I am posting

because it’s been a long time.  School is really packed, but less so now that I dropped my Pritzker Prizewinners class.  I think I’ll catch up with work this weekend, though, and I’m getting to work on studio again already, so I’m very happy with the decision.

Part of the reason I’m behind is because last weekend I played with the Fighting Merkins at Winter Thing, a little tournament here in Eugene.  We came in second to a bunch of high schoolers heading to junior worlds in a few months.  More than that result, however, the weekend was a fantastic amount of fun.  Good to play again, with those folks especially.

It’s late at night and I just spent a couple of hours doing structures calculations/organizing my gmail account/uploading photos to flickr/researching jobs opportunities and classes for the ecological design certificate/mostly doing structures calculations.  Point being, I’m not very eloquent.  I did have to break the no blogging spell, though.

More and more and more.  Soon.

The Story and the Saga

First, woo hoo for four comments on “Brief Interlude.” Now I see why people do the whole reposting thing – it’s exciting to get other people reading what you write.  Thanks to Mark for posting his pics; Thanks to Kate, who doesn’t have any idea who I am and is perhaps my first real visitor to the site [Kate, I played at Oberlin college in Ohio, I now go to the University of Oregon and play with a club team, Denial.  I sure do know Bucky, I captained her freshman year!]; Thanks to Erica for promising to call, I’m looking forward to hearing your summer adventures and smiling at serendipity.

Which I need to do because I’ve been on a downward slope since leaving Vermont (for the visit, not since June).  I’ll start with the story of Vermont, because it’s far more fun than the saga since.

Warning: This is a long post

THE STORY

I arrived after a long, but quite pleasant day of travel to find Seth waiting for me at the train station – a lovely surprise and much better than climbing the steep mile to his house with my two heavy bags.  We got back to the house, watched a bit of Deadwood, and made a lasagna in a cast iron skillet while Stefan mowed the lawn and Colin went out to find Mark N.  The evening was relatively quiet, preparing for the yardsale; Jeff joined us midway with freshly baked pies, and Colin stayed out at the bars all evening after finding the house empty during one of our errands.

We woke up early Saturday morning and went through the familiar ritual of bringing out everything to sell, and then trying to convince people that they’d want to buy the things that had been stored in the less than lovely shed all summer long.  Towards the afternoon we went to the little league field to play a few rounds of double disc court, for which I had an uninterrupted loosing streak.  Post DDC, we began grilling and partying, which as previously stated went smashingly well in the majority, with my usually gloomy iPod actually serving up a good deal of the dance party.

Sunday morning I had my pleasant brief interlude at the computer, went to Mocha Joe’s with Noah, then went back with the whole crowd of folks that had stayed at South Main.  As the day progressed, folks floated away, until we drove Andy down to Springfield to catch his train.  We ate pizza at the Red Rose, a Springfield institution, then headed to Amherst to watch The Illusionist, then grabbed drinks first at the Amherst Brewing Company, then at the Moan and Dove.  Having lived close to there for a year, it was great to finally get to the Moan and Dove, which has very expensive imports of all sorts.  I had a yummy Belgian Farmhouse beer, and in the process of deciding, tried a beer that tasted like white wine.  Very nice to sit around the table with the boys drinking tasty drinks, never want that sort of moment to end.

But it does, and other good moments come. After some house clean up Monday morning, I visited Building Green for Monday staff lunch, where I picked up my new copy of Your Green Home, the book that Alex was writing while I worked there. It’s beautiful, and at least on preliminary glance looked to be chock full of good stuff. All the hard work I did on the bibliography will soon be up online, and the Islandwood case study is about to be posted. The office was full of energy and late summer sunlight. I stayed so long that I had to hurry down the hill to catch up with Tori, my former housemate. I picked up my mail and toured her new gardens, and then we went up to Pisgah, where we climbed up for the view to Monadnock, then down for a chilly skinny dip in Kilburn Pond.

