Mash Pad

I live on the eighth floor of my building. There is an elevator, but it doesn't work (in fact, I have yet to be in an apartment building that has a working elevator). On average, I climb up and down the 135 stairs twice per day. It's a bit of a pain when I have to haul drinking water upstairs, but I mostly like where I live. The apartment is small and my neighbors are fairly quiet (although the woman who lives below me goes on screaming sprees every once in a while). The main drawback is that I barely get a trickle of water out of the kitchen tap (although the water pressure in the bathroom is fine), which makes washing dishes a bit of a headache. There's a trash chute on the landing between mine and the 7th floor, but I'm always careful about the size of my trash bag because the chute is quite small. I think one of my bags got stuck going down once (I think this because I usually listen to the trash as it falls and I heard the bag in question stop), but nobody came upstairs to complain so either it wasn't a problem to jostle it so it went the rest of the way down or it wasn't "foreign" looking enough and whoever dealt with it didn't know it was mine. Sometimes I just walk my trash downstairs and throw it in one of the dumpsters that line the main road.

There's no light in the stairwell at night, so I always try to remember to have a flashlight with me if I think I'm going to be out after dark. Walking up 8 flights of stairs in pitchblack isn't much fun. Generally, there are 9 stairs between each floor and the landing between floors, but there are 10 stairs in a few places and I can never remember where these sets are, so going up in the dark is slow going. There's also a cat that likes twine around my legs as I'm walking up or down the stairs. I've stepped on it accidentally a few times and I worry that one of these times it will trip me. I've seen rats in the building a few times scurrying from floor to floor, too, which doesn't bother me too much...at least as long as I don't think about them too much.