Living arrangements, considered

A quiet night, after a long day of exploring. I made popcorn in a pan on the stove for the first time, truffle popcorn, and watched the Bourne Ultimatum. It’s been a long day.

Hunting for an apartment is not easy. The SF Bay Area is the most competitive real estate market I’ve ever encountered; it makes New York look easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if activities involved in angling for a good apartment weren’t the basis for a class of criminal activity here. I have never seen anything like it before. It’s really no surprise housing costs here are so high – after seeing a dozen rather crappy apartments that I wasn’t too excited to live in disappear right out from under us, I’m rather surprised costs aren’t even higher! Such were the tribulations of my day.

Nevertheless, we are presently feeling cautiously hopeful about a place. I find applications for these sorts of things rather nerve-wracking. Having someone look at your history and current financial state is just weird. Jeff and I are rather boring to look at in terms of paper, I’ll grant you, and whenever situations like this come up I’m very happy we’re so boringly normal. We take pains (well, Jeff does) to be boringly normal on paper. Financial institutions do not like it when your paperwork is at all exciting and would rather not extend people who are exciting on paper the opportunity to do additional interesting things.

Our upstairs neighbor has been quiet as a tomb lately, for which I’m very grateful. For most of our time here, she has had her son living with her, to whom she is barely civil. Since our last noise complaint and offer to call the police, she appears to have sent him off to live with his father, who I hope is much nicer to him. I’ve found it rather difficult to know exactly what steps to take with her. A large part of me feels as if I should call Child Protective Services to come out and do an evaluation, and I feel almost as if it would be unethical not to do so. Another part of me thinks that is way too … intrusive, or perhaps presumptuous of me to do so. I’ve been struggling with this a lot, trying to figure out what’s appropriate for me to do. My gut says she’s not even close to being a fit mother, but who am I to judge? What good would CPS do anyway?

I’ll be glad when all of this is over, and I can go back to being blissfully ignorant of the private lives of my neighbors. And one of these days, I may even get to unpack more than the basics.

eh?

So, um, yeah. Moving.

[San Francisco in the fog, seen across the bay from Berkeley]

Before I get started with that, I’m going to ask for positive thoughts for my grandfather, who’s not feeling well and has been in the hospital, and for my grandmother, who hasn’t been well either. And also my two aunts, who are taking care of them. They’re making their way through slowly but surely, but I’m sure they could use any positive friendly energy you can send their way.

[My commute. Walking + BART.]   So if I owe you a phone call or an email, I’m totally sorry. I moved to a new apartment last weekend and have neither an internet connection or a cell phone signal. I’m amazed that I could not have a cell signal in one of the most populated areas in the United States, but there it is. Today is the first day I’ve had internet. Grrr.

[Long walks in Berkeley. Jeff, Wesley and my brother Jeremy] Transitions of this magnitude are rather jarring. I haven’t managed to wrap my brain around everything that’s happened in the last couple of months. I went for my interview on August 17, and since then it’s been week after perplexing week of new and unfamiliar stuff. I’m getting to a saturation point of new stuff, I think, hitting an exhaustion point. It would be nice if it would all chill out, and maybe I could get to having some groceries in the house again.

[Berkeley streets] All the same, it’s been a good series of changes. I love the feeling of being back in a big city with all the things to do and people doing every kind of thing imaginable. People are really strange en masse. Always something to watch, always something going on. People pay a lot of attention to their clothing, but not always to good effect. There are the inevitable large city pee smells, of course. I plan to skip as much of that as possible and instead enjoy the museums and symphony. We’re planning on seeing West Side Story and have tickets for a Copland/Tchaikovsky concert soon, really looking forward to that kind of thing.

[Civic Center farmer's market and Yarn Bombing in Berkeley] I really like Berkeley. It’s a lovely area and walking through the neighborhoods is like going to a garden show. It seems like every yard has something edible or floral or just something that smells amazing. We are in North Berkeley in a pretty nice apartment we found. Our main trouble is the fishwife upstairs, who screeches, swears and stomps her way through her days with the TV at full volume. She and I are going to have a few talks about her noise. This will not stand, man.

