Roller coasters

My dad and stepmother happened to be in Berkeley for a few days this week and came over for dinner last night. It was their first time to see our place here and they were very impressed at how nice it is. They were so enthusiastic about how much better it is than anywhere else I've ever lived that you would think all my previous apartments had been vermin-infested shitholes, which at least one of them wasn't. At least not right away.

They brought us a set of coasters as a housewarming gift. They're made of glass and they come with a stand-up holder thing that, to me, looks like they're about to go on some sort of really fun ride like a roller coaster.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Food on the walls

Our living room and kitchen are painted with Warm Apple Crisp and Chilled Chardonnay, respectively. It seemed only appropriate that we have an unofficial housewarming event last night to celebrate - and quality check - our paint job.

The Warm Apple Crisp was right on! Whoa!

Chilled Chardonnay was not even close. I think the color we've got is more accurately described as Flesh.


The bedroom is painted "Ol Blue Eyes" so we'll be contacting Frank Sinatra to come by and quality check that paint job.

Upshacked, unpacked

It was 40 days without furniture and 40 nights on an air mattress, but my stuff finally arrived from DC and the final touch - a chocolate brown sofa - arrived last week. For the first time since leaving DC on May 25, I have a home.

Somewhere between a house plant and a fish

Meet Steve and Nessy.



Steve is the dumpy-looking puppy on the left. Nessy is the chipper dinosaur/monster on the right.

Nessy won Round 1 of the chia competition back in DC not only because she grew a nice even, full coat and had a pleasing well-groomed look to her, but also because she didn't become nauseatingly moldy and rank like some other chia pets I know. Poor Steve. It's not his fault he looks like he pooped his pants and also kind of looks like a pervert.

I see growing the chias as an exercise in loving unconditionally. And trying not to inadvertently kill living things that depend on you for their survival. Both admirable things and worth cultivating, I think. Until Steve gets moldy again at which point I'm throwing him away.

Unpeel your eyes

I was sitting on the couch last night admiring our new black leaning bookshelves against the brown wall when I realized that it was unnaturally quiet and had been for some time. The unsettling quiet was coming from the street below which, though it is a small side street, is pretty much a 24 hour stage for a range of human tragedies in progress.

We call it The Clementina Show.

One of the things we've learned is that no matter how much you might think you want to look out the window to see the images that accompany the soundtrack, you don't. I'm only going to say this once: don't look.

Oh sure, we've got the requisite naked man on his balcony directly across from our place. This dude might not actually own any clothing: he reads nude, barbeques nude, he's clearly got nothing to hide from us. But he's an amateur act compared to the pros at street-level.

Eric made the rookie mistake once while looking out our window of making eye contact with a homeless man on the street below, who then, without breaking eye contact, proceeded to drop his pants and poop on the sidewalk.

Another evening, we heard a commotion on the street below: yelling, car doors slamming, tires screeching. Then a pause. Then a woman weeping. We peeked out the window and there was a woman wearing just a t-shirt and high heels standing next to a large suitcase and just crying. It was horrible. About 20 min later - more commotion and she was gone.

The show goes on. And on. But we're just tuning into the radio portion these days.

This past Monday night was karate night on The Clementina Show. "Hiiiiya! Ya!" we heard again and again from the street. Who was doing this new verbal martial art? I have no idea because I know better than to look out the window.

It was nice to have a bit of quiet last night but somehow it just didn't feel like home. Happily, I woke up this morning to the sound of a man trying to vomit up his lower intenstine, god bless him. It's nice to have things back to normal.

Nesting week

Eric and I met at the airport this past Sunday evening to share a cab home. He was coming from a week in Paris for work, I from 5 days in Olympic National Park. Arriving home, we took in the card table, air mattress and two borrowed plates that constituted the whole of our material lives, noted that the pod would be arriving from DC on Thursday, and wondered what life might feel like if we really, you know, lived somewhere.

"I declare this week Nesting Week," declared Eric.

Nesting week had three phases:

Phase I: Talking about Nesting Week but not actually tackling any Nesting To-Dos such as taking items we know we don't want in the apartment down to the storage, making extra copies of keys or deciding where things might go.

Phase II: Whirlwind of Nesting Activities! Air mattress is deflated, pod is delivered, pod is unloaded, DMV is visited and licenses and registration are switched to CA, enormous mess is created. Passive voice is overused.

Phase III : Getting a little drunk and eating a whole pizza.*

The apartment is such a disaster scene right now that when the power went out in my office for 3 hours today I sat here in the dark and worked off my laptop battery rather than go home and work there.

