new floors

Alison's been teaching for over a month; me, for a week.

I've gotten some request for pictures of our new floor. So, below you'll see pictures of our old floors and then of our new ones. Enjoy

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last update. Alison did end up with a full-time job at Malcolm X College in Chicago and has had to be at school from 9-5 pretty much all of last week and this. We are still trying to get things done around the house (fix Dryer, get rid of Wasps on the roof, wait for Garden Window to be replaced, decide who to use for hardwood floors).

One of our recent projects has been finishing up the dining room and I think it looks really good now. There was a problem with the paint -- we ended up having to put a sealent coat on top. It is now glossier than we'd like (we wanted semi-gloss and this is full gloss), but still we are happy. We also restained Alison's grandmother's old Danish-modern table and chairs AND recovered them with a new fabric. I'm really happy with how the dining room has turned out.

I feel like it never ends. Our next project, I think, will be to clean the windows, replace broken screens, and put weather stripping on them. And for the condo we are also going to see about getting a watering system and replacing the doors on all the garages.

Sorry for not doing more updates -- things have been going slowly.

We've also been a bit depressed because we found out on Monday that Alison's full time job, which seemed like a sure thing ("So do I have the job?" "Well, you are the remaining candidate."), is not so sure. She showed up for a meeting with the president on Monday, which turned out to be an interview. I guess they may need to cut the position for budget reasons.

On Monday, she was told she would be told for sure on "in a couple of days." She called back on Friday, but the president was in a meeting and never called back.

So anyway, that has cast quite a shadow on the week. Also, somehow cleaning up/setting up is taking a lot longer. I think the easier things are done.

Unfortunately, I ordered a 50" flat screen TV (Pioneer Kuro -- considered the best and being discontinued) right before we found out that the job was uncertain. So anyway, we re-arranged the living room again. I think this is the final arrangement. It took a long time to set up: mounting the TV on the wall, getting a surge protector to go behind the record case, etc. But it is set up now!

Also, we finally got the concrete work done on the garage and we can pull the car in. We certainly appreciate our garage more having tried to park on the street for a couple of weeks.


I'll post again once the condo is really set up. The last major thing to do is to paint the dining room, so we can set up the furniture in there.

Out and about

Well, I was hoping that today we'd be done unpacking everything but the dining room. We aren't quite there, but we are getting close. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow. We are planning on painting the dining room before we unpack the stuff there.

We've been cooking recently, but tonight we walked down to Argyle for dinner. We went to a new place -- Pho 888. We got a tofu banh mi (sandwhich), vegetable soup, and spring roll. It wasn't our favorite Vietnamese place, but the soup broth and soup vegetables were exceptionally good.

Some pictures from our trip out:
Front of our building:



Big Chicks and Tweet (at the end of our block):



City-run Mental Health clinic across from Tweet:



Argyle:






Our el stop:

Found battery

I found our second camera battery, which has just a little charge left in it.

The only thing I can think to say is that we are going to put some sort of curtains up that will go under the sink and under the cabinets, so you won't see the Cuisinart, etc.

Brief update

Sorry not to have posted much recently -- we have just been unpacking, unpacking, unpacking. Unfortunately, the battery on the digital camera died and I don't know where the charger is.

It is unfortunate, in part, because we finally finished setting up / unpacking the kitchen and it looks good! It's nice to have one room that is really done. We've also been doing some easy cooking recently, which is definitely nice.

We've decided to set up the living room quite differently than in the previous picture. The problem with the old set-up was that there was really nowhere to put the TV except right in front of the fireplace. Now the TV and stereo is turned 90 degrees to the left and the couch is across from. This actually works a lot better, but it was a bit depressing to move a bunch of records that I had just unpacked and shelved. Again, I'll post pictures when I can.

Anyway, things are moving quickly. If we really work on this hard for the next two days, we might be basically done.

Whew. We more or less collapsed yesterday -- didn't get any unpacking done. I played a computer game. The one thing I did do is set up my stereo. I had to spend a while searching around in boxes for missing pieces, but I think it'll be worth it to have some tunes.

So, about the place. It is about 5 miles north of downtown and 7 miles south of Northwestern. It's a half block from the northern extension of Lincoln Park -- which is on the water. Lake Shore Drive (an 8 lane expressway) separates us from the water, but there are a couple of convenient underpasses.

Our place is on the third floor of a three-story walk up. It was heavily rehabbed in the 70's, so it has central air, but lacks some of the original detailing you could see in other condos. We really like this place, but it was the neighborhood that really sold us on it. The condo itself has two bedrooms plus a back room. There is a really large sun room off of the leaving room -- basically making the living room L-shaped. The kitchen and breakfast-nook have been combined to make a very large kitchen. And one of the previous owners (not the very last one), put these Antique lockers from a girl's school in the kitchen. It is certainly the most interesting feature to the interior. They are very pretty. Recently, we put cork down on all of the shelves before we put stuff in them.






As far as the larger neighborhoods go, we are on the border between Uptown and Edgewater. Both of these places had pretty bad reputations, say, back in the 70's and 80's. Their heyday was in the 20's-40's, where they were some of the most posh parts of Chicago. Unfortunately, a lot of that history has been torn down, but still a good amount of it remains. Today, Uptown is more ethnically diverse (especially West African), and has more public housing -- in fact, it is the major area with public housing on the North Side. Edgewater is a bit more residential / gentrifying.

