I was thinking a while back that I've never really lived alone, barring a little over a year which doesn't really count because I was dating Buck in that sharing two apartments, rather than one, kind of way: Childhood, MIT co-op, U of C dorm with a roommate, U of C apartment with four roommates, back with my parents for a month or two, Peace Corps, living with the crazy Australian for the first year and the uptight Chicago accountant (I probably would have liked her fine if we we weren't living together, but my slovenliness and cat-harboring annoyed her, and her annoyance annoyed me), home with my parents for six months, Brooklyn with a high school friend for a year, living 'alone' but mostly with Buck in an apartment with slate floors and a hardly-working fireplace which meant I smelled like smoke all year, and then I moved in with Buck in Inwood in a rental apartment and two years later we bought our current place.
I just almost made a graph of number of cohabitants per time across my lifetime. Why would I do that?
It would be pretty level at a mean level just below two except for some massive spikes, I think.
Oh, what the hell, maybe I'll do it.
1 may have been the dullest comment of that length ever posted. My excuse is that I have an absolutely crippling amount of work to do, and I don't want to.
Stanley, whatever happened to your survivalist roommate? I remember that you lived with a couple, and at some point the man moved out, but whatever happened to the woman?
5: She's still around town and involved with the local activist community. I believe she's dating someone new, but I haven't looked into his survivalist bona fides.
The survivalist dude (and it really was much more him than her) re-married and moved to NC, last I heard.
Moving does in fact suck, although I gotta say paying people to do all the packing and actual moving makes it suck a lot less. I do look forward to having a lot fewer boxes in my space sometime in the future, though.
Yup, there was one big spike that brings the mean up to 2.71 people under the same roof, but the median and modal number of people under the same roof (that is, cohabitants including myself) is 2. Max is 14, min is 1.
Records from the year 9 are spotty at best.
Moving does suck. Especially across the country, which I've done four times now. For the last two, I've said Never Again. I guess we will see.
I lived alone in my current space for about eight months, and liked it. Took sub tenants due to an unfortunate jobless interval, and now like my current flatmates quite a bit (one I met because of this blog).
The place is huge and gets dusty, and one benefit of cohabitation is help with cleaning, especially because I am not the best at doing that.
And now my girlfriend is crossing the country to move in in about a week...
Anyway, just hoping to make LB feel better about long, pointless comments.
I think everyone knows I'm moving but it's only 50% my news to share so ok, I am elected president.
I'm currently looking into having my stuff moved across the country and, so far, it looks like it costs a great deal more than I would have imagined. Like the first estimate I got, I could definitely have bought a used truck in not terrible condition. Not thrilled about this but still looking. The last time I drove more than an hour on the highway was 2004.
4: How do you feel about World War I?
4: How do you feel about World War I?
4: still right there with you. I literally NEVER do this, allow work to stack up to the point that I can't even begin to think about where to start. FUCKING HELL.
Have you tried arguing about WWI and buying a new tablet computer thing.
4, 17: I solved this problem by quitting. Whee!
Regarding my current house, I'm fairly certain there's a bird's nest (presumably with eggs or baby birds) in the gutter out back, since I just got dive bombed twice by a robin when I went out there.
20 may be my only option. It's a shame to throw away a perfectly good white boy job like this, but I'm pretty sure I don't have any other choice at this point.
Moving is awful. I declared during the move last summer that next time I would be in a box.
20: also, this really isn't my fault. I'm supposed to review a book that should have been great but is, all things considered, much nearer to terrible, and I don't want to say that. The guy who wrote it was under ridiculous pressure, and rather than writing some narrow piece of fluff, which, given his situation, would have been the easy way out, he tried to do something very ambitious. That he failed pretty dramatically is a serious bummer, and I don't feel like creaming him for it, but I'm not sure how to be intellectually honest without mentioning the fact that the book, though an emblem of the author's courage, sort of sucks. So the draft of my review has been sitting on my desktop for three weeks, and in that time more and more and more and more other stuff has piled up. And now I'm screwed. Okay, maybe this is completely my fault.
Maybe I'll become a mover. I hear that's a growth industry.
Moving is awful, except for the upcoming move back into my house. I won't bore you with the saga of the last year and half, so we can leave it at that.
It is super expensive to do a cross-country move, no avoiding it. The cheapest way, if you don't have a lot of stuff, is to just bite the bullet and rent a u-haul and do it yourself. It's even sort of fun. The best way is to get a job with someone who will pay to relocate you.
Okay, further to 12: Smearcase and I are moving to the Bay Area some time around the end of the summer. (I got a job that very much resembles a puppy, in the parlance of our times.) I am less worried about moving my stuff than Smearcase is, because I have less stuff. However, I am getting way prematurely anxious about finding an affordable apartment, BART-accessible, in the East Bay. The whole point of leaving New York for good was to avoid any more hellish real-estate markets.
Stanley:
Are you living on a sports-themed road?!?!
34: You two will be fine. The rental market has gotten tighter here, and if you're absolutely set on having a 2BR it may be a little challenging, but it's not anything like SF or NYC.
34: Converting pet units to legal jobs is hard.
35: No, but close enough to be wondering if I'll regret it.