Tuesday we loaded up a truck full of furniture and carted it to Leyden, Mass, the idyllic town where Colin’s parents live. Then Colin and Stefan and I went to the strawbale house Colin worked on this summer and got the first layer of plaster done in all the places it was still missing. The homeowners came back about a third of the way through our time there, and David, the husband/father came out and worked with us. I didn’t get to see Stefan’s strawbale, but it was cool to see how confident and knowledgable they both are about building these days. They’re applying to the Yestermorrow internship for this winter, and I personally think they’d both do very well there. We headed home, watched some Youtube, including my favorite video, Chris Bliss juggling to the end of Abbey Road. Noah came just as we were watching it to pick me up for bowling, which was great fun. The two of us shared a lane next to the whole Putney crowd, and I actually bowled very well, with two games in the 130′s and one 181! After bowling I went to the rennovated Weathervane with Mariah and Emyli for a drink, and then went home and crashed, exhausted.

Wednesday I finally got around to business, after another trip to Leyden. I arranged my hotel for Albany, closed my bank account, withdrew my shares from the coop, mailed myself some of the stuff I acquired on the trip, picked up a couple of cute new shirts, and visited Karamo. At the end of my errands I went to Mocha Joe’s and ran into Mark B, and we got to talk for a half hour before the boys came by. Then the four of us headed to Top of the Hill Grill, the local gourmet grill shack, for a tasty dinner, since the South Main kitchen was stored in Leyden. We hurried back to the house afterwards just in time for George to pick me up to go to Albany in his Prius.

There’s your extended summary of my fantastic Vermont trip, the kind of trip that makes you just really want to stay where you are. And this is where the Story turns into the Saga.

THE SAGA

When I checked into the Howard Johnson, late at night and a little befuddled, I scheduled my cab for the morning, headed out to my room, and got ready for bed. Early Thursday morning I awoke, got ready, checked out and caught my cab. But, I didn’t catch my plane, because I had scheduled my cab an hour late in my readiness for bed the night before. I saw it leave from the gate, turned, and wondered what to do. Luckily, Southwest is awesome and immediately rescheduled my flight through BWI, then Salt Lake, to Portland. So I called Herman to tell him of the change, forgetting that it was 4:00 AM in Portland.

So I had perhaps the longest day of travel in the whole trip, during which I caught a cold, lost my very expensive sunglasses, and had my luggage delayed. Boy was I glad to see Ruth and eat some of Herman’s tasty spinach pies that night.

The next morning when I picked up my luggage I got caught in accident traffic, but then got to Eugene before two. I immediately started to move and look for furniture. I headed to Springfield at three, and headed home by 4:30 having bought a mattress.

Saturday morning I continued moving, hit up about 15 yard sales, and had no luck finding reasonable furniture for my room. The queen sized mattress took up almost the whole room, and I just wanted cheap, repaintable furniture. I felt sick and alone – my computer couldn’t access the internet at my new house (we just got it going tonight), my phone had gone dead and I realized the charger was in Vermont. So I went to Best Buy, Target (where I squished my finger in the bathroom door), World Market, several “real” furniture stores, and finally home, without having made any progress. I searched online, ate a pitiful dinner, and went to bed.

This morning I went to the Flea Market, then went back to World Market and Target, again mostly unsuccessfully. So I spent a lot of money on organic groceries, went home, and got down to work on the IKEA website. After I meticulously found a set of furniture that would outfit my room for $250, all of which was available online and which matched reasonably well, I checked out, just to find that the shipping and handling would cost another $250. So, I decided that I’d be heading to the Seattle IKEA tomorrow.

So, now I’ll go to sleep since I’ll be driving 4.5 hours up and back to Seattle tomorrow, and shopping til I drop in between. But then, hopefully everything will be better when I return some order to my life, so I think it will be worth it…

Our house, in the middle of the block

Finally, a free moment.

I arrived in Eugene on Thursday afternoon, and immediately hopped into action. Since then I’ve had nary a moment to myself, and especially one long enough and internet accessed enough to post. But here I go; are you ready for the saga?

