Good to be home

Houston was great and Canada was AWESOME, but there's really no place like home.  I've been in a daze of happiness for the last week+, remembering why I love this little house so much.  Walking to the farmer's market on Sunday mornings, the beautiful light coming through our big old-fashioned windows, cooking in my own kitchen (there's some kind of magic about that, because this kitchen is definitely smaller than the Houston apartment one - but I almost never cooked in Houston and definitely never enjoyed it like I do here).  And having our own little backyard, which is what this post is mostly about.

But first, obligatory Canada beauty shot:

This photo is even more awesome because it was taken within a stone's throw (if thrown by someone with a better arm than mine) of the Burgess Shale quarry.  Trilobites!

Anyway, after a week in that part of the world, you'd think it would be a let-down to get back to the semi-suburbia that is Menlo Park, but that was definitely not the case.  First of all, I didn't get to go straight back home - Sam and I flew back to Houston in an all-day airport marathon, involving three layovers and a lot of overpriced food, to pick up my car and all my stuff from the summer.  We drove home via Tucson and spent two glorious days eating at places that would have cost twice as much in California, and caught up with the surprisingly many people we know who've been drawn down there in the last few years.  That was followed by some pretty but never-ending driving, a little sight-seeing and arm-waving in Sam's field area, and FINALLY arriving home just in time to get some take-out from our favorite Chinese place down the street.

(Also, I have to include this, we watched Hunger Games that night, and I really don't get why people were so happy about it.  I really think that's one of the worst movies I've seen in a while, both from a fan's perspective and a regular movie-goer's perspective.  Moving on...)

So it turns out that Good Mood + Free Time = Ambitious Projects, and that's where the backyard comes in.  We had the great luck of moving into a place that had been reasonably well tended by a woman who (apparently) really loves plants, so from day one in this house we had a green and blooming backyard.  Amazingly, we've managed not to kill everything in our first year, despite a few long absences during the dry season, and now that we're signed on for year two, it's been exciting to think about how we can improve the yard ourselves and really make it into a place we love.  I think of this as the equivalent to the new paint job when we first moved in, but this time it involves living things and long-term commitment to keeping those things alive.

Last year for Sam's birthday, I got him some seeds and a gift card to a really neat nursery near our house.  He built a pretty kickass raised garden from some scrap wood in the garage, and we tried to grow things like cilantro, onions, and lettuce.  The only thing that really took off was the parsley, so much so that it's now attempting to reproduce.  I'm fairly certain some of the blame for our failure lies on critters eating the new shoots, because the little bit of cilantro that did appear had its tasty bits chewed off within a day or two.  At any rate, the garden is pretty bare now, but we revisited the nursery and we're ready for a fresh start.

That mass of green on the left is the overgrown parsley.

While we were at the nursery, we also decided to just go ahead and try all the little improvements Sam has been talking about - native plants to fill in some of the bare patches in the yard, and installing a drip system so everything won't die next time we travel.

Sam's really good at doing useful things, and I'm really good a spending money.  So in addition to all that, we tried this pallet garden project that we had each heard about independently, inspired by our finding a pretty good-looking, small pallet next to a dumpster last week (it was fate!).  The tutorial we tried to follow is here, but we didn't really follow it all that closely.  Our step-by-step:

1) Steal (?) a pallet that looks like it's about to be thrown out.
2) Sand down the rough edges so it doesn't impale you with splinters.
3) Cover all the stains and imperfections with leftover house paint.
4) Buy the cheapest flowers at the nursery and herbs that might or might not ever be useful.
5) Staple-gun landscaping fabric to the back of the pallet.
6) Throw in some crappy compost and a bag of potting soil.
7) Plant all the flowers and herbs.
8) Realize there's nowhere near enough. Buy more at Trader Joe's and piss off a lady by clearing the shelf of all the cute little orange ones.
9) Plant the new ones, realize it's still not enough. Transplant some of the overgrown parsley.
10) Prop the finished pallet against the wall and hope for the best!