We are in the process of moving my 85 year old mother-in -law. You have no idea how much crap can be accumulated in a lifetime. Of course, to her they are precious memories and need to be saved and passed on to the fruit of her loins, none of whom could give a shit. Except for the silver and china and antiques. There will be blood over that shit.
27: There must be someone in that WWI thread who'd be willing to write your review.
Huh, I'm actually reassured by the news that others here have never really lived alone for an extended period. It's bothered me off and on for years that I never have, chiefly because I know any number of people who think it's absolutely freakish.
But you know, I'd be giving up a lot to live alone: have to be on top of things, say, grapple with plumbing problems on my own, be home for the repair person to show up, be unable to get my car unstuck from the snow; or unable to use the housemate's printer if mine's out of ink, or borrow an envelope, or whatever.
The pros? Well, not having to compromise. Also much more expensive.
In many ways, I live alone now. My son is away at boarding school. My daughter lives with me, but she does not have conversations with me due to her impairments.
Plus, I no longer live in the heart of the city where everyone hangs out on their front porch.
The solitude has been good. But, it has taken some time to adjust.
38: You have no idea how much crap can be accumulated in a lifetime
Au contraire.
Lizardbreath, 38 is crying out for a post on tontines. Crying!
By the time Smearcase and Bave are in the Bay Area, I hope to have mostly moved back into my house in Seattle, and only pop down here for meetups PI meetings.
Unless I do so badly with tomorrow's presentation that he never wants to talk to me again. Possible; see 4, 17, 20, etc. Back to grindstone.
27
20: also, this really isn't my fault. I'm supposed to review a book that should have been great but is, all things considered, much nearer to terrible, and I don't want to say that. ...
Well then you shouldn't be reviewing it. Is it too late to get out of it?
Bave:
Are you done in June!?!? Wow! That has gone by fast.
I have almost always lived alone. It will be nice not to, except I will have to remember that walking around in one's underwear is not A-1 "socialized human being living in proximity to other human beings" behavior. Except I guess in the Bay Area it's actually standard Casual Fridays office attire so I may be walking in the door that way.
My last class was today, and my finals are next week. It was indeed fast, although it also seemed really long.
44: I thought about it, actually, but I'm just going to write an honest review.
"Downstairs, pants." Rule in a joint house I know of. (They were renting from the Jesuits who ran the high-school next door.)
I love living by myself, but I get wierd.
I will have to remember that walking around in one's underwear is not A-1 "socialized human being living in proximity to other human beings" behavior
Depends on the underwear, really.
Also, 48 to 46.
Converting pet units to legal jobs is hard.
Legal job puppies can grow into vicious curs if you aren't diligent about training?
So, but, like...does anyone have recent-ish experience of having stuff moved across the country and input on how much it might reasonably cost? If not, I am hiring Limpy Jew Movers.
I lived by myself for seven years. First three were in an incredibly small studio. Paris is the only place I've ever seen a smaller apartment. (NB, I have not been to any expensive Asian cities.) It was made workable by several details of the apartment:
1. A counter between the kitchen corner and the rest of the room. That way I could just have a stool at the counter and didn't need a table.
2. Closets. Linen closet, clothes closet, weirdly deep coat closet.
3. The bathroom being at the end of and around the corner from a teeny hallway. It made it so that there was somewhere else to go in the apartment, even though it was just a few steps. If the bathroom had been directly off of the main room, the place would have felt much more closed in.
By the time I had lived there three years, every inch of space was used and there were shelves on the walls and handy hooks and niches for every little thing in a design-magaziney way that would make visitors sigh with delight. I could not wait to move. The necessity of everything having its place and having to always be put back there eventually made me batty. I desperately longed for an apartment in which I could sometimes leave things out for a while after I was done with them and not have them disrupt the entire space.
46: My girlfriend has lived by herself for the past 6 years. The last week and a half has definitely been an adjustment.
55 reminds me of another con for the carriage house: no closets.
56: Yes, but which of you is underdressed? (Actually, I remember early cohabitation as making `underdressed' meaningless. There was only `late'.)
54: My cow-orker reports that moving his family of 5 from Chicago here last year cost about $9K. I'm willing to bet they have way more stuff than you do.
I've lived by myself since 2005.
Paying movers is expensive, and I say that having only done central New Jersey to Boston-area and within-Boston-area. I don't suppose Bave can get his new employer to chip in something toward moving costs? I always forgot that that was the sort of thing one had to bring up before accepting an offer.
55 reminds me of another con for the carriage house: no closets.
Oh, that sucks. My current apartment is kind of under-closeted. When I moved in I thought "eh, it's less closet space than my old place, but I'll manage," but it has made it difficult to prevent it from being a mess. I think I need to buy an armoire or something.
I had a single for two years in a dorm at Chicago, but, huh, I think that's actually the only time I've ever lived alone (and even that doesn't really count).
It's a good thing I'm so agreeable.
Our apartment is definitely under-closeted. That is, it only has a couple, and they are weirdly shallow. It is not so much ideal. But everything about it basically is so oh well.
I've been chipping in a not-negligible but not-all-expenses-paid moving allowance to postdocs in our group out of my startup, and the other faculty seem to think I'm insane for doing it. But moving sucks and is expensive! Maybe I'll regret it if I get no grants and run out of money.
