but…for a whole month now…Every single day…It’s a bit of a muchness.
If anybody needs a 2 bedroom condo in Glendale, we’re having an open house on sunday next.
and after that…I WILL BE THROUGH
uuuhhhhh….
but…for a whole month now…Every single day…It’s a bit of a muchness.
If anybody needs a 2 bedroom condo in Glendale, we’re having an open house on sunday next.
and after that…I WILL BE THROUGH
uuuhhhhh….
packing and packing and cleaning and painting.
Now, it’s packing some more. Yesterday I was packing my shoes. I usually can’t see all my shoes. I mean, I have a nice shelf for them in the bottom of my closet, but it gets kind of hard to see all of them under the clothes.
I definitely have a style of shoe I prefer. Really, the fact of the matter is, I don’t need anymore little booties or black strappy mary janes.
In fact, it may be that I really don’t need much of anything anymore. Which is GREAT! How blessed am I that I have everything I need, and way way more?
In fact, the only thing i really need is more space. And even with my plans to move to a bigger home, it’s clear to me that I have to find a new hobby
I’m going to have to give up shopping.
Have you noticed? Shopping is really america’s hobby. Chris, being very close to perfect, really loves to shop with me. And this is So Cal, we have some good shopping, and pretty much everyone is in on the fun.
But I don’t know. I mean, if I have everything I need, and really I do, what’s the point of going out to spend money on buying new things?
I think I will have to come up with other ways to spend my time. It’s just pointless to keep on shopping.
I guess I’ll have to spend more time gardening.
Well, the light is peeking through every once in a while at the end of the tunnel.
I got new linoleum in the kitchen and bathrooms today. Sure looks different. The condo is slowly losing it’s 70’s funk.
I’m very very close to finishing now..Soon we’ll be able to show the place. I’m looking forward to setting everything up all pretty like a model house. It will be like I don’t even live here.
I already unpacked my dresser and put it all in a suitcase. I have to make the bedroom look large and spacious, so my dresser goes into storage. CHRIS’s dresser stays because HIS dresser came from his grandparents who probably bought it somewhere expensive in Wisconson. MY dresser came from a garage sale and cost 40 bucks.
but the bedroom looks pretty good now.
Now there is most just the little things. I am dearly hoping this whole thing will be over soon…Soon SOon SOON. please…
Not much longer, I know that.
When I go out to my balcony, I tell my plants that they will soon have full free dirt to spread their roots it. They seems to look forward to it too.
Let’s just say, I don’t want to pursue a career in home painting
WOW.
I have NEVER been so consistently tired. It’s been several..How many? I don’t remember…weeks that I’ve been working on making my condo beautiful.
I’ve never had a baby, but I suspect that just after having a baby feels a lot like how I feel now…
I usually am a morning person. I usually wake up with all kinds of plans about what I will get done on that very day. Not right now. I have plans, but they are not cheerful.
It is better now that Chris is back from New York…His trip was very successful, which I am glad about. And even though he is neck deep in his preparations for his trip to Germany next monday, it is still great just to have him around.
I know that this is a good thing to do, that it will pay off, but BANG it’s tough.
Therefore, I apologize for the lack of content on my website.
So…We have a new plan.
Everyone knows that the real estate market in America has shot upwards, for all kinds of reasons.
And I seem to have lucked out on my purchase of a condo here in the middle of LA. It was something of a fixer upper to begin with, but even so I almost didn’t buy it.
See, Chris and I were getting more and more serious…And I just wasn’t sure. “Maybe I should wait until he and I have made some plans about our future together before I commit to a mortgage.”
I stewed about it for a while, eventually deciding that I might resent him for not making a move on a timeline that was entirely invented by me…Etc.
So I bought, and after a year he moved in with me. We are very happy.
And we are both very happy that I bought the place. Because now, it’s worth practically a gazillion dollars more than i paid for it. yay!
So…Chris and I have spent a lot of conversations talking about future plans. And we talked about a little house by the mountains.
He grew up by the mountains.
Me too, but different mountains. His mountains are about 50 miles away, and little houses there are rather reasonable.