So far, it's looking surprisingly healthy, with the exception of the transplanted parsley and the Trader Joe's chives.  It's definitely suffering from gravity a bit, and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to hang it on the wall (the original plan) because the back is bulging with the weight of all that potting soil and vegetable matter.  But I'm pleased because it looks cute and homemade, and considering that everything didn't just up and die the first night, I'm feeling a little more optimistic than maybe I should be.

The plan was to hang it here (nails already conveniently in place). No, we're not competing with the neighbors' pepper and tomato plants, where did you get that idea?

See how pretty??  It was really the perfect plan.

All planted up and ready to go! You're supposed to let it lie there for a few weeks so the soil can settle and the roots can get going, but it seemed like that would just kill off everything at the top. Also we didn't have nearly enough plants, or soil, so the top was kind of falling apart and we wanted to get gravity involved.

The herbs are all in the green row, and the purplish blue ones at the bottom are supposed to attract butterflies. The sad, sad parsley is at the top with the Trader Joe's additions.

So it's currently propped against the wall, and it might just have to stay there.  Still pretty cute though, you have to admit.

I should mention that all this went down while we were taking care of a friend's cat, which was displaced when a bank robber set fire to his getaway car in her carport while she was out of the country (best reason to babysit a cat EVER).  The kitty was quite happy to perch on the couch watching hummingbirds, and us.

Awww.

So dignified.  As though her head wasn't smashed between the window pane and screen just seconds before.

We're quite sad to have given her back, since it was nice to have a furry thing around the house for a while, but I'm sure she's much happier at home with her scratching post, and Sam's allergies are certainly better off this way.

Update from Humidtown

Huh, I guess I'm not so good at this blogging thing.  As always, a lot has happened since the last time I even thought about updating, but it would be pretty futile to recap all that.  Instead, here's what's happening now.

Houston
I'm in Houston.

It's pretty hot, and really humid, but I haven't turned into a puddle or sweated away all my clothes or anything.  I do think my muscles have atrophied because, as it turns out, exercising in 80 degree heat with 80% humidity isn't enjoyable, and I don't have a good track record of consistently doing things that aren't enjoyable.

In the months leading up to this little adventure, I got all sorts of happy advice from people who had come before me.  The climate was always the first subject, but that might be because I always asked about it.  "How did you stand it?  Why do people choose to live there?  What the hell does 90% humidity even mean?  Is back sweat just a standard fashion accessory?"  Most people were cautiously optimistic, and clearly they had all survived.  No one answered my question about the back sweat.

The other common tip was about the driving.  I heard independently from two people that the drivers here are hyper-aggressive, and when I brought this up to others, no one really shot it down.  So I developed this picture in my head of crazy lifted monster trucks looming in my rear-view mirror for a few terrifying seconds before whipping around me at high speed, their truck-nuts dangling in a show of Texan masculinity.

Well, as it turns out, the drivers aren't that bad, either.  Compared to my previous internship experience, which kicked off with a car crash that totaled two vehicles and left me hyperventilating for half a day (and ultimately resulted in my current car insurance premium of $120/month for fuck-all coverage), traveling in Humidtown has been a carousel ride, complete with pretty ponies and giraffes.  And I have yet to see a single truck-nut, so I guess those are more of a California brand douchebaggery.

I will say, though, that the warnings I received about Houston suburbia were right on the mark.  I was told to live in Montrose, or the Heights, or the Museum District, or really anywhere in the Inner Loop, and that distance from downtown meant distance from everything enjoyable about this city.  I tried to heed those warnings, but due to an irreparable warp in the fabric of space and time, housing here is very nearly as expensive as housing in Menlo Park.  For that and various other reasons, I ended up in a furnished apartment in a gated complex, in the middle of a stuccoed shopping center, at the edge of the Outer Loop, in Chinatown.  Positives: proximity to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian restaurants.  Negatives: pretty much everything else.

Well, that might be a little harsh, but it is a bit weird that my closest supermarkets have chicken feet and pig heads but no milk or bread.  And really, more than anything else, I've realized that this neighborhood really just lacks beauty.  Houston, as you may know, is flat flat flat.  When you get on a freeway overpass, you are as high as you can get without taking an elevator.  I'm sure it's not a big deal for people who grew up in topographically challenged areas, but I'm having a hard time adjusting to the fact that the only features I will ever see on the skyline here are buildings.  And a little exploring has led me to realize that some areas of Houston strive to alter this view: there are neighborhoods with cute brick houses and big, leafy shade trees, and they're actually pleasant to spend time in, even just driving through.  But here in my frontage road community, we have concrete, power lines, the tollway, and a really big bank to fill our view, and if you don't find that a little bit depressing, you're probably not imagining it properly.

