didn't know that Grace was a tenant in the third bedroom, that I had a cat, or that's Alicia's dog Sampson was that large. (He was an English Mastiff but we told her initially that he was a Mastiff/Lab mix). So every time she would tell us when a showing would be, we would have to load Sampson, Stella (my cat) and Grace in the car, make it look like the third bedroom was a guest room and drive around the neighborhood for hours. Everyone was miserable- especially Grace!

We were convinced it was going to be on the market for a long time which would give us ample time to move out because the house wasn't a real gem. It was nice and all but there was no closet space (mine was in the hall upstairs) and Alicia and Ryan's bathroom (in their bedroom) was the only bathroom in the house with a shower. The upstairs bathroom had a severe ceiling slant and only had a tub. For the first year we lived there I would take a bath every morning before work (what was this, the 1800's?) until I got fed up and had to walk in Alicia and Ryan's bedroom while they was sleeping in the morning to shower. Awkward! The stairs leading up to the second floor were as steep as Mt. Everest and Sampson would frequently climb them, get stuck because he was terrified to come down and howl until we assisted him on the descent. And the basement was a whole different story- it looked like it was straight out of a horror movie and I used to hate it when Stella would sneak down there and cry to be rescued. Then who was going to rescue me when I got scared? But when the house surprisingly did sell and we had to move out sooner than we had expected (refer to my post titled "Living in a Frat House") we were sort of in a panic.

And then I became convinced that our landlord was trying to get us out faster by doing weird things...like the time I came home from work to find a giant baby bunting/dead body wrapped in plastic wrap in our driveway. Was she trying to frame us for a murder? Was she trying to bomb us out? This mysterious package was addressed to 'Eric Hammer' at 13 5th Street. We were 15 5th Street and our neighbor was 11 5th Street, so unless this Eric guy lived in the trash can in the alley between our houses, he did not exist. Alicia, Grace and Ryan also had no clue who this package could belong to and after we asked all of our neighbors and called the sender (I am pretty sure it was a disconnected number) we had no clue what to do with it. It's not like it was a small box that we could write 'return to sender' on and hand it to the mailman- it was literally taking up the entire driveway. What the hell was this? A giant plastic cigar? After about a week of this giant monstrosity sitting in our driveway, it was magically gone. Nice try landlord, nice try!