Houses and homes

My friend Suzanne and I went to look at open houses on Sunday. She has a big house in the Berkeley hills that she wants to sell, and we were checking out the comps to give her an idea of pricing. Which is always weird. Some houses are so unappealing that you want to shoot yourself at the idea of living in them (Jerry and I still talk about a "suicidal green box" on Everett Street that we looked at in 1976), but SOMEBODY buys them. And then for the same price, there'll be a house that's easy to imagine yourself living in, given some paint and maybe some new light fixtures.

Sunday's houses were no different:

House A--Old and enormous, but not in a pleasing way. There were stairs and steps and numerous odd roomlets, as though a drunk had laid it out and thought, oh, what the hell, how about a useless little room HERE? The house was elegantly staged on the first two floors and featured the original unpainted wood trim, but it had none of the fashionable and expensive finishes you'd expect in a house that cost more than $2 million. Eventually, semi-lost, we found ourselves in a renovated attic where you'd have take off your head to wash your face, so steeply angled were the bathroom walls. Really. You could not bend over the sink without knocking yourself out. There was a deck off the living room, but a live oak blocked the bay view, and unless someone felt brave enough to whack it in spite of stringent Berkeley tree laws, so much for THAT.

House B--A mid-century house so drastically remodeled that it is virtually new AND on a status street. Gorgeous wood floors; broad hallways; a logically laid-out floor plan; bay view; mature and inventively landscaped back garden; decks; and in the middle of the house, like a jewel, a courtyard viewed through floor-to-ceiling windows from nearly every room. Evidence of thought, taste, and money everywhere. We managed to pump the realtor for her opinion of the price and the history of offers. She seemed bored enough to tell us, maybe because she's hosted Sunday open houses there for a period of 150 days. Too expensive for the current market, apparently, and the owners don't want to back down on the price.

We switched to houses Suzanne could possibly move into, smaller and not so high in the hills:

House C--A mercifully un-tampered with mid-century with a bay view and a water feature bubbling away in the backyard. Not as pristine as House B, finishes not as recent nor as elegant, realtor not as well-dressed but very thin. The house would work for Suzanne, but first she has to sell her own. House D bordered on suicidal: a small bungalow right on top of its neighbors, no view, one cramped room after another, tiny kitchen, and the bathroom smelled. Suzanne wanted to leave right away.

See what I mean about pricing? The first two houses were comparable in price, but only the second one (the dreamy "B") was livable. The second two houses were priced within $100,000 of each other, but House C was do-able and House D definitely was not.

Suzanne is still puzzling over what price to ask for her house. I'm wondering who bought that house on Everett in 1976 and WHY?

Yarn bombs

A petulant woman claimed two chairs at Starbuck's today, leaving me nowhere to sit, so I had to take my hot chocolate outside . Had very uncharitable thoughts. Wished Tony Soprano had been around (just for a warning, nothing involving strangulation).

Sat on cold chair staring out at the street and noticed that a nearby utility pole had knitted sleeve covering about half of it. Multi-colored, a bit faded. What the hell? Finished the hot chocolate and walked to a nearby yarn store and asked what that was about. The clerk said I should google "yarn bombs," so I did.

It turns out to be about "guerrilla knitters," who are "changing the landscape one stitch at a time," cozying up the world, and it's an international movement. A woman named Magda Sayeg has actually knitted a yarn cover for an entire bus in Mexico City, including rosettes on the hubcaps. These last reminded me of butter cream flowers I've seen demo-ed on one of my very favorite educational TV shows, "Bake, Decorate, Celebrate," (Channel 60, 3:30 pm weekdays in the Bay Area; must be seen to be experienced, really).

I'm in the middle of putting together a quilt back for a very large quilt and I'm so bored I could scream. It's a fraction of the size of a bus. It might cover the windshield and the area down to the front bumper. There aren't enough interesting NPR programs in the world to keep me at knitting a cover the size of a bus or to make a quilt for a bus, or to transform any landscape in any way, except for my own personal bedroom. What ELSE do these people do while they're knitting something that size? Listen to the Oxford English Dictionary? Learn Finnish?

That said, there are some pictures online of smaller knitted accoutrements: a bikini for a female statue, hats and gloves for others. They're considered "non-permanent," and unlike graffitti, can be removed easily. Carry on, knitters.

Dinner, again?

I wimped out on dinner again tonight. The options in our refrigerator were: Niman Ranch pork chops purchased three days ago and begging, IMPLORING, to be cooked; the sad remains of a roast chicken; an item from Costco that involves a pouch of brown stuff to be poured over de-pouched chicken breasts and microwaved to become--ta da!--Chicken Marsala. And a plastic tub of dish known locally (our house) as "fart muck"; brown rice, lentils, chicken broth and a bunch of herbs. It's supposed to lower your blood pressure.

There was a family vote, 2-0, unanimous in favor of going out. We had plenty of food, but a complete and utter lack of will to deal with it. Most night, though, we grimly collaborate, throwing together some kind of meal, usually including a vegetable one of us hates (him/Brussels sprouts, me/broccoli) due to the colon cancer prevention angle. A brief hiatus for eating, and then the dismay of being faced with a messy kitchen. Each night I think, "Am I going to have to do this again TOMORROW?"

A group of quilt-maker friends are off shortly to a week-long orgy of sewing at Pt. Bonita on the Marin Headlands: quilt camp, all meals provided. It's barracks-style accommodations and the weather tends to be chilly, but they get to turn off the part of their brains that deals with food. They don't have to think up dinners, buy the food, cook it, or clean it up. All they have to do is eat. That part would be bliss.

weather report

Today at the Food Pantry one of the clients, a man, said, "The air's not heavy on my chest, so it's a FINE day."