So I've been venturing out more and more, and despite all I've just said, my experience here has been overall very positive.  I've experienced some of the coolest thunderstorms of my life, eaten some pretty delicious food, scienced some awesome science, and a few times it's been cool enough post-rain that I've stepped outside and felt happy about it.  And more than anything, the great people here are making it all so much fun that I'm actually a little bummed that I've passed the halfway point of my stay.

Oh yeah, and I saw an alligator.

Weddings
A lot of my friends are getting married these days.  I guess it's just that time of life, but wow it's weird.  Of course it's super exciting and awesome, and I love seeing my friends all happy and lovey, but that is so far from my life plans right now, so it can't help feeling a bit weird.  Also, it's a universal truth we've known from age six that first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage (I should get an award for awesome blog writing after that one).  I can blissfully ignore the fact that more and more people in my life are referring to husbands and wives instead of boyfriends and girlfriends, but babies are a little more solid and in-your-face.  There are actually a lot of babies in my life right now too, but they're the progeny of people in their 30s, so that's okay.  My high school and college friends will always be too young and doofy (love you guys) to have babies, at least in my mind.  Plus I'm really bad at remembering birthdays, so when the people in my life start multiplying without my having any say in it, the birthday-remembering part of my brain will probably just over-pressurize and burst.  At least then I'll have an excuse.



Travel
I guess Houston sort of falls into this category, but who said blogs have to be logical and organized.  Looking back on the last year or two, and looking ahead to the coming years, I have a fuckload of traveling going on.  I know it doesn't hold a candle to the endless adventures of those backpacking types and globetrotters who make my Facebook feed look mildly interesting, but for me, it's pretty good.  Yesterday was the two-year mark from my trip to France with Sam, which was followed by a jaunty road trip around the western U.S. looking at grad schools.  Stanford obligingly shipped me off to New Zealand within months of my arriving, but not before a quick trip to Death Valley, which will always feel like an exotic land no matter how many central Californian gas stations you drive through to get there.  Now I'm in Houston, which is pretty damn foreign to me, and the minute this internship is over I'm headed to Canada for a little geologizing in the Rockies with some of the best people I know.  A few months later it's back to Zealandia, but hopefully not before a little California travel with the absolute best person I know, if we can get our act together in time.

It's sort of a crazy ride, especially for a homebody like me, but I feel so unbelievably lucky to have had these experiences.  And I think I'm getting a little better at traveling without freaking out, but my New Zealand partner in crime can attest that I'm not there yet.  Practice makes perfect, eh?

Rennes probably deserves its own blog post, but until then here's the Frenchest photo I have from that trip.

Pretty much sums up most road trips.  This one had spectacular rocks though.

Day one in Death Valley I discovered my camera was out of batteries, and I didn't have the charger.  So this one is credit to Glenn, who pretty much always has a camera I think :)

Yeah, New Zealand was pretty nice I guess.

Fresh paint

Okay, so we started painting over the horrible pink in the new house, but I'm not totally convinced we've improved things.  It was a long and very unproductive (although totally enjoyable) morning, so we didn't down to business until after lunch.  Then we had issues getting decent quality paint, and I might have made some impulsive, lets-get-this-over-with color decisions.  Well... see for yourself.

At least it's only the bathroom.

Actually we both kind of like the green, I think it just needs to be toned down a little.  The nice thing is that the bottom half is white (painted) tiles, so it's not completely overwhelming.

Painting this room was kind of ridiculous.  We bought the paint at Ace since it's so close to the house, but this particular store only carried their brand of paint which, as it turns out, is pretty crappy.  It went on 'like watercolor,' as Sam's mom described it, and took 3-4 coats before it looked basically solid.  After all that work I'm definitely going to give it a fair shot before thinking about painting over it.