When we were talking about getting a little house there, we thought I would have to become employed again. When thinking about what kind of job I would have to have, I got all worried about it.
So I called to find out. Turns out they’ll let anybody borrow money.
AND WE”RE OFF! We’ve run the numbers, we can afford it and everything looks good.
So I’m painting and packing a learning about how to sell a home. Chris is learning about buying a home. It’s all very exciting.
And very familiar. The moving, I mean. I hadn’t realized I’d been here a full two years. Well, two years come August.
Moving is the constant in my life, it seems.
“Chris? How many places have you lived since you became an adult?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I’ve lived a lot of places. If you don’t count after I moved back home, because that made me not an adult again…Wait! That wasn’t my choice, so dammit, I’ll count it.”
“Sure, that counts”
“Let’s see…”
There was the commune that first summer.
Then back home for the fall
then the Mirnyy one-room flat
then the two room flat
Then Yakutsk, with the other teachers,
then with Lena on the outside of town.
then back to anchorage with my brother
then in Muldoon with crazy roomate Cheryl
Then the next roommate near midtown
then the first place with Jack, for a month
Then the second place with Jack…23rd street?
Then on Spenard
Then to Cupertino to stay with Bryan again
Then we found the place in Sunnyvale (a residence i remained in for tge longest period of my to-date adult life..a very nice place)
then the other place in sunnyvale..Where my brother Chris and Suzanne tag-teamed as roomates…and from which I finally gave up on Jack
then I stayed with my brother Bryan until I got the hot-box in Mountain View
THen I found the place on Taylor in Sunnyvale…where I lived happily as a highly paid consultant and then a college student and then GRADUATE!
And then I moved to LA, to Los feliz. That place was nice. Lived there a whole year
Then I bought this place.
And this summer I will move under the mountains.
Okay, here’s the count:
14 years of adult life
20 residences
That’s a lot of boxes.
Okay, I’m packing and painting like a maniac. Boy…So I am packing some books right now, and I found my copy of the Iliad.
THIS is the BEST translation. Let me tell you. I bought this copy in the Royal Museum in London. What better place, I thought. What a good souvenir. The british have long been mad about translating greek classics.
So, I had this unread copy. I read a little bit, but I didn’t read too far until I had to take the classics class at my univerisity. The teacher had a copy of the Iliad at the bookstore. I thought I would use the one I already.
Then, at a study group where we were getting ready for the quiz, I read a piece from my book. The other students dropped their jaws and said, “Whoa! That’s not what my books says at all!”
THIER translations were totally opaque. THey all passed around my book and said I was lucky.
SO, if you want to read the Iliad like it was meant to be read, all exciting and interesting, get this translation. It’s really great.
And the Iliad is a good book to read.
Sometimes you just have to get away. This urge strikes me frequently. Though not so much lately…I’m very happy right now.
However, there have been times when I wanted so badly to get out of the country that it was dangerous to get behind the wheel of a car. I would drive and drive and not want to turn around.
I’ve been seized with the need for snow, to see cold in this unrelenting sunny california weather. I’ve been in the grip of the NEED to hear people speaking another language.
My friend Lenny, a congenital programmer, feels that need too. He has made a tool to satisfy the need.
Check it out:
Pretty cool, man.
boy, it’s been a very exciting few weeks.
Christ is Risen! Eastern Easter was just last Sunday and we celebrated in style with my godmother in Mountain View.
And Just before that, Chris and I realized that our dream of buying a house with a yard is possible now that my condo has increased in value so much. So we got approved for a mortgage and are preparing to sell this place.
And now I think I’m going to get a job, because I think someone wants to give me one.
It sure has been exciting.
But that means that the blog has been bare. Sorry guys!
It’s been a sad few days. My laptop began to freeze and refuse to reboot. The good news is that it required a new hard drive and now it works fine.
The bad news is, I lost all my contacts for all my friends and such. I did not lose my writing files, so I cannot cry forever. But I hope that I can re-create connections to my friends.
Please, email me with you contact info if you wold like us to stay in contact with one another.
I’ve been really mulling this one over for a while.
