Home Sweet Hole

My new apartment now has the air of the garret domicile of a Parisian artist. It is well appointed with small but tasteful furnishings and a plethora of hooks and shelves for tidy storage. It is hard to take myself back three weeks to my first night there, when I arrived with only what I could lug by myself and wondered if I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.
After chasing the realtor up and down the city to acquire my keys, I pulled into the handy leftover end of a bus zone in front of my building (the rest of the zone is taken up by a sprawling construction project). I unloaded the essentials from my car; foam mattress (I'm still sleeping on it!) and bed linens, clothes, a few dishes, folding chairs. While moving my car to more secure lodgings, I breezed into Whole Foods for water, macaroni and cheese, apples, and brussels sprouts. I easily found handy parking and went back to see what I could do at the ranch.
Now one of the major selling points of this small studio was the sleeping loft, the presence of which would keep me from feeling that I was sleeping in a kitchen. When I last walked through the apartment, the loft was covered with a rank grey carpet that one could imagine had once been covering the cold cement of someone's garage, so that he could enjoy a little comfort when sliding under his vehicle for an oil change (which either didn't go well or the car had some other unpleasant leak). The hapless home mechanic soon traded in the carpet for one of those scooter things and offered the practically new carpet to a cousin who was renovating some apartments. I had suggested to the realtor that something be done about this carpet and when she suggested new carpet (possibly from someone else's cousin with a sun room where they kept an incontinent feline) I said I thought it made more sense to just rip up the carpet and paint the floor since vacuuming a three foot high space would be no small task. Great idea, she said, apparently while mentally balancing her checkbook, because when I arrived to take temporary possession of this little piece of heaven, the carpet remained.
After making up the "bed" in the middle of what would someday be my parlor, I climbed up to check out the rug. It really must have been just the one oil change because the rest of the carpet, while heinously un-aesthetic, was like new. As I surveyed the scene, I noticed that when they installed the carpet, it was clear that no one had told them they would need to cut a hole in it for the space where the ladder leads up to the loft, and they had accordingly not brought any cutting tools and had had to use their teeth, leaving a frayed edge reminiscent of the fur on a homeless poodle. Lucky for me the carpet glue they used had been recovered from the basement of a deceased relative, clearly of advanced years, and gave only a vague impression of stickiness. It would be easy to pull up the now infamous carpet, but I was succumbing, by that hour, to the polyurethane fumes that hung thick in the air and decided to call it a night. Actually, I went to bed, found that the fumes made one drowsy, yet not capable of sleep, got up and ate an apple, for utter lack of entertainment options, and eventually managed to put the day behind me.

(PS - Spell check would have had me replace "polyurethane" with "blurting". Hmm...no I really meant polyurethane!