[Berkeley streets] Another thing about this place is the food. On the left in one of the above pictures is a Wednesday farmer’s market that’s half a block from where I work. I came up out of the subway into the middle of it. There are a thousand farmer’s markets here. There’s a permanent one down the street from my apartment. Plus, every single grocery store around here has all the specialty vegetarian food that I could only find at one Whole Foods in Austin. Seriously, the tiny mom-and-pop store down the street has a better selection than that huge Whole Foods did. Once I find my kitchen stuff, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

[Berkeley streets] One thing I’ll say about having a commute like mine is that I’m going to get a lot of crocheting done. I’m going to keep working on my blanket on the train since it’s made of individual motifs – I can do it in pieces so I don’t have much to carry and it doesn’t take up much room. I’ve gotten a few weird looks already for public crocheting, but I don’t really care. Maybe eventually I’ll see someone else knitting or crocheting on the train. This type of crafting will have to suffice until I can get to my sewing stuff, which could be a while yet.

[My apartment with lots of bikes and mess] Venturing out into the unknown has been hard. I knew Austin really well, and I can’t even find a Walgreen’s here yet. Plus, not only do I have a new job but I switched professions entirely. I’ve gone from being an expert in my job, from nearly being able to do my job in my sleep, to being completely new to everything all the time. Although I wanted change and I needed new challenges in my life, I have to say that this much upheaval has definitely been stressful.

But nevertheless fun. Because why bother if it isn’t fun?

Then and now

In between when I last disappeared and now, I reached the not-exactly-young-but-not-old-either age of 35. I have a few concerns about this age, but overall I’m in good shape, and with some degree of wisdom from all the things that I’ve done and seen. When I was a teenager – and here I should note that I was not particularly good at being a teenager, and didn’t really like it – I told myself that I just had to wait. I believed that when I reached 40 I would finally have grown into myself. And I think that will be true.

For my birthday I chose to take a tour of the Real Ale Brewery in Blanco, Texas. That’s me and Jeff there after the tour. The tour was 40 minutes long and given by the head brewer – good stuff! Lots of information, lots of future plans. About halfway through when we were standing in the midst of those giant tanks you can see, I thought I might pass out from the heat and steam. But I did not, and I was rewarded later for my tenacity in the tap room.

You people might not know this, but I like beer. I don’t like cheap beer. I only like really good beer, the kind found in Belgium/the Netherlands and Bavaria and microbreweries and people’s basements.  The kind where monks are involved, or people experiment with ingredients and chemistry. The fun kind. Beer is a side effect of my interest in (a) medieval monasteries and (b) supporting local community industry (microbreweries). Besides, meeting the people who make stuff I like – a lot of fun! Whether it’s beer or earrings, , there’s something irreplaceably awesome about meeting the person whose effort went into creating something they feel passionate about.

The weekend previous I went to visit my mom, and my other birthday present was to see Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. You people might also not know that I love Agatha Christie. I started reading her mysteries around the time I was the age in the picture there (7 or 8). I’ve read everything she’s written. More than once. Including non-mysteries. My favorites were Tommy and Tuppence, but I’ll take any of ‘em. It was lovely! My mom can testify that I squeaked happily through the whole play.

While at my mom’s I took pictures of things that I remembered growing up that remind me of why I do the crafts I do. The first picture of me as a kid (with my brother) features me wearing a light blue eyelet dress my mom made me for an aunt’s wedding. I thought it was the absolute coolest thing ever to wear a dress my mom had made me (I also loved that ridiculous bow in my hair). It was like magic, that she could do something so awesome. She made me a few other things, which I thought were similarly cool. So you can see why I wanted to learn to sew – to my young mind it was one of the summits of accomplishment. There was also crochet in the house. The doily above adorned my room while growing up. I recognize that doilies are not acceptable for people to love these days, but I always did like this type of lace.

The above piece as a rather deft bit of thread crochet that my mom has framed. This piece and the one below were absolutely my favorite things besides the antique upright piano. What I can’t show you, unfortunately, are the cape my grandma crocheted for a baby me that I tried to wear much more often than my mom wanted me to, the vest she made for my brother’s beloved stuffed panda, or the elaborate crocheted dresses that adorned the small dolls in her home. I tell people I’m apathetic about knitting, and that’s true, because no matter how useful knitting is, it was not the thing that sparked my imagination as a little girl. When you’re six, you don’t know crocheting is a seventies thing that no one thinks is cool anymore. You like what you like.

This last angel piece is a rather interesting one. I always thought it was filet crochet, but now that I’ve taken a good close-up look the pattern appears to be threads woven into netting. Anybody know what kind of craft this is? I’m stumped. It looks unbelievably tedious.

Anyway. I’m 35 now, but the past sneaks up! Sometimes I’m still an energetic and mischievous seven. It was a good age, of playing cars with my brother, reading anything I could put my hands on, and summers at my grandparents’ farm running around like a mad chicken. Good times.