We also tackled the dining room, with much nicer paint this time around.  The goal here was to paint an accent wall that would distract a little from the pink without requiring us to paint the whole room (which would be a little silly since the kitchen is definitely staying pink, too many cabinets to bother with).  I initially chose a nice rusty reddish/pinkish color that went well with the walls but was a little less... pink. But that was the cheap paint, and when I went to get the better stuff, I ended up with something a lot rosier.

Before:

After:

I think it looks like a little girl's room.  Sam thinks it looks like a candy cane.  Either way it's definitely more feminine than before, but we still both kind of like it.  We'll see.

The next step is the living room, where again I'm worried I didn't buy quite the color I initially planned on (idea: pale smokey blue; purchase: pale oceany blue).  We also need to paint the hall (the previous tenant did a TERRIBLE job spackling, and unfortunately spackled just about everywhere... so even if I didn't hate the pink we'd have a lot of painting to do) but I think I'll just go white or gray for that.

So Sam is going backpacking to collect some samples, and I'm going to spend a couple days painting and cleaning/waxing the floors.  Here's hoping it all comes together.

House pictures!

First I would like to say how relieved I am that the house is basically as awesome as we remembered it. I mean, our only viewing before we signed the lease was a five minute walk-through in which the previous tenant was following us around in her nightie. I did have a slight feeling that we were snatching her home out from under her, especially as she hadn't really packed much and this was maybe a week before she was due to leave. But that might have been total paranoia, as she did leave us a nice selection of potted plants, a reusable grocery bag, and a partially used roll of "A Christmas Story" wrapping paper.

But anyway, the house is amazing, and I'm so excited to personalize it. Step one is definitely going to be paint... all the interior walls, bathroom excluded, are painted this horrible pale pink that I'm already sick of. We got the go-ahead from the landlord to paint over it, although he did seem a little concerned about my color choices so I think I'll have to be careful. We can always paint over it when we move out, but it'd be nice not to have to.

See?  Pink.  You'll hate it too by the end of the tour.  So this is the view of the living room from the front door.  That's a functional wood-burning fireplace and fabulous wood floors.  They're in bad need of waxing, but supposedly that's all they need to look gorgeous and new again, so we'll see.

Going to the left, we get out to the back patio.  The previous tenant left us a LOT of stuff back here, including this cheerful mat...

A lot of plants...

And a lot of trash.  Oops.

The state of the roof, like I said before, is not ideal.

But the yard is beautiful.  A little overgrown, but there's a lot of potential here.

Dining room/kitchen as seen from the living room.  I forgot to get a picture after we put our table in - the only furniture we've moved over so far.  It's a good fit but it's in even worse shape than the floors.

Kitchen with a gas range!  Even the cabinets are pink... Pale pink with dark hardwood is bad enough, but with pale yellow tiles??  It's like an Easter basket.  Unfortunately the kitchen will probably stay these colors, because it would be way too much work to paint all those cabinets and drawers, not to mention moving the appliances out of the way...

And so is the hallway.  That little nook is for a phone... not sure what will go in there.

Bathroom.  Not very exciting except that it's a nice relief from the pink.  Only we'll have to paint this too since there's spackle blotches all over the place..

Oh, and everything in there is set really low, like it's intended for small children.  It's kind of strange.

Don't let the yellow cast fool you.  The bedroom is also pink.

That strange black mark on the floor is a burn in the exact shape of an iron.  Hmm.

I have more bedroom pictures but it's just a big empty room, so not very exciting.

So that's the new place, at least for now.  I'm going to skulk around the paint store tomorrow and get myself an insane amount of paint chips.  If most of the house were white I'd probably only paint the bedroom, but with all that pink it's going to be a full overhaul (minus the kitchen).  Sam has some fix-up plans too, mostly for the garage I think, and then of course there are the floors.  So it'll be a good couple of weeks before the place is really ready for us to move in, but that just makes it even better that we're double-renting this month.  If we get to keep this place for the next four+ years, it'll be so worth it.