Wow. That is very generous. I have never heard of that.
I mean, it's startup, it's not like it's coming out of my own pocket. We're asking somebody just finishing grad school to move across the country, it seems like we should help them out a little. I dunno.
I have no real idea how startup works but I've generally been surprised by how long people have continued to hang on to it.
52: Thanks!
My employer will reimburse some moving expenses -- less than I think the total will come to. It's not a terribly posh job. I guess maybe I should have tried asking for more (since the salary wasn't really negotiable), but I was really just overjoyed at getting the job.
I love living alone in a one bedroom (vs. a studio, which I liked) but having reassessed my finances, I probably should move to a studio. I have to move in a couple months, anyway, and since people have already been coming to view the apartment I'm in right now, I clearly need to start looking early. But in addition to being lazy, I'm also having trouble getting my housing search going because I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not going to like anything I see and I want to confine my dislike of me next apartment as close as possible to the period during which I live there.
I think it cost about 12k to move a family of four from Minnesota to the Bay area. One car loaded onto the truck, which may partially account for the difference from Josh's cow-orker.
67: Yeah, people seem to hang on to it forever. I think my PhD advisor still has some left over from when he started his current job over a decade ago. I guess I figure they're likely to kick me out in a finite amount of time so I might as well spend it all first.
Congratulations to Bave and Smearcase for their move(s). Smearcase: are you really going to have to forbear walking around in your underwear? I mean, it will just be Bave, I would have thought. Maybe he objects -- he might have a colleague over on occasion, something like that, so you can't just be parading around in your skivvies. You would need some notice that you have to put some clothes on, but providing such notice is just normal for couples anyway, nu?
(I once got in a *lot* of trouble with a live-in mate for bringing a grad school friend home without notice, and yeah, my mate was lounging on the couch with a beer in hand, shirtless and in shorts, and was not amused.)
I got a small relocation allowance and I'm not going to claim it's more trouble than it's worth because I feel very lucky to have gotten it, but the terms are such that I've had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use it and in the end I'll probably use about half of it. I don't have much stuff and little of that stuff is worth anything. Meanwhile, my big expenses were mostly non-eligible for reimbursement.
What is startup in this context? Is Essear hoping to get the death ray venture off the ground or does that just mean some money that the University gives you for a while so that you can build a lab and get paid by tax dollars or private charity?
ABF is a good way to do a cross-country move, if you're not in the market for higher-end movers. Maybe around $2-3000 or so?
There are also the moving pods, which I've never used. They should be a lot cheaper than full-service moving but more expensive than U-Haul.
I used a pod. It worked great, although I think it was not all that much cheaper than full service.
Pods are excellent if you have a lag between moving out and moving in, since they'll store them for you for not that much and then deliver them whenever.
74: they give you money to start a lab when you get hired, yeah. It's as far as I know meant to hold you over until you get real grants? I dunno if it's a thing outside the sciences.
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Newt is being delightfully clever -- brought home something that was puzzling him from science class that turned into successfully deriving a formula for buoyant force. I love having kids who ask questions that let me crack my knuckles and say "Let me show you how dimensional analysis works, kid."
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I've heard the pods are significantly more expensive than regular freight.
Here's a quote from ABF for $3,541.
Basically, you load your stuff onto a trailer and then they fill the trailer up with commercial freight, and get it to you at some time in the future. No idea how cheap that is but I can't imagine a U-Haul would be much less if you include gas.
Right, funding from the university that they give to new professors. (As far as I understand, basically the only time the university typically provides research funding, although people who get tenure get to negotiate a new startup package and people who get offers elsewhere sometimes get retention packages.) The "start a lab" part doesn't really apply to me, but I hired a postdoc starting next year, so if I don't manage to get a grant I'll have to pay him out of startup (which would, in fact, consume the startup pretty damn quickly).
My first law firm job paid for our last move. It was probably supposed to be for out-of-towners moving to NY, but instead it paid for moving us three blocks uphill from our rental apartment to our current co-op. Totally luxurious -- we could have done the move with a handcart and a bunch of sweat, but instead we had a lovely bunch of giant men pack everything for us.
Moving cross-country becomes much easier if you aren't attached to many things. Everything I'm actually sentimental about is pretty compact, with the exception of books, and due to a mishap and a shared storage space, I lost most of my book collection (previously, several thousand, now, probably about 100). So I got over that sentimentality, although I'm still pissed off with a particular person about it.
Everything else, except clothing, is simple cost-benefit - can I sell this for more than enough to replace it (if it needs replacing), or is it cheaper to ship?
One trick - it is a bit of a hassle, but Amtrak shipping is really cheap for things that fit in boxes of less than 50 Lbs. only some stations do freight, and you likely need to rent a truck at both ends, but when I came back to the Bay Area, I shipped a bunch of stuff and it was, IIRC, something like 6 times cheaper than commercial movers. For Bay Area destinations, Emeryville is where freight ends up. Pack carefully, but I did ship a fair amount of glassware, and there were only two casualties.
82: he's not coming with funding already in hand? What a slacker!
Does it make any sense to store things here on the east coast for 6 months or a year while seeing what's what in the Bay area, then arranging to deal with the stuff here after that?
