Domesticana mirabilis
I am drowning in IKEA furniture and cardboard boxes with cryptic labels like "KITCHENY-BITS: FRAGILE!!!" If I didn't own a power drill my death certificate would have read "suicide aggravated by discount Swedish furniture". I am finally catching up on my sleep. And I'm finally settling in.
To summarize for those who don't already know, who are probably pretty few, Lauren and I moved to San Francisco last weekend. We had been scouting rentals off Craigslist for weeks and finally found a place that was larger than a shoebox and cost less than the GDP of an industrialized nation. That effort cost me five consecutive weekends of driving more than twelve hours each weekend. Sitting in my living room right now, though, I think it was worth it. I was going to put an LJ-cut right here, sparing casual readers from molesting their "friends" pages, but screw it. Nobody writes anything important here anyway, least of all me.
Moving out of Simi Valley was surprisingly easy. The only part of my house that I'm going to miss (and in fact already do) is my dog. I had to leave Shelby with Irene. She wasn't my dog to begin with, she's Irene's, but she was my dog and I was her owner, you know? I took her out in the back yard and sat down and gave her a talk and told her to be good and not to give Irene any trouble when I'm gone. She'll be sad, and I was pretty beat up when I left her, but she has a big back yard and a terrifying little yap dog for a chew toy, two things I can't offer her in SF. I can't in good conscience keep a dog in the city, even a giant coward like Shelby. Dogs need run, and that's all there is to it. But it's just not normal to leave a dog, for whatever reason. There's just something fundamentally Wrong with walking away from a pet, and I'm still pretty guilty about the whole thing. She's moving to Sacramento with Irene and Scott soon, so hopefully I can have some visitation rights out there on the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm or wherever it is they end up. Lauren was pretty sad to leave her place in West LA, too, which is understandable as it was her first real Place On Her Own and a pretty sweet apartment in its own right. But the new house and the new city do a lot to alleviate that nostalgia.
We're six blocks above the Castro and Lauren is convinced I'm going to come home sometime soon with a pasta machine and an affinity for dudes, a concern which I understand most of you readers also share. Well, you all can... but I digress. Let me tell you about the house.
I think Lauren said it best when she compared our new house to the Winchester Mystery House, that architectural Cthulhu created by a schizophrenic widow, on 1/16th scale. The house was originally two houses, or a house and an in-law. Okay, to be specific, it was originally a house with a barn in back. Then they added an in-law house. Then they tore down the barn. And finally, they bastardized the two houses into a single house without the aid of contractors or common sense, the result giving you that bizarre feeling of having a joke played on you as you walk through the place. It's a familiar feeling, I think, to anyone who's owned or lived in an older house on the East Coast. I'll give the Grand Tour here to those interested in the architectural expression of a mind gone horrifically astray. We start in the kitchen.
Yes, the cupboards are brown. Yes, there is essentially no drawer nor counter space. And yes, that is a fake brick backsplash on an interior wall. Okay, so the 70's were a little hard on the place. But it's sunny and bright and the layout isn't bad, all things considered, and with the added butcher block thing it's actually pretty good to cook in. So far: grilled chicken and asparagus; grilled marinated portabella mushrooms, spinach risotto, and roasted garlic over French bread; molasses crinkles. And no casualties yet. Molasses crinkles basically powered my Mt. Shasta expedition this past weekend, but I'll get to that one later on. On to the laundry room:
The kitchen leads to the laundry room via the left hallway. On the inside of the hallway there is a locked door that, when opened, reveals the space between the two houses, complete with piping and ducting leading between the two. The laundry room used to be the front porch of the second house, an arrangement which leads to architectural non sequiturs like this:
It's, uh. It's an exterior window that leads from the bedroom to the laundry room. So you could, in theory, throw your dirty underwear out the window of the bedroom into the washing machine. It is entirely daft and actually I'm pretty fond of it. The laundry room is sunny enough that the window does seem to lighten up the otherwise dark bedroom. The bedroom, incidentally, is separated from the other corridor by a sort of folding divider, rather than a real door, which caused Lauren to exclaim upon seeing it, "oh, my God, is that a Naugahyde pocket door?!" It's not (it's a fake woodgrain), but it's pretty close.
My office is upstairs and looks out on the Eureka Valley, a pretty good view on a clear day:
Meredith the Turtle is settling into her new home but I'm pretty sure she still hates me for strapping her aquarium into the passenger seat of a 17-foot U-Haul.
Here's another view of the kitchen, showing the other corridor leading to the bedroom, which is off to the left:
I'd like to draw your attention to the door on the right end of the hallway. That's a bathroom. Now, if you were putting together a house to torture souls and breed nightmares, how would you hang that door? Yes, exactly. Instead of opening toward the wall, hang it so it actually opens 180 degrees into the kitchen and creates the inevitable hazard of Lauren tearing through the house like a deranged chimp while I accidentally open the bathroom door into her face. All I can do is laugh.
Out back, behind the front-porch-cum-laundry-room, we actually have a little patio back yard:
Like the rest of the house, it's an amalgam of recycled architecture: it used to be the foundation of the barn behind the house. But we've got roses, geraniums, a plum tree, rosemary, sage, and thyme growing back there. We're keeping an eye on Craigslist for cheap patio furniture and maybe a brazier to roast marshmallows on.
That about wraps it up. We also have a garage under the house, but it's not much to look at besides the boxes labeled "STIRRUPS, ETC", "HORSE SHOES", and "HORSE???"; the owners of the house once owned the entire hillside behind it and kept horses and cattle. And, apparently, continue to keep the detritus of that operation, thirty years later.
L and I are getting along pretty famously, which I think we both expected but were a little apprehensive about nonetheless. It's interesting for me to look back to the last time I lived with a girlfriend and see how differently we're coming at the whole thing. I guess that just comes with being older and, if not wiser, at least better-humored. I'll just say that it's a good thing we got a house instead of an apartment, because the assortment of crashing, hysterical laughing, and foolish sounds coming out of the two of us would drive anyone who shared the same walls and floor as insane as we are.