Four gold domes and a bride

Went to San Francisco today on a whim: such a beautiful day, have to get out and EMBRACE it, blah, blah. We drove via Marin County, over two bridges, into SF, and decided to eat lunch in whatever block we could find a a parking place on Geary, a crap shoot. By some miracle, we found a spot near two restaurants, the first too much of a hole-in-the-wall (feared food poisoning), the second a coffee/laptop place trying very hard to be Parisian via murals. Even the wastebin in the bathroom had been tarted-up to look French, an Eiffel tower painted on black plastic. (Now THERE'S a wastebasket.)

Sitting at a window table with our sandwiches, we could see four onion domes--one big, three small-- on a large church across the street. The domes were bright gold, with a texture something like orange peel. A man in a full-length black priest's get-up hurried past our window carrying a cheap white plastic bag. His hair was straggly, shoulder-length, and greasy. Not a good look. He crossed the street and disappeared into a side door of the church. What the hell?

We finished lunch and investigated--or I did; Jerry couldn't give a damn about any church in any form unless it has outdoor lights where he might find a moth. He tagged along. The church turned out to be a Russian Orthodox cathedral. Who knew? There were lots of instructions in Russian (Cyrillic?) posted on side doors. The impressive front doors were locked. One had a combination lock on it, which did not go at all with the domes.

Then we walked at Crissy Field, first toward the Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Mason. Across the bay, the Marin headlands were so visible--every contour, every blade of grass--it was DIGITAL. We turned around and walked as far as the newly-renovated Palace of Fine Arts, which is now very elegant, with beautifully landscaped grounds, including a large pond, all of it originally designed by Maybeck. On one of the meticulously kept paths, we came across a bride in bright-white satin embroidered down the front with rhinestone flowers, posing for photographs with her groom, who wore creamy white from head to toe. They were enraptured, with each other and with checking out the pictures already taken. My groom (c. 1977) could give even less of a damn about weddings, but I loved it, every detail.

The Palace, the pond, and the adjoining building (now the Exploratorium) were all part of the Pan-Pacific International Exposition, held in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and also to pep up the city's PR after the 1906 earthquake. I remember my dad telling me that his father carried him around it as an infant; he was born in May of that year. The Exposition covered many acres of what is now the Marina. All the rest of the buildings are long-gone.

Why Starbuck's?--Addendum

I'm sitting in my local, and I'm thinking it would be fascinating to go from person to person, insist they remove their ubiquitous white ear buds, andhave them tell me why they're here, rather than at home. Do they not have desks at home? Do they have noisy roommates or children being babysat? Is this room, with its cases of inferior pastries, pseudo-chalk boards advertising exotic coffee blends and perplexing, if not sickening, sound new drinks--does this room offer comfort they can't find within their own four walls?

For me, I'd say yes, it does. It's comforting sitting with the entirely non-judgmental, merely present, endlessly varied assortment of people who share humanity and a thirst for companionship, however anonymous, and some sort of coffee drink.

Re Starbuck's from former cynic...

Today I packed up my Lenovo in an unfashionable computer case that looks like a briefcase (own no sleeve, but then I AM old) and hauled it down to Starbuck's, where I sat without fidgeting for 2-1/2 hours writing up my journal, doing e-mail, and having an interesting time watching the peeps. The notorious Crossword Puzzle Man, who sat to my right at the computer table, was there most of the time. He apparently arrives around 5:30 am, according to my friend Annika, who worked at that Starbuck's for two summers. I almost asked him about his psych meds (or is Starbuck's a modality, as therapists would say?)

Fortunately I had read an article somewhere re etiquette of computer users in cafe's and so was only moderately startled when young man who replaced Crossword Puzzler asked me to watch his computer while he went to the bathroom. Oh, I was cool! He returned, and we typed away.

good-by tree...

Took down the Christmas tree last night, which took only an hour. This is what happens when your tree is only 4 feet tall--all ornaments, lights, bows, all off the tree and boxed up during one episode of "48 Hours." Glory be! Jerry carried the tree, shedding needles all the way, out the side kitchen door and left it in the rain. I flung the door wreath into the camellia bushes down the side of the house, per tradition. Stacked all the votive candles in a box (Jerry calls them "candle cups") and put them in a cupboard. Gathered up the Christmas cards. House looks bare.

Saw in the paper this morning that Bristol Palin has bought a house in a Phoenix suburb, more than 3000 square fee, triple garage. Many houses on the block in foreclosure or owners "under water." How many bad decisions can a girl make?

Snooki, My Fave

I love The Jersey Shore: Pauly D.'s smile, Sammi's sweetness, JWOWW's tough-girl bluntness, and Vincent-with-the-eyebrows. I do not like Ronnie, and I hate Angelina. Mike the Situation is okay, but I wouldn't trust him.

I'm fascinated by Snooki, especially the wail she lets out when things go wrong (dumping raw chicken on the floor, her boyfriend calling to say he had sex with another girl). She has a pink cowgirl hat and crystal sunglasses that cost $395. She can't see out of them, so she wears them up on her head like a tiara. She drives a black Escalade with the seat pushed so far forward (she's only 4'9") that her boobs press up against the steering wheel. She loves fuzzy slippers, which she often wears with shorts, but only around the house. A shot of alcohol at any time of day is fine, and she adores pickles. I don't think I'd want to talk to her, but I love listening to her. Snooki's the star (da bomb?).