I'm losing track a little bit here: do Bave & Smearcase have living quarters yet? How would you know where to move/ship things if not?
We'll have a place once we find one, hopefully in the summer some time. My job starts in September. Worst case, I think, is we store stuff out there while looking for an apartment, but that would be a grand pain.
I think the options are, in order of least to most expensive (and assuming you have furniture):
1. Drive your stuff yourself.
2. Ship bulk freight. Cost probably depends on size and weight. UPS quoted me in terms of pallet x height, I think. I didn't ship any freight so I don't know.
3. Pod-type moving. U-haul, ABF, and PODS all offer pods of various dimensions, with PODS having the largest minimum, I think. I found the local U-haul didn't really seem to have it together, PODS was annoyingly aggressive and I never contacted ABF because once I saw the size of a trailer I realized I'd need to buy furniture just to justify using any of the POD services.
4. Professional movers. I didn't even ask.
The first pod place I looked into quoted me over $6K. I was openly incredulous.
If it were five years ago and I had a bunch of Ikea stuff, I'd just get rid of stuff and then get new stuff. For better or worse, I discovered mid century furniture around that time. It's not as if I had a ton of it--I live in a pretty tiny apartment. But there's that line between "boxes of books" and "Adrian Pearsall walnut wingback chair" where suddenly you have to either get a UHaul or have your stuff moved.
87: Congrats on the good news. 19 left me confused as I couldn't figure out how you could have guessed. I kept reading for clues and wondering if I missed something in the FA the way I've never been able to understand the pet shop metaphor.
I had a bunch of Ikea stuff. Now my parents do and some of it seems to be getting a lot of use.
Adrian Pearsall walnut wingback chair
Ooh, just googled that. Pretty.
Congrats to Bave and Smearcase! Moving does suck, though. When I did my cross-country move(s) I just drove all my stuff myself, but I didn't have any furniture so everything fit in my car.
Things I want in my Oakland apartment:
- Smearcase
- in his underwear
- Smearcase's furniture
92: there are a few different kinds, I think. Mine is this one. I do adore it. And I got it for 1/8 of what they seem to go for.
94=favorite comment ever. "Get a room" you all say, and we're back where we started.
90.last: puppy = boxes of books shipped by Media Mail
wolf cub = entrusting your prized furniture to North American Van Lines
Sure, but when I say basically the same thing to somebody at work....
You tell people at your work you want Smearcase in his underwear in your apartment? Sorta can't blame them for being confused on any number of levels.
Topically, if the topic has drifted to #12, the only person I know who ever moved to the Bay Area with a mover basically had to pay a ransom to the movers to get her stuff back.
94 is sweet and sensible.
89: I discovered mid century furniture around that time. It's not as if I had a ton of it--I live in a pretty tiny apartment. But there's that line between "boxes of books" and "Adrian Pearsall walnut wingback chair"
I see! I don't think I've ever moved without having a new place lined up first, so, you know, that's the thing.
I've never actually lived alone. Childhood, same co-op as in 1, an apartment with three other people (closest, since we didn't interact very much, but we did still share the place), a rented house with five other people (very social, and a seriously rotating cast; I think a total of fourteen people lived there with me, with only one other person who was there the whole five-year duration I was), and then moving in with my now-wife. We're on our fourth residence together, and the first one that we own, so hopefully no moving any time soon.
On the living alone -- or not -- front, I've just learned that you can adjust the water flow on the toilet. There's a knob, turnable, down there at the base; this adjusts whether you're introducing a pathetic dribble or an avalanche of water whenever you flush.
I didn't know that.
You must have a fancy toilet or something. I've never seen anything like that.
There's the shut-off valve for the water intake, which will change how fast the tank refills, but a valve or knob between the tank and bowl would be new to me. If the shut-off valve seems to be controlling dribble vs. avalanche, the flap is probably not closing as quickly as it's supposed to.
When I moved from Chicago to NorCal, ABF was surprisingly affordable. That was eight years ago, though.
106: The new ones have a twisty thing at the top of the fill stack that lets you adjust how high the water goes in the tank, but the flap should still open full bore when you flush.
I love living alone. Most of the times I've lived with other people I've spent lots of time eagerly looking forward to my next opportunity to live alone.
100: I have never been in LB's apartment without my underwear. I wish we could put that rumor to rest.
Alternately: outside of my underwear, it is light enough to read, and there are more books.
I recommend leaving your toilet, no matter how fancy, and just getting another one at your new apartment.
106: Huh. The water pressure when flushing the toilet a short while ago was crazy strong, which I mentioned to my housemate, and he said, "Oh, I turned the water flow up on the toilet earlier today [for various reasons he had explained to me]."
He then went into the bathroom and made some brief twisting screeching noises consistent with turning a valve. I said, "What did you just do, how did you do that?" He said, "I turned the valve down here a couple of turns." Oh.
Actually he did say that he messed around inside the tank for a bit this afternoon trying to figure out what was going on. THIS is why I need a housemate.
It is a real pain in the ass to get an old toilet down the stairs without spilling the water.
The real cost is in extending the pipes to the new place. They call it "toilet as a service". Let me tell you, when you put your waste in the cloud, you run some big risks.
