And the Winner is...Nobody

In my last post I let you all know that due to a confluence of crappy events we were being forced to move out of the house I had rented for 27 months and head to parts unknown for an undetermined amount of time until the new house was finished, because the new house WASN’T FINISHED YET. The instigators of these crappy events were my insurance company and some city bureaucrats who, because of their collective indifference and incompetence, were also forcing me to somehow find $50,000 in order to keep construction going. (You can read the gory details in last month’s post.)

I didn’t try to make total light of the situation since, well, look under your sofa cushions right now and see if you find $50,000 just lying there. Like me, you probably only found a few cashews and a leaking pen. And, like me, you accurately surmised that no city bureaucracy would take cashews as payment when what it really wanted was $50,000 cash.

But if I failed to find the humor in all of that, I at least tried to make it interesting for all involved. And so I offered a bottle of wine to anyone who could accurately guess the date we would, finally, move into the new house THAT WASN’T FINISHED YET. I also offered a bottle of vintage champagne for anyone who could accurately guess when the insurance company would reimburse me the $50,000 that I ultimately scrounged from various sources.

I want to thank everyone who participated. However I must regretfully inform you that nobody accurately guessed the completion date. There were a few adorably sunny personalities who chose dates in mid-October. You guys are the cutest things ever! Yet so, so wrong! But most of you chose dates clustered in the early-ish to middling November range. I interpreted this as reflective of the fact that you are, for the most part, a bunch of cheerful pessimists/hopeful cynics just like me, which is probably one of the reasons we are friends. Prepare for the worst, hope for something a scootch less terrible than that, then pour a glass of good wine and see what the hell actually happens, we always say.

And yet. Even the most dour among you chose November 12th, which I initially interpreted as a tad unsupportive, but even you were too bubbly about the situation. For as I write this we are aiming for November 18^th-ish. Or thereabouts. Perhaps a few days sooner but more likely a few days later. (Nobody even attempted to guess when the insurance company would reimburse me, proving again what a very smart bunch of people you are.)

Which leads to the question many of you have been asking: Where the hell are you two? We left the Bay Area on October 8th like a present-day, Silicon Valley version of the Joad family: SUV piled to the roof with clothes, bedding, bags of food and other flotsam of everyday life. Except, unlike the Joads, we were heading east and we stopped at Peet’s for coffee on the way out

Since then, we’ve mostly been living in a vacation house in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It is a spacious abode with beautiful views. The area is peaceful, the autumn weather is lovely and deer and wild bunny rabbits bound across the property day and night. We barbecue, we hike. We make the scandalously short drive to Yosemite for afternoons of photography. It’s kind of perfect, except when it’s a total pain in the ass. We don’t know any of the neighbors, it is a culture-free zone as far as I can tell, and while for the most part I’ve been able to work from the vacation house, at least once a week I need to make the 130-mile drive back to the Bay Area for client meetings or to Menlo Park to meet with Glenn the contractor. One night last week I was driving back to the hills from San Francisco. I was in the middle of a work crisis, tangled in hideous 580 commute traffic, illegally emailing while driving and pulling over approximately every fifth exit to make a call or take some notes. Somewhere in the city of Tracy, one of California’s foreclosure epicenters, I missed the turn to get back on the freeway and ended up driving a few miles on a surface road lined on both sides with dozens of identically bland tract homes, all of them dark since all were unoccupied. I was a little spooked and really tired and for the trillionth time in the past 27 months I thought, “I just want to be home.”

During my commando visits to the Bay Area I have been crashing at the home of some friends in Los Altos. They have a big house, so one more person hanging out there doesn’t bother them. They also have three kids, so one more person opening the refrigerator and standing there zombie-like for 15 minutes pondering what to eat does not bother them either. The kids themselves are completely unfazed by my presence. We all shamble downstairs in the morning sporting pajamas and bed hair, and we often work elbow-to-elbow at the dining room table at night, them doing their homework, me doing email or some other worky thing. Jon sometimes flees the vacation house when I’m gone. Most recently he spent several days with a buddy of his who also hails from Iowa and who owns some acreage near Mt. Shasta. I have no idea what they did up there, though Jon returned having showered once and shaved not at all, clear signs that good, grimy fun was had by the menfolk that week. What happens at Shasta stays at Shasta.

So we are here, and then there, wherever “there” may be as necessitated by work, the need to break the isolation or the opportunity to beg Glenn to please finish this #$@%ing house. Which is looking great (pictures below), if only it would be done already. I’ll let you know what day we actually get to move in. And thanks for playing.

 

Comments

[Darius Cartmell]

I look forward to seeing your new 'home sweet home.' From the pictures you've shown above, I expect your new house to be more elegant than before. Perhaps you and your family are now enjoying the holidays there.

[Dafne Buelow]

Your house looks great! I bet your house is better now as compared before. :) I can't wait to have a quick photo-tour of the finished house. My house is also under renovation because of an ongoing gutter replacement. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your holidays! :D