Rochester

In October of 1996, my girlfriend and I moved from the river town, Winona, to the Med City (Mayo Clinic is located there), Rochester. We looked at two apartment complexes, Rochester Village and Homestead Village. We ended up choosing to live in the "park-like setting" (that's what it said in their ads) of Homestead Village:

We moved there in the middle of November. Our living room looked just like this:

It was cool to have the built-in shelves. I put my movies, music, and trinkets on them. The kitchen looked like this:

It was a two-level townhome with 2 bedrooms upstairs. It was actually a very inexpensive place to live in (about $500 - $550 a month). They didn't have garages as such, but there were "shelters" that you parked your car under so that snow couldn't accumulate on it. We didn't own a bed, so slept on the floor our first night there. The next day, we went to Happy Sleeper and bought a queen sized bed. We still have it, but it's pretty worn out (for obvious reasons).

We did have Mayo at the time, but she was still a kitten, less than a year old. I remember birds built a nest above the light located next to my front door, so anytime the cat walked around outside, the birds would be dive bombing her and she would be thinking, "WTF?"

One drawback is that there was this old fuck who lived two apartments down. He smoked all the time and the smell often drifted to our residence. That's one of the primary reasons why we left after our lease expired in late 1997. Though we lived there only a year, much happened during this time.