Thursday I drove into town and arrived at Shady Pines, a potential house, with the big drawback that it wouldn’t be available ’til July 1. Still, I met Jacob, with whom I’d already had a couple of fun phone conversations and saw the house. Great house, six housemates, three chickens, space for concerts and bike fixing and art making and gardening, and a table with 45′s under glass. Lots of fun details, lots to look at. Jacob and I chatted for a while, then he hooked me up with a bike from his friends’ house, where there were also rentable spaces, but a two-person and a three-person spot, so I filed away the info and thought little of it (insert foreshadowing here). I got to ride a very small road bike around for the next several hours before the bike parade (!) that Jacob invited me to, so I hopped on and headed to the university to look around. Not much doing in Lawrence, the architecture building, so I decided to time a 10 minute ride south and mark it on my map, then a ten minute ride east, and mark that on my map. That gave me a very rough approximation of where I ought to look for housing, which turned out to be pretty much anywhere in the city of Eugene.

There weren’t many For Rent signs up, except on the exceedingly ugly apartment buildings, so my plan wasn’t working. I wound up at a bike shop and started my job search, but pretty much everywhere I asked required a resume, which means I have to find a printer, rather than having some sort of application. Good to know, and when I get housing figured out, I’ll move on to tweaking my resume for non-office work. Before I went back to Jacob’s house, I found a coffee shop with free wireless and hatched a plan to get up early in the morning to get back on Craigslist for a serious round of research and cold calls.

Off to the Bike Parade I went, along the way getting decked out in light pink spandex tights, a bright pink full length princess gown, and a matching visor, which I wore upright as a tiara. Little did I know, but I was underdressed for the occasion – the best costume, in my humble, was a full body yellow spandex unitard that actually went over the wearer’s head, to which was attached a yellow balloon. Bikes were also decked out, and as we rode to the sounds of our boombox, we received hearty cheers from all directions. In several locations, we stopped to get off and dance. I felt a bit out of place, what with being entirely sober, but it certainly was a full-immersion introduction to the town.

I stayed the weekend, including Thursday night, with some of Eugene’s solid frisbee supporters, who were very kind in opening up their house to me. It was great to have such flexibility, since I knew that my car would be safe parked there, and that I was welcome to go in and out of the house as I needed. Friday morning I did indeed get out early and get to work on my housing research. I found that many of the houses were recently occupied, which greatly shortened my list of possibilities. To put it in a positive light, I figured that it was making my choice easier. I checked out the first place; it was a mess, but livable.

Thus started my day of looking at uninspiring housing and sitting in my car between appointments wondering what I had gotten myself into. Why hadn’t I applied to more than one school? Why hadn’t I visited? Why was I doing this all anyway? Out of the corner of my eye I saw a for rent sign, pulled into the driveway of a large house, and wrote down the number. A guy about my age was coming across the adjoining parking lot and sat on the front stoop on his cell phone; he motioned for me to join him on the stoop. When he got off the phone, he told me that he had just talked to the landlord who was sending over the handyman to show him the house, and I could join in the tour if I’d like. How convenient! I said yes, but as we went through the house, I quickly realized it wasn’t ideal. It was a 10-person boarding house, with a few nice features, but nothing that would make me actually want to live there, including the price of rent. I invited my fellow house-seeker, Erik, to go get coffee.

It turned out that Erik was also a new Option III M.Arch student, currently living in Portland and down for the day frantically trying to find a house amongst the uninspiring offerings. It also turned out that he had worked with Tina, my co-captain for the Manti, at the Green Roundtable in Boston. We chatted and agreed to go look at the two-person house I had written off on Thursday when I picked up the bike for the bike parade.

We searched through town using my vague recollection of its approximate location and found the spot as one of the people living in the next house (also for rent by the same landlord) got home. The two-person house is in the center of the block, surrounded by houses on three sides and a fence to give privacy from the alleyway/parking lot on the fourth side. We walked around, but all the blinds were closed and no one was home, so we knocked on the door of the adjacent house and asked the girl there what she knew about the house. During her positive report, the girl living in the house came home. After much convincing, she showed us the house, which, though small, was well kept and good-looking. We finally got in touch with the landlord, who was at the beach for the weekend, and scheduled to look at the house officially on Monday.

