From 16 years old until about 22 I had a car for every year I had been driving. Kathi’s CRX (that I totaled, not my fault, Vivian from elementary school ran into me), the navy Honda with the weird white shoe polish on the bottom, Krista’s silver blue Honda when she went to Chicago, that awesome Mitsubishi sports car that the transmission died in and mom still hasn’t forgive Smock for, mom’s old Blazer that Sue had for awhile, and a really Reno brown Jeep Cherokee. Funny story about that car, I blew a rod in that engine and when I towed it to have it looked at the guy started it to hear the noise I said it made, thump, thump, and the guy with his head under the hood called the other guys over to hear it as it was so cool, apparently the rod is important to the engine actually running and it was loose and bumping around in there. I realize now I have the cars out of order but you get the point.
Well now it seems Elliott and I have a place we have lived in for almost every two years we have been together. That cute duplex on Imperial where he basically lived with me. I remember we hid his stuff when my mom came to visit one time! And then Deb and Carie’s old condo on Tierra Verde, it was bigger but kind of dark, not enough windows. And then our first house on Satellite, that we bought, may be the last, time will tell. Then we moved to California and lived on Tassajara in the mixed use development that was literally over that delicious yogurt shop and shared a parking lot with the Safeway. Then we moved down the street to save a few buck and lived on Hacienda Drive, that was a good decision because that was the year we got laid off. And just under 2 years ago we moved to Oakland, recently named by the New York Times the #5 place in the world to visit in 2012!
I would like to capture here the things I will and will not miss about our current loft.
Will miss:
- Walking to seemingly everything: dog park, BART, Jack London Square, farmer’s market, restaurants, coffee shops, my reprographics company, Elliott’s work, atm, dry cleaners, Kinko’s/Fed Ex, post office, and that should do it
- The light in here is wonderful, this could also appear under won’t miss, I prefer a dark environment for sleeping and here the two are mutually exclusive (or is it not mutually exclusive…, I are an engineer you know)
- The fun, modern industrial feel here, I will always look back on this loft as a point in time when we went from DINK to DIOK (I have a blog somewhere from when we went from Double Income No Kids to No Income No Kids and now we are more like One and Half Income One Kid but you get the point)
- Friends, this is the first place where we made friends with our neighbors, we credit Shiloh for helping us be more social, obviously I am not saying we can’t be friends anymore we just won’t be able to run into each other as easily
Won’t miss:
- Semi trucks driving down our street on a fairly regular basis and them using their engine brakes
- Living so close to a Fire Station
- Living so close to the police station (all of these things I came to realize when we had a baby)
- Sneaking through the curtain like a magician after putting Mack down to nap
- Living across the street from the giant trash room of a large multi-story residential building
- Living next to the entrance of our own residential building which means among other things that UPS and every other carrier stops in front of our place at least once a day
- Backing up to the trash compactor in our building which gets stuck and thump thumps in our unit every so often
- Having to give Shiloh dirty looks we he sighs, smacks his lips, or licks himself while Mackenzie is napping - new place - new rule, Shiloh can’t nap in the same room as Mack
- Not being able to sneeze, cough, clean, go to the bathroom, eat, wash laundry, type, etc without being worried about waking Mackenzie
Funny thing is I haven’t even seen the inside of the new place, its hard for me to get out so Elliott checked it out. I did do a drive by, can you say that Oakland? I know it doesn’t share a wall with any neighbors let alone the trash room. I know its on a residential street. I know it has a yard and a dog door. And I know it has some interior walls as Jamie would put it and doors on the bedrooms. So we are moving again. So I have to get back to silently purging and packing and I look forward to blogging from our new location next week!
