I've had this question for some time. In Hubbard's Teichmuller theory book, on page 9, he describes an ugly complex 2-manifold that is not second countable. He constructs it by taking $\mathbb{C}^2$ and blowing up every point along the axis $\mathbb{C} \times 0$. More specifically, he considers all blowups of finitely many points along this axis, and takes their inverse limit under the natural projection maps from one blowup to another which has a strictly smaller subset of blowup points. He notes that there is a natural map $p$ from the blown-up space to $\mathbb{C}^2$.

He denotes $p^{-1}(\mathbb{C} \times 0)$ by $Y$ and claims that $Y$ consists of one copy of projective space for each point of the complex line plus a 'horrible set'. Here's my question:

Where does the horrible set come from?

Because every point in the inverse limit is given by $a=\mathop{\Pi} \limits_{\alpha \in J} a_\alpha \in \mathop{\Pi} \limits_{\alpha \in J} X_\alpha$ with $p_{\alpha\beta}(a_\alpha)=a_\beta$ whenever $\alpha<\beta$ (here the $X_\alpha$ are all the blowups with partial order given by inclusion of the blow up points and the p maps are the natural projections). So, any point in the inverse limit has a coordinate $a_0$ in the non-blown up space $X_0=\mathbb{C}^2$ (the minimal element in the ordering). There is an $\alpha$ corresponding to the blowup of the point $a_0$, and in $X_\alpha$, we must have that $a_\alpha$ is some element of the copy of projective space created in the blowup. This means that our point is in the 'nice' set, and not in the horrible set. So where does the horrible set come from?