No longer beachside

As of this morning I officially live in two places at once... yup, signed a lease for a place in Menlo Park, going the double-rent route for various reasons. That is, we're staying in the Santa Cruz house until the end of August, but we'll be slowly moving over the hill during that time (and Sam will make use of the lab over there, but mostly I just care about having lots of time to organize and decorate...). Meaning this will be a VERY expensive month for us, but I think it's well worth it.

The house is AWESOME. I'll post pictures as soon as I can take them (Monday) because I'm just too excited. It's a 1930's-era duplex a block away from downtown Menlo Park and is by far the cutest, most liveable place we've seen since we started looking. Let me recap...

A month ago, we thought the best possible place for us was a $2000/month converted poolhouse literally across the creek from campus. Despite the fact that it was a one-room studio with less than 600 square feet of space and two walls entirely made of windows, which look into the backyard of the main house. Oh, and it didn't have an oven. We were stoked about it but before I even had a chance to see it in person, someone else made the cut. Our first experience with the competitiveness of the market.

Shortly after that, when I was actually back in Santa Cruz and visiting places together was a possibility, we really went for it. Then the #1 place was the 500 sq. foot studio (which actually had a wall between the kitchen and bedroom, a feature we found quite refreshing) with a decent side yard, a garage (!!!) and a really weird green concrete front 'yard.' We were, again, stoked, but the guy was on vacation and we still have never heard back from him (meaning someone else got it and he didn't bother to tell us). That place was $1500/month, a total steal for Menlo Park pricing. The same day, we saw a remarkably bright and cute apartment in a good Palo Alto neighborhood for $2000/month, but despite being told that we were 'top of the list,' we lost out to someone else. Probably someone who actually has a credit score (I don't).

Despite the disappointment of not actually getting any of those places, we felt pretty good about our options after seeing them. Then for some reason we had a string of pretty shitty spots. The bottom of the barrel was the $1350/month top-floor unit in a duplex behind a small house, in northern Menlo Park. The yard between the two buildings had some discarded kitchen appliances for decoration, there were some really funky jury-rigged electrical situations inside, and all the power/phone/whatever cables came right to the front corner of the house - as in you could stand on the balcony/front porch and just reach out and grab them (I did not actually do this). The view from the front door, living room, kitchen, etc. was of these cables and the backs of some similarly craptastic houses.

But then... then we found the holy grail. Okay, it looks kind of dumpy from the outside, mostly because the roof looks like it was abandoned in the middle of being re-shingled, but it's surrounded by glorious plants, and the inside is all lovely, rich hardwood floors. The living room is a remarkably decent size, with a working wood fireplace; there's a charmingly tiny dining nook attached to the kitchen, which has a gas range; and there's a little alcove in one wall of the hallway which was built there to house, yup, a telephone. 'Cause that's how they do in the 1930's. Even better than that: there's a wooden bench built onto the porch, with storage under the seat for firewood; this can be accessed through a hole in the dining room wall, so during those bitterly cold Menlo Park winters (I know, I know) you don't even have to go outside to stoke your fire.

I should probably say that if Sam were writing this, he'd list his favorite features starting with the garage. That's perhaps the one thing that has been giving us major trouble in the housing search, is finding a place where we can store all those bikes without cordoning off part of the living room. Which is why it's a dream come true that we not only found, but managed to secure a place which has multiple rooms (after all those studios we were starting to think it couldn't happen for our budget) AND a garage AND a backyard. And the perk of gas cooking.

So the place is at the top of our price range, $1950/month, but the landlord pays water and a weekly gardener. We both think it's well worth the price, not only for its innate fabulousness, but for its location (literally one block from Trader Joe's and a Sunday farmer's market, not to mention the entirety of downtown MP) and the subsequent easy bike route to campus. In driving around looking at places, we quickly discovered that it's much more pleasant to get to campus from Menlo Park than just about anywhere else in the surrounding area. This is mostly because MP is south of El Camino Real and west of Page Mill/Oregon Expressway, which are the major roads that make getting to Stanford from Palo Alto kind of a pain. I'm sure locals would disagree, but keep in mind that I've been commuting by bike for 4+ years and I'm still not comfortable in heavy traffic on Santa Cruz streets.  I was having heart palpitations watching people ride on El Camino.