Erik and I talked a while longer and agreed that we were serious about the little house. We’d sleep on it and we had a lot of details to work out, but I left feeling pretty confident.

***

Saturday morning, I headed to the frisbee fields for Solstice, Eugene’s home tournament. It was two days of a lot of sun and a lot of new people. I saw Q, a nice familiar face, and also it turns out that Sadie, a former Mantis that I also met last year at Potlatch, is a Eugene local, so I had an immediate connection on the team. I played horribly to start on Saturday – the long car ride had done my game no good – but I quickly warmed back up to the game and by the middle of the day I felt almost normal again. The women were all very nice and explained the various city leagues and teams to me as we played. We went 1-3 on Saturday and 1-2 on Sunday, but had a fun time as we did it. It seems like it’s difficult to play mid-level on the West coast because good players go to the major population centers, leaving the smaller, far-apart towns with few great players.

The tourney party was at a bowling alley, which was awesome since it meant free beer for three hours, free snack food, and free games. Unfortunately the approach was a bit shorter than regulation, and since it was a party atmosphere, the lanes were covered in enough gunk and moisture that it was impossible to slide. Still, after the party died down, I bowled a 151, tying a new friend. Also, now I know that I’ll try to find another alley for league play, if I can fit it into my schedule.

So, now I’m staying at the house of one of the lovely ladies from my team this weekend, where I crashed last night after the exhausting weekend (I also got home at 1:51 on Saturday night after winning the party). In a few minutes I’m headed out the door to my appointment for the house with Erik. I woke up to thoughts of furniture painting and thrift-store hunting. So hopefully my next post will be of how I have a new Eugene house and am no longer living out of my car in this petty-theft plagued city!

Savoring the last few (rainy) days

I had a fantastic weekend at Get Ho, Get Lei’d, a frisbee tournament in Middlebury, VT. My team was a combination of University of Chicago alums, players from Six Trained Monkeys, and my fellow Oberlin alums. One of the excellent people I met wrote this brief and informative post about the tournament and our team. My one wish is that Joe could have been there.

I got home very tired Sunday night and staggered through Monday. When I got home from work, I began the task of packing. It’s amazing the stuff you find when you go through the accumulated detritus of your life. I finally said a requiem for my Airwalks, which I’ve had since sixth grade. Saying goodbye to those shoes really did give me a pause.

Today I took in my Altima to the shop to have her checked over for the trip. She came back with a clean bill of health, which made me very happy, since my trip to the repairman cost less than $40. I also finished up my blog research at work, with some great thoughts on how Web 2.0 and the sustainability revolution are related. I hope to work out those thoughts for a mini-essay soon.

Tuesday night here in Brattleboro means Frisbee and two dollar bowling. We had sixes at Frisbee, and after this weekend I was psyched to run around and play a pretty hardcore game. At the tournament I realized a) just how much my game has suffered from not having a team, b) how excited I am at the prospect of having a real, drill-running team in Eugene, and c) how capable I could be of getting back into the swing of things Frisbee-wise. So I kept my energy level up for pickup, and it was totally worth it, even though my compatriots weren’t at the same energy level. It’s pretty fulfilling to be running around and actually sprinting, a feeling you can sometimes forget when you’re only going to pickup games.

Coming in to the bowling alley, covered in dirt, I was pleased to see a whole lot of fun folks there. I ended up bowling pretty poorly tonight (somewhere in the neighborhood of 115), and only got one game because there were so many people to meet and greet. Still had a good time, though, and managed to arrange a casual soiree tomorrow afternoon to help drink the growler of ESB that I brought back from the Otter Creek Brewing company this weekend.

One last thought – several people told me tonight how much they’d miss me. It’s lovely and horrible to hear those words. It made me feel as great as the week that five people independently just picked me up off the ground to give me hugs, and as sad as I’ve ever been to leave a place. It’s slowly sinking in that I’m really going.