"Oh, I turned the water flow up on the toilet earlier today [for various reasons he had explained to me]."
Sequentially:
1. No fiber & cheese
2. beer
3. lots of fiber
112: Also, commercial toilets usually work without a tank, so must run on pressure. It didn't occur to me that you might have that in a non-institutional residence.
[for various reasons he had explained to me]
Because pooping.
Also, commercial toilets usually work without a tank, so must run on pressure. It didn't occur to me that you might have that in a non-institutional residence.
My current toilet is sort of like this. It flushes with the same sort of pressure as a commercial toilet, and inside the tank there's nothing but a mysterious black box. I don't know of any valves to control the pressure, though.
If it doesn't have a tank with water that is dropped by gravity, it about has to have a valve. Pull it apart until you find it.
Well, there might be some sort of tank inside the black box. In fact I think there probably is.
Ah, it turns out it has one of these things inside. That's the "black box" I was referring to.
115, 117: Hey now. No, it was because, mid-afternoon, the water pressure seemed to diminish, apparently, and when housemate did dishes, it seemed there was some rust or murkiness in the water.
This sometimes happens when the dept. of Public Works does work on pipes in the area, but in the meantime we were having our six-monthly water backup in the shower. I tend to blame this on my housemate for not brushing/combing his freaking hair *before* he showers and washes it. But anyway, he was plunging the tub mid-afternoon as well. So then he did thing about the toilet.
123: My mom recommended bleach for the clogged-shower thing, and it works great. I initially felt bad about pouring bleach down the drain, but something something laundry water toilet stuff it's fine.
Bleach, that makes me feel bad too. But, um, okay. I'll add it to the list of remedies. It's a pain when it happens, I'll tell you that. I seriously just think it would be helpful if my housemate combed out his snarls or whatever beforehand.
I use drano, but I'm sure that's good for the environment.
79 - are you showing off again? It reminded me to ask you (forgive me if I missed this whilst on holiday) which way Sally had decided?
I've never lived alone. I'd like to.
127: Busted.
After a whole lot of indecision and angst (resolved only when, two days before the form was due, I told her that I would stand in her room and play the ukulele at her until she made her mind up)(this actually happened. It's not a tactic I've used before, but it seemed appropriate)(when I say "play" the ukulele, I mean random strumming, rather than anything intentional) she decided to stay at her current school.
I lived alone for two years between college and moving in together, and again about 15 years later when my wife went away for a month to help her parents move to assisted living. The second time was quite pleasant and decadent. Fortunately no sexy celebrities died around that time.
I've lived alone for coming up on ten years. It's certainly allowed my inner weirdo to come out more than if I had a roommate. I rather like not having anyone around, so it works well for me. I think if I did not have cats I'd find it lonely, but the little fluffy bastards are just right to take the edge off.
an affordable apartment, BART-accessible, in the East Bay
Hot tip: look at El Cerrito. The BART-accessible parts of Oakland are a tricky split between sketchy and tony.
131.1 is good advice (although it'll mean you'll have to have a car, and getting to things will be a little bit of a pain). I take issue with 131.2.
I guess you don't *have* to have a car living in the East Bay but my impression/memory is that you definitely want at least one in the household.
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Hey Halford, looking like my name might be on a patent. Cackle away at the rich irony.
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(resolved only when, two days before the form was due, I told her that I would stand in her room and play the ukulele at her until she made her mind up)
I have a "time to get up" song, which I sing loudly while pounding on the bed until Caroline gets moving. These things can be effective.
If teo is around, he might like this. Warning: there are clichés and some overwriting.
Cackle? I think of myself more as the copyright guy, patents are weird.
131: Is El Cerrito along Solano affordable? My vague memory is that it's nice over there. (Um, or that might be Albany.)
Oh. Well, agreed. Surely it'll make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice, though.
138: That's Berkeley/Albany. Definitely affordable; here's a place in that neighborhood. That same place would probably go for $3-500 more/month in Oakland.
I actually laughed when I saw how little the rent on that place is.
Whatever that road is between Albany and Berkeley is great. I fondly remember The Pub (fire, port, beer, Trivial Pursuit and loose tobacco) and The Mallard (tiki bar/hunting lodge plus pool tables). No idea if they're still there. El Cerrito near the first BART stop is a little more accessible by foot/bike than the second one which gets closer to the hills. Amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge on the two days it's clear.
The rent is low, but the toilet is green.
So a friend of mine, who is also moving out there for a job, just signed up for a $2k/month studio in downtown Oakland, after having a hard time finding anything at all. I'm hoping he's just not looking in the right places?
138, 140: Regarding Solano, "near BART" is the kicker, if you mean "walkable." If you need to get to downtown SF, though, the AC Transit Transbay bus lines go through many different nice areas, cost no more than BART, and are loved by at least some commuters (quiet, plush, wifi). A good friend told me that was her favorite way to get to downtown SF from El Cerrito during normal commute hours. For late nights, though, might be a dealbreaker.
Also, if everyone moves to El Cerrito, they will have to open a second Catahoula coffeehouse here. For purposes of searching, you can also consider the Richmond Annex part of El Cerrito. In fact it's nicer than the adjacent parts of El Cerrito west of San Pablo, if a bit of an Alameda-North haven for nerdy, nerdy parents of small children.