Our more immediate neighborhood is Argyle, the street just one block to the south of us. This is primarily a Vietnamese neighborhood (I'm told a number of the Vietnamese are ethnically Chinese), with 20+ Vietnamese restaurants, as well as a good number of Chinese restaurants and 3-4 Thai restaurants. There are also 4-5 good sized Asian grocery stores. I walk down Argyle to get on the el, and as you walk down there, you are likely to hear a lot of Vietnamese and/or Chinese (not sure I can tell the difference), Spanish, and some Slavic languages. Sorry, I haven't taken any pictures here, but I will soon.

On Argyle, we've been to three different Vietnamese restaurants so far and a Chinese one. I wasn't sure whether the Asian food here would meet our California standards, but it has. Perhaps not as good as the best places I've been to in CA, but still really good. Our two favorites are this banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) place (Ba Le) and a Chinese one (Honeymoon cafe). The banh mi place has a very good tofu sandwich, is jam-packed with Vietnamese at lunch time, and has the best fresh fruit smoothies. Somehow fresh fruit smoothies (with boba) are really popular among the Asian community here -- more so than I've seen elsewhere. We ran into the Chinese place basically by accident, looking for a meal one night. We were walking down the street, most of the restaurants weren't very busy, and then this little single-storefront-wide place was absolutely packed. Turned out two of the big tables were taken up by a wedding party or something, but still, it was a good sign. We were the only Caucasians in there. We had an absolutely amazing meal. The highlight was the soft "Japanese" tofu, fried, with salt and pepper. By far the best version of this dish I've had.

Even closer to us than Argyle are a couple of other cool places. The absolutely closest place to us -- half a block from our condo, on Sheridan -- is the bar Big Chicks and sister restaurant Tweet (actually called "Tweet....let's eat" but let's ignore that). These two establishments are connected and share a central room. From 9 AM - 2 PM Tweet serves brunch. It is a quite good brunch -- and extremely popular. We recently had to wait 40 minutes on a Friday. Tweet is an extremely straight-friendly gay bar, that also serves burgers and fries, etc. We've been to each place a couple of times now and enjoyed it -- the atmosphere at Big Chicks is actually just awesome. Tuns of interesting art on the walls and really relaxed/enjoyable.

The other place near us is this Pakistani taxi cab hang out, Shan foods. The last time we went, the food was really, really good -- approaching Vic's territory, in my mind (although quite different style -- more densely spiced). Unfortunately, I got rather pissed off by the waiter, so I'm going to need to give myself some time to reset myself before going back. All the cab drivers were sitting in one room, watching TV. We sat down with them, and the waiter asked us to go and sit by ourselves in the other room. I tried to go back, but the waiter's English wasn't very good and so we just dealt with it -- but it pissed me off.

So anyway, that's about it. I have to say, the neighborhood has been everything I've hoped for. And so far we haven't really explored it much. We've only been out to the lake once -- I think that'll be a great place for walks and bike rides. I'm less than a mile walk -- or one el stop -- from a jazz club (the Green Mill). We can also take about a mile walk to Andersonville, if we want the sort of place that has lots of little boutiques and things.

The crazy owner and more

So when we showed up the place looked good -- but it immediately had some problems.

The biggest one, by far, is the smell in the kitchen. It really, really smelled like dog. But the whole house was really dirty too -- dog hair everywhere, cobwebs, etc. We were a bit disappointed, to be honest, because it just didn't feel nice, like you'd hope a new house would. But it was clear that we could fix things up eventually, so happily it is a short-term problem.

We hired a cleaning crew to show up the next day, but they ended up doing a really poor job. So we had to go out and buy a new vacuum, and start trying to figure out how to get the dog smell out of the kitchen So far Alison's scrubbed down the floors once with a special pet product -- Nature's Miracle -- and I've scrubbed it down twice with bleach. We've also washed all of the walls. It now just smells a bit musty instead of intensely doggy (much worse than any place I've been to before that had dogs).

Why did it smell so bad and why didn't we notice it before? Well, that seems to have to do with the previous owner. When we were buying it, we were told that he was sick and so it could be hard for him to show the unit. It is now clear that he had a serious mental illness -- sounds like he was bipolar. Somewhat recently the cops broke down his door to pull him out of the condo and also somewhat recently he was suddenly hospitalized for a week. Evidently, he was hospitalized without warning and so his dog was trapped in the condo for several days -- which is, supposedly, when the "dog smell" became really bad. I am fairly sure that we are going to just need to replace the hardwood floors (which were beaten up anyway) -- hopefully that'll solve the smell problem.



We have also been finding dog hair everywhere in the condo. The air conditioning intake was just full of dust and hair. We pulled two vacuum canisters worth of hair out of the dryer-duct. It is just everywhere. But I think we have basically gotten rid of it all now.

We had plenty of time to clean before our stuff arrived, because the truck showed up with our stuff and couldn't fit in the alley behind our place, like they had planned. The cops came by and said they couldn't be in the street (no cars could pass), so they just had to leave. So our stuff showed up the following Wednesday instead of Saturday. One thing we did in our empty house is learn to paint and paint over the ugliest color in the house -- in the far back room, which Alison will use as a den. We have other painting we want to do too.




So anyway, those have been the basic trails and tribulations. Oh, and we can't pull our car into the garage because the slope is too steep and it scratches the bottom of the car. And one of the windows is broken. So we need to have concrete work done, a window installed, and new floors put in. So we are learning about home ownership quickly, but luckily we can put a lot of time into it over the summer and I think it'll be in good shape soon.

But anyway, our stuff is here and we've unpacked half of it and the place is starting to feel like a real home now. So