Things have come to a pass. I have questions about why certain political choices are being made,and the voices I am hearing from media outlets are almost exclusive liberal voices.
I am trying to follow the tangled thread. Here are some of the things that concern me:
Health Care
Cost of Living
Whether jobs will be available
How much stuff costs
Being fair to everyone
Taking good care of natural resources
These seem really basic to life enjoyment. I have to live, I have to pay for stuff, I have to have a job to pay for said stuff. I think that we have to be fair to everyone, because it’s the right thing to do. Plus, if we aren’t fair, they will exact revenge.
And we have to take care of natural resources, like the EARTH for a big example, because I have to look at it when I am not working or shopping for stuff. And I like the earth. It’s where I keep my stuff (okay, that’s a quote from The Tick).
If we take care of the stuff that keeps my list of concerns taken care of, we’re doing okay.
Alright. So who pays for Health care to keep me living? In the USA, insurance companies do. That’s really really convoluted. I mean, at one point in history, Doctors used to take their knowledge and think of a way to cure the person, and then they would take money or some trade item from the person they were treating. That was the end of that.
Now, getting your tonsils out takes huge statistical charts and indexes to pay for. Whoa. That’s strange and weird. But that’s really what we are living with.
The people that pay the insurance companies to pay the bills for our medical needs are:
the employers, i.e. Large Corporations
Mostly, that’s true. Some individuals can pay the premiums themselves, if they want. The governmentactsd as a safety net, that picks up the slack sometimes for those who don’t have an employer to pay.
That’s how we do it in the US. In Europe, the government picks up the tab for the whole bill. It’s called socialized medicine. And socialized medicine has a whole host of problems, such as lowered quality of care and restaints on compensation for the professionals who are therefore unmotivated to innovate and invent such needed things as new cures.
Socialized medicine is not the best way to do it. But neither is our way. Both of us are figuring out what to do next.
But things being the way they are, Large corporations are the biggest customers of the health insurance companies who control the health care in america.
So, when you are dealing with health care, it’s really a lot about large corporate interests.
Large corporate interests = the Republican party
right? well, maybe.
But the democrats are the ones who are always bringing up health care concerns. And they are full of speeches about how new programs can be funded by new taxes that will be paid for by big business or ‘the rich.’
But, if the democrats expect to milk the corporate cow, it would seem to require checking that the cow is well fed. If we learned nothing from the stock crash of 2000 it’s that businesses are quite apt to fail.
Interestingly, the democrats are for ‘equality’ too. That is what they seem to talk about a lot. I hear a lot about people being underpriviliged. Or people being minorities or poor. Sometimes, they even talk about people being oppressed.
These are pretty big words. The conservatives tend to say things like “Idiots” and “Morons” about the liberals. Not very helpful, just to oversimplify into name-calling.
But the liberals voices seem to forget where their bread is buttered. I have listened for a long time, and I can see that their basic idea is to take money from rich people and from big business in the form of taxes and redistribute it (through government branches) to ‘the less fortunate’.
That bothers me. This country has a high regard for independence, and we seem to be setting up a structure whereby people become dependent on the government, that thing that NO ONE, conservative or liberal, trusts.
It seems to be better to take obtacles out of people’s way and let them do what they feel like doing.
I like the idea of compassion that the democrats supposedly espouse. I’d like to be a democrat and help out where help is needed.
But this constant talk of ‘the less fortunate’ seems to place those speaking on a superior plane than the others. Sure, they may be speaking about compassion, but there are ways of giving help without stripping the recipients of their dignity. But the speechers raise themselves by referring to others in a one-down position. It’s as if they are attempting to become patrician by designating all others as plebian. But it is smoke and mirror. We do hold to the truth that all people are created equal.
It is non-humanitarian to create a system of whereby people become dependent for their basic needs. That’s infanticizing the ‘less fortunate.’
So, I have a bad taste in my mouth for these psuedo patrician non-humanitarian democrats. I know there may be plenty of truly compassionate charitable people who work hard to help the less fortunate, but the loudest voices in the democratic party (at least those around me in liberal LA) are terrible examples.