141: Whereas I think our mortgage payment made you cry, though that was probably in the sanctity of other places.
parsimon, white vinegar can help with hair clogs if you're looking for the more hippieish version. So can those stupid, disgusting hair traps you put in the shower or tub part of the drain.
The toilet is green,
But the rent is low
And neither have
I wings to fly.
Burmashave.
142: Both the Mallard and the Pub are still there. There's also the Hotsy Totsy, which used to be a 6AM bar but is now hipstery and fancy cocktails.
144: He was looking in the wrong places. We were looking for a few weeks largely because we had pretty specific requirements. If we'd been less picky we could have gotten a 2BR/2BA for $2100/month in the neighborhood I used to live in within a week of starting to look.
145: There's also casual carpool. Doesn't help so much with getting home, though.
the Hotsy Totsy . . . is now hipstery and fancy cocktails.
!!! I guess it is pretty close to Mod Lang.
142: I'm pretty sure The Pub is still there, friend of a friend is a long time bartender there.
144: Definitely not looking in the right places, if the experiences of my friends are anything to go by.
We moved into a new house two weeks ago. This would have been just merely difficult had we not had a baby two weeks before that, which made it certifiable lunacy. I had this great plan to move a king bed out of my in-laws' house the day before the move so HJ could hole up in the new house with the baby and not be around the chaos, but a series of cascading miscalculations (apparently you have to account for cleaned carpet to dry) made that impossible.
The new house is substantially larger than the old one, but has moderately less character, by which I mean built-ins, by which I mean storage space. So we are immediately back to living in a blivet, but now with more cardboard. But I like it. In the long term, we'll do all right -- we decided to move into an affordable neighborhood between two neighborhoods we liked in order to not sell the old place and commence our very small real estate empire. But in the near term, we have two mortgages to pay, the pregnancy disability check hasn't come in, and I'm not sure where I put the new tenants' security deposit check. Not to mention thousands of dollars in remodeling costs on the credit card. At least there's miles!
The really fun part was that the remodeling ran a week late, so the first week in the new house (and the third of new baby's life) was shared with our very sweet and talented contractor, en attendant salle de bain.
146: Okay, I'll consider white vinegar too -- but given that Drano (an act of desperation) hasn't worked in the past, I don't know whether vinegar would. The trouble with the whole thing is that the tub/shower drain is constructed in such a way that that metal stopper cap over the drain that you can close if you want to fill the tub is not removable. Dumbest design in the world, but it means you've only got about an inch of access around the edges of it to get into the drain itself -- so you can't use a hair trap thingy.
You can't even fish out 5 dollars from there.
parsimon, white vinegar can help with hair clogs if you're looking for the more hippieish version.
Also very useful for clogs: The drain claw (seriously, that was $5 well spent).
If the drain stopper is the kind that has a switch up near the top of the tub, you can sometimes pull that out and it takes all the hair with it. Then you can, I'm told, put that back in. Or something. I'm not a plumber, but I have a vague memory of dad doing something like that.
155: That looks like it's really worth a try -- thanks, NickS.
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Holy shit I still can't get over the fact that I saw PRINCE!!1! in an 800-person venue last night. Also goddamn the man knows his way around a guitar.
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I can echo 148.2. My one-bedroom, about 1.5 miles from downtown, is worlds less than that. And very possible the market has tightened up, but two years ago it was maybe the 3rd or 4th place from Craigslist I visited.
158 - nice. This thread is making the East Bay sound awesome, which it basically is. Never understood why (except commute time to Silicon Valley) anyone would want to live anywhere else in the BA.
My wife saw Prince in a revolving door in Pittsburgh, where you can make a mortgage payment on a big house for the kind of money that apparently only gets you a small apartment there.
I was in a revolving door with Phillip Glass once.
We were evicted from our revolving door.
I take issue with 131.2
Fair! That was a big tarry brush. I was just thinking of BART stations: as far as I know, West Oakland or Fruitvale dicey, Rockridge expensive. Downtown/Lake Merritt a question mark. Where are the right places to look in Oakland?
Lake Merritt has some cool stuff, doesn't it?
I was in a revolving door with Phillip Glass once.
Of all the places one might encounter Phillip Glass, a revolving door is perhaps the most artistically appropriate.
How many people know what Phillip Glass looks like?
164: You forgot about MacArthur! The neighborhood north and east of the station is one of the most desirable in the East Bay at this point. Basically you want to look for Temescal/Rockridge/North Oakland/Grand Lake.
165: There's lots of cool stuff around the lake. Better to live on the north and west side; for the most part if you're in the numbered streets it's going to be sketchy.
This raises the question of what counts for people as "walking distance" with train stations. A mile? More? If I have to walk much longer than fifteen minutes, I get very annoyed about not being able to walk faster/run, and it spoils the peace of the commute.
Under ten minutes is ideal for peace of mind and tolerance of the fucking slowness of bipedal motion. Maybe I'm too irascible in general, though. (Although, Halford, at one point you said something here about the Bay Area being "full of rage" -- I think of that at least once a month, usually more often.)
