Brake-O No Mo'

When Chad and I first fell in love with this apartment, we realized that we'd have to take the good with the bad when it comes to city life. The good: I live a mile from work, we can walk across the street anytime we need a Starbucks fix, and the best queso in Dallas is just a block away at Uncle Julio's. The bad: dead bodies that tend to show up in the alley across the street, drug cartels in our parking lot, lots and lots of homeless people. Actually, the homeless people don't really bother me. I'm nice to them, so they're nice to me. Also, I gave them ham on New Year's Day as a peace offering.

Another entry on the bad list would be the Brake-O right across the street from our bedroom windows. Our building is old, and the exterior walls are made of thick slabs of concrete. But the windows? Are single pane. Actually, they may be more like one-eighth of a pane. We spent all winter wiping thick pools of condensation from our windowsills, and we're still dealing with the mold. The first few weeks we lived here, I would wake up on Saturdays to the sound of a full-functioning oil lube just about twelve feet from our bedroom windows, sounds such as VVVVVVVVppttt!, NNNRRRRRRRRR, the garage phone whose ringer was turned up so loud it could melt your eardrums, and, my personal favorite, the workers cussing at each other.

Then, suddenly, the sounds stopped. And the Brake-O sign, which we used as a landmark to tell people to turn onto our street off of Lemmon was always dark. The workers moved on. The parking lot was always empty. We began giving people directions from Blackburn instead of Lemmon. And the Brake-O sat empty for months.

This morning when I left for work it was there. When I came home for lunch, it was not.

Goodbye, Brake-O. Can't say I was too fond of you, but you did provide some excellent background color for Rufus' looking-out-the-window shots. Now, I suspect, there will be a parking lot for the new Buffalo Wild Wings.