The winner of the town poll was St. Augustine, and I’m glad because my gut kind of went with that one as well. I knew it was a Band of Horses song, which is fine, I like that song very much and they are from the Northwest.
July draws to a close, and San Francisco has been very cold and gray this week. I walked to the train today and the fog was so thick it had turned into a fine spray on my face. Summer!
Work sucked today because our replication server died in the middle of the morning, meaning that content I uploaded to be tested was not showing up in our preview site. This went on until about 3pm. What a waste.
Luckily it gave me time to work on my novel outline, which I’ve neglected since January. An outline is really important, especially when working with something that’s going to be about 25 or 30 chapters.
Dinner tonight was scrambled eggs with green peppers, and a green salad. I want to make something vegetarian for dinner tomorrow. Something crazy. Maybe with beans? Hmm. Legumes!
I found out today that my pal Rena is moving back here from NYC. Rena I need your email address and I need to know what the deal is, too!
My coworkers have been so sweet about me leaving. They all seem happy for me to be taking this step, and one rad girl gave me a job contact in Seattle and her personal email. I think whenever someone leaves my company, people are a bit envious. It’s a very corporate environment. Good money and benefits, but really, not extraordinarily creative or anything.
Speaking of moving, there is a house for sale in my neighborhood, very close to our building. It’s a grey single family house, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two stories, garage and back yard. Really a typical family house, right? Our neighborhood is nothing special by any means, cold most of the year, but this place is three blocks from the park and a half block from the N train. The house is on a fairly busy street, close to an auto repair shop, with houses on either side built directly against the side walls. It’s the Inner Sunset, not a posh neighborhood like Pacific Heights or the Marina or even Golden Gate Heights way up the hill. There’s no view, it’s just on a flat street. It’s nice on the inside; I’ll admit it, it’s a pretty nice house.
Guess how much this place is asking, given all the criteria I mentioned?
$700k?
No.
Okay, $850k?
Not even.
$1.3 MILLION
And so we moved to Seattle.
because seattle is ‘spensive too, yeah?
you misspelled portland!
i’m excited you are moving to seattle! perhaps i can finally buy you coffee or something.
did you see that the magazine that is the reason i know you has published its final issue. weird and sad.
Re: because seattle is ‘spensive too, yeah?
$400k looks cheap to us. $400k will get you a crackhouse in SF.
We will definitely make a day trip to PDX this fall and I will see you then.
Yes, Dan emailed me about it a couple months ago. Very strange and sad. He is on to different things — he and his family are actually leaving Chicago so that he can pursue journalism at Stanford, of all places.
Sounds like outskirts of New York City.
I’m not talking downtown Manhattan or even the trendy suburbs of Brooklyn. But outskirts, ordinary, boring, average-looking homes.
1.3 MILLION. And plus.
The other piece of the description relevant for people who don’t live in San Francisco to know is that such a house would be abutted on all sides by other houses (I’m assuming, unless it’s a very rare case) with probably a tiny backyard and no front yard, opening directly onto the sidewalk. It would also (I’m also assuming unless it’s a very rare case) have been built probably in the first quarter of the twentieth century, or possibly in the 1930s or ’40s, which is fine enough, but it’s often not with the solid construction people further east take for granted, and certainly without central heating, and so it can be expected to have maintenance issues that will cost the owner yet more money. All of this to live in a neighborhood that you can’t get others who haven’t lived there to fully invest in believing exists. You try and try to make them believe that there’s a place in the mid-Northern Hempisphere not on top of a mountain that in July and August necessitates the wearing of a jacket, with dense fog and biting winds, and even if you describe it earnestly and without a bit of hyperbole, you can tell they think you’re pretty much making the whole thing up.
Congratulations on your decision to move!!
-Brett (from DB)
Ha Brett you are totally right! Even at this very moment, YET another chilly, gray midsummer morning dawns…
thank you 🙂