And now I should actually go for the run that I postponed for the whole refreshingly cool morning.
How many people know what Phillip Glass looks like?
381,517.
Philip Glass doesn't look like what I thought he looked like.
Out here we have cheap housing and the greatest neighborhood watch in the world.
OT: I don't know if this is really perfect, but they came out well on the first try.
174: Better than putting it in a plastic cup in the microwave, anyway.
(urple hasn't commented in a long time, has he? Hope he didn't eat anything too poisonous.)
Haven't had to move house super recently, but I will take this thread as an excuse to gush that, after two and a half years of working out of bedrooms, my business has just finally got itself a tiny garden office in west Berkeley. The Pub is right at the midpoint of my bike commute, which should nicely mitigate any health benefits.
I wish UPS's "by 3 PM" would clarify which time zone they had in mind, because it doesn't seem to have been this one.
Hipster hotsy totsy is kind of blowing my mind.
Bill Clinton and Charlize Theron clowning around with headgear at an award show.
I just misread 180 as "at an awkward show."
167: I'm starting to think you aren't familiar with all the Chuck Close paintings.
Hotsy-totsy is hipster?! I was confusing it with the other place - The Ivy? - that used to be a great venue and then got fancy cocktails and chandeliers. What does H-T look like now?
I grew up in El Cerrito/Albany/Berkeley. It's not as easy to go without a car in that border area between not-really-north Berkeley and the El Cerrito Plaza BART stations, but if you're close enough to a grocery and can take AC Transit to SF without needing to transfer, it's probably fine.
176: Maybe he discovered a totally novel sex act that was actually enjoyable.
158: He's really something else. I saw him in a 50,000 seat hall, then went back to his studio at 1 in the morning to watch him jam with Larry Graham and Chaka Khan until 4. One of the high points of my life.
158 - nice. This thread is making the East Bay sound awesome, which it basically is.
But the Prince concert Josh went to wasn't in the East Bay, it was in SoMa--only a few blocks from the Grumbles & Trapnel residence, as it happens. Clearly, Smearcase & Bave should move in with us when our other housemate moves out, creating Flophouse West: Older & Wiser edition.
(Note to Grumbles: kidding, kidding!)
The East Bay is for living. SF is for doing some stuff like going to concerts and trying not to slip on the vomit at the bottom of the back door steps of the bus that takes forever to get from downtown to the Richmond district.
Trapnel -
I'm not sure about that 'wiser' part.
This is the first I've heard of a 6am bar. Is the idea that you've been partying all night and now it's 6am so it's off to the 6am bar, where they can start serving booze again at 6am?
Things I want in my Oakland apartment:
- Smearcase
- in his underwear
- Smearcase's furniture
This comment made me smile.
191: More that you need that eyeopener before you head to work (or never make it to work).
191: I don't know if that's what it means, but the bar two blocks from our house works like that. As I've said before, I think it must be a gambling front or something.
First time I visited the bay area the SFBG had a cover story on the best places in town to get a drink at 6AM. Really gave me warm feelings about that part of the world.
People who work the night shift have to drink after work somewhere, don't they?
196 is really the function of our local early bar, but we're not as sophisticated as the Bay Area.
197: Pittsburgh also. But I don't think they really exist anymore.
The End Up in SF is a famous place to tipple way later than you should be doing do.
Also close to home. I've been there, and did not enjoy. I just didn't know what I was doing out drinking at five in the morning drinking with people I didn't want to sleep with.
I hate to brand other people's enterprise, but it is mostly a gay bar. Straight white boys like me have gotten lucky there. It is just a little overwhelming. I'm getting old.
If you happen to need a 6AM bar in SF, look no further than the Galaxy 500, in the Mission. I used to walk by them every day in the morning, and the inhabitants seemed happy with service.
199: maybe you weren't high enough?
I think the earliest I've ordered a drink (after a night of sleeping) was on a plane at 8am. Band trip to Miami for a gig, and we ordered morning beers.
I have been searching for my San Francisco mythology, like how when I moved here I was moving to the city of the Algonquin round table and Catcher in the Rye and all that other [David Copperfield] crap. The idea that straight guys still get laid at a gay bar confirms the potential of Tales of the City to provide some mythology though I imagine the 70s are as gone from the place as the 20s from New York. Actually I think the End Up comes up by name in Tales of the City. I loved those books in college. And there's always Vertigo.
(A lingering concern is moving Smearcat, but I'm sure there's some solution to that.)
and we ordered morning beers.
To wash down your breakfast pretzels, no doubt.
But a beer does have a bit of nutrition, after all. And now that most airlines have eliminated any sort of snack food in coach class (I don't know what kind of gourmet meals they're still serving in first-class, but in coach, they won't even toss you a bag of peanuts anymore), the drinks are the only possible form of sustenance. If I'm hungry, I'll sometimes ask for a glass of tomato juice, just because it feels a little bit like food. I don't actually like tomato juice, though.
(Porter Airlines in Canada still offers nice shortbread biscuits, and sometimes they'll even give you a sandwich for lunch. In coach class! But they have a terrible record for delays and cancellations, so I guess it's true there's no such thing as a free lunch.)
