Estoy celoso

A good friend of mine from many years ago just bought a house. Considering I'm in my late 20s,this may not be surprising to all that many people reading this blog - particularly those gentle readers who happen to reside outside of California, New York, and major cities such as Boston. He is, after all, in State College, PA, pretty much close to nowhere in the western part of good old Pennsyl-Tucky. He and his lovely partner have to deal with things like: snow, mosquitos, humidity, and don't have the advantages that us Californians have such as: nice weather, beautiful scenery we can be in year-round, and (in Santa Cruz) sea otters.

But what he does have is a house. One that is over 2,000 ft sq, on a good chunk of land for less than many manufactured homes sell for here, and has a kick ass name.

Where it is hard for me to believe is that this is affordable for them as two grad students. You couldn't afford a house like that out here if you were two professionals raking in over 100K a year.

Per a conversation with kungfuramone, I remind myself that I choose to be here. We could have gone to Univ of AZ and probably purchased a home in what for me is a less than desirable area with a program that wasn't a good fit, didn't guarantee TAs, had no union and only one other history grad student. But we're here for a variety of reasons and I feel truly lucky that I have the opportunity to live in such a beautiful place. I'm never again going to be able to afford the view I have out of my kitchen, I love having redwood trails in my backyard, and I remind myself of what I love each day.

On the other hand, I'm jealous that they have the opportunity to live in a place they own. No landlord telling them they can't have a cat, no sharing a wall, no more saving quarters to do the laundry, and a place indoors they can put their cars at night where they don't have to worry about them getting broken into. (We've had break-ins at FSH, Luke's stereo was stole out of East Remote, not to mention our place in LA...).

Combined with that is a general "move-weariness" that is particularly strong in my generation and even more so amongst us crazy nutcakes going into academia. I have now lived in my place in FSH longer than any other home since I was 15 and my mom and I moved out (it'll be 2 years in Sept). Most of us have been moving around every year or so since we were 18 or so. I'm tired of moving. I'll probably be here another 2-3 years, making this the most stable home I will have had in years, but it's always with the look towards a future move date: to who knows where and who knows when.

I feel like a lot of things in my life (with the exception of my husband) are very semi-permanent: home, classes, work relationships, grad school friendships. I'm looking forward to a time when I can put down some roots, and not have them have to be in a pot that I can throw in the car and move somewhere else.





PS Finally, a few large things that are advantages when renting: it's always someone else's problem to take care of the stuff that breaks, no property taxes, no homeowners insurance, and if you hate your neighbors there's always the possibility that one of the two of you will leave.

And now for a rant

Blogger/Google sometimes drives me crazy. I have two Google accounts (actually 3, but only 2 I use regularly): this one and a personal account. I get most of my email and use the calendar at my other account and use KellysIrishRed as my public account and contact site for this blog. I hate HATE that I can't easily switch between the accounts. Recently I've been using Safari for KellysIrishRed and firefox for my primary account. But Safari sucks for blogger. The you lose a lot of the easy to access buttons, the photos upload differently, and the spell check is a pain in the ass to use. I'd do everything in Firefox, but then I end up having to sign in an out of my accounts to go back an forth between my gmail, calendar, homepage (all on one) and blogger. It's becoming more of a pain now that I'm using picassa web albums. I'm duplicating too much. I wish google could link the accounts, or have both saved with a simple "switch accounts" button. Or at the bare minimum, update the support for Safari for those of us who run two browsers, one for each account. I realize I could condense into one account, but which one? And I'm not sure I want my primary email address to be accessible through blogger.


I'm annoyed, and it's actually part of why I don't update my blog as often: because it can be a real pain in the ass.

Knitting Update

The summer is into full swing and I'm enjoying my period of academic decompression. This has allowed me to get back into some of my crafting projects that were neglected over the course of the year.

First I give you a sleeve and a half for Rogue. This is my first sweater and first cabling project. I'm very excited that I haven't had to frog anything yet *fingers crossed*


The three balls below are projects to be started. Pink for a kittyville hat for my sister, blue for a sizzle tank for me, and purple for a scarf to match odessa



Thanks to tips from knottyhistorian I've been able to avoid wrist strain while knitting and really made some good progress. I'm also working on the Big Bad Baby Blanket for our friend's first baby (due in Dec), which I'll post when I've made more headway.