They say it is always darkest before dawn. Well, I can't wait to see what the apartment looks like in the morning light!


*According to Eric, this is in fact required by law following any sort of household move.

The things they carried

Labor Day lived up to its name for me this year, at least in part. It had become clear my DC apartment wasn’t going to pack and move itself to SF no matter how nicely I asked, so Eric and I spent Saturday maneuvering three years’ worth of accumulated stuff from my fourth floor walkup into a Door to Door storage pod on the street below. It was so full by the time we were done that closing the door was like putting on skinny jeans after eating a burrito – it can be done, but it isn’t comfortable and you have to be ok with stuff bulging out around the edges.

This overstuffed little pod was then whisked away Monday morning and is headed west, due on our Clementina doorstep September 18th, which will also be Day 32 on the air mattress* not that I’m counting.

I paid a little extra for insurance that vastly overestimates the value of my things, which leaves me now in the slightly awkward position of feeling just a little hopeful that the pod somehow rolls off the truck and bursts into flame.

*Not aerobed, should you be so ignorant as to confuse them. I myself once made such a foolish mistake and was corrected with requisite condescension.

Playing house

This past Sunday we moved into our new place! And by moved, I mean we took one-and-a-half carloads of our clothes, shoes and toiletries, a toaster oven and a coffee maker to our new place.

My furniture and other miscellaneous belongings won't arrive from DC until late September so we'll be doing some version of urban camping until then. Until we finally borrowed an air mattress we were sleeping on our therma-rests on the floor. I've seen homeless people with more home furnishings than we have right now.

But we are resourceful! Courtesy of the craigslist "Free" section, which usually only offers things like a complete set of Playgirl magazines or free dirt (if you come pick it up) I was able to billy-goat us a folding table, rug, recliner from the early 70s and rickety wooden chairs from long before that. This was real progress.

I think it is probably still a bit premature to be planning a housewarming party but for now I am very happy with our camp site, I mean living room.

Yay baseball!

We're taking advantage of living a block from the baseball stadium by going to games on evenings when you don't need arctic gear to survive more than a few innings. Last night was a perfect night for baseball so about 45 min into the game we wandered out our front door, scalped some $40 tickets for $10 each and headed into the land of $12 plastic bottles of Miller lite.

The game was fun but it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to leave happy without having gotten a foul ball, so I asked the universe to send one our way. I asked kinda quietly at first, but Eric said he didn't think the universe heard me - I had to shout it. So I did. (I guarantee you it was no more obnoxious or disruptive to the people around us than the women who were shouting an inane conversation behind us. "I was at this yoga class in Santa Monica and the guy from Six Feet Under walked in and I thought oh my god I can't believe this...")

So then I decided to take a picture:



As Eric was posing, we heard the crack of bat on ball and a guy behind us say "That's us!" And sure enough everyone around us was tracking the foul coming right at us, trying to position themselves to get it. Eric, typically quite agile, was unfortunately still posing for the photo and so did not dive for the ball with 8 other dudes, and as such did not get entangled in the ball of arms, legs and maybe even a few tails that grunted and bumped its way down the aisle until the guy with the sharpest teeth emerged victorious.

Thanks anyway universe!

So there I was

My mother once dated a guy who always began phone conversations with the second half of a sentence.

(phone ringing)

My mother: "Hello?"

Hopelessly geeky middle-aged man: "And then..."

My mother: "Um, hello?"

With a comb-over and bad breath: "...I had to re-carpet the whole basement!"

My mother: [Is dying alone really so bad?]

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that this is actually a brilliant way to get people interested in a story without wasting time setting the stage. I'm not saying he did it well, but I do think he was onto something.

For example, when recounting my travels through Africa, I could begin by saying: "And thus I found myself low on water, hitch-hiking on my own across the border from Namibia into Botswana in a car with a man I think might be part jackal and a woman who is almost definitely smuggling putrid flesh, possibly human, when the car sputtered to an unpromising halt in the middle of the Kalahari just before dark...."

[It's a good story. Ask me some time to tell you the rest.]

If I were beginning a story today, I might start with the following:

So there I was: jobless, newly certified as an Ashtanga yoga teacher, shacking up with a guy I've been dating for about 5 minutes in a sublet we can't afford next to AT&T Park in San Francisco, and I've just decided to move from Washington DC where I've lived for three years to see what sort of life I can make for myself in San Francisco....

Sure, it's a run-on sentence, but it does make you wonder what is going to happen next!