The End Up in SF is a famous place to tipple way later than you should be doing do hang out with tweakers and listen to house music.
203: I think so far as there's a San Francisco mythology at this point, "Groove" is probably it.
The End Up in SF is a famous place to tipple way later than you should be doing do hang out with tweakers and listen to house music.
Does tweaker mean something besides an enthusiastic consumer of methamphetamines? Because I thought that was a rural drug.
My favorite tweaker lives in East Palo Alto, actually.
She's more of a ritalin girl. Does that still count? Maybe not.
Fresh Salt used to have a morning happy hour, for the guys who worked at the Fulton Fish Market and were just getting off work. Then Giuliani moved the fish market to the Bronx to break up its mob control, and Fresh Salt lost its morning business but gained a lot of yuppies in the evening.
209: It's like you've never heard "Semi-Charmed Life".
209: gay urban partiers and rural hicks can find common cause in at least one place.
Yeah, but it wasn't confirmed as a good question until I also asked it.
209: It's like you've never heard "Semi-Charmed Life".
I'm not sure I'd ever heard more than the doot-doot-doot-doots until just now.
215: Other than not being much concerned with the opinions of women?
That's another common cause, Moby, not another place.
There are rural hicks in the gay bars of San Francisco?
I mean, non-gay rural hicks. We need distinct categories for this to make sense.
218: When that song came out, the singer/songwriter talked everyone's ear off about how it was so catchy, no one noticed it was about meth.
Some undergrads were doot-doot-dooting the fuck out of that song in the Berkeley BART last week. They didn't look tweaked, just young and ill-informed.
I once had a conversation with a young woman who worked at Toast Studio in SF, where that thing was recorded, and she told me their singer was the only truly unprofessional dick she'd ever seen come through. He was waving actual Benjamins around and sneering at people like this was a novel thing. After he left they had to use the pitch shifter on everything, which in the nineties was still fodder for contempt.
203: Stop by our place whenever you get here and we'll give you a copy of the collected works of Jack Spicer. Biography too, if you want it. I'm not sure exactly how the mythology of the San Francisco Renaissance ends up looking, but you can improvise what you need.
I really loved that song back when it came out and I was a high-school junior in that tweaker capital of the world, Newton, MA--I even bought the CD single. At one point I thought the lyric "How do I get back there, to the place where I fell asleep inside you" was racy and romantic; now I think it's sad and awkward.
I feel like this revelation about the song is clarifying some things for me about my infamous recent encounter with my own favorite tweaker, but I'm having trouble articulating how.
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To Lurid Keyaki, since you've been around on this thread:
Thank you for mentioning Scott Miller's death, as I don't know when I'd have found out otherwise. I'm so very sad to hear it, though, having been a fan for years and years.
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I'm currently living in a yoga studio in a small city in China. The perks are free yoga, and access to dozens of middle aged women. The cons are...yoga in my living room all evening cramps my style. Also no refrigerator. Also, I am not supposed to leave the house alone at night, so I have to wait yo go out after the yoga teacher leaves.
230 seems extra unusual if one assumes that Britta has been placed on a very strange form of house arrest.
This has been, at least to me, one of the most amusing threads in quite a while.
And yes, the End Up is a terrible place to end up.
231:
Wondering what the crime would have been? Aikido?
233
heh.
The line between extreme overprotectiveness and house arrest is very blurry.
Since Neb killed the other thread, I'll just note here that I savored living alone, but only managed it for 2 years of dorm single (as noted above, doesn't 100% count, but pretty close) and a scant 6 months as a bachelor between BOGF and AB. So ~21 months out of 40+ years alive. Sheesh.
229: yeah, I thought there might be a couple of fans here. It's so wretchedly sad -- and, to keep it semi-topical, I think living in the Bay Area for almost nine years made it more acute for me. I feel like the whole metropolitan area should be in mourning. Maybe meth and breakfast drinks would take the edge off.
The more alone I felt the more the celebration grew
All the way down Van Ness Avenue
But I no longer take so lightly walking down that street
With nothing left between it and my feet
There are a lot of Scott Millers.
I like this cover, though I've never heard the original.
That's a lovely cover! The original is much janglier. Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, twenty years old this year, is probably their high point of accessibility and quality, although you might prefer going straight to the puzzles in Lolita Nation. Email if you want more recommendations and/or distraught sniveling.
A recommended moving service quoted me an estimate of just under 3K. I guess now I have to figure out what it would cost to do it myself.
Wow, considerably less than I would've expected given the distance. But I don't know---maybe another company would do it for even less.
240
Wow, considerably less than I would've expected given the distance. But I don't know---maybe another company would do it for even less.
Yes, I got quotes of $3500 and $5000 for a 80 mile move (before my employer decided I should use their contract moving company which I was told ended up costing even more). This was for the contents of a 2 BR condo which took 3 guys a day to box up and load into a truck. So estimates can vary. You do need to be careful, you hear horror stories about lowball estimates followed by extortionate demands before they will give you your stuff back. I also had a few things damaged, fortunately nothing I cared about.
This place was recommended to me. The person who recommended it said three of her friends had used it and they were all "evangelical" about it.
Who recommended this place? I think you might have a judgement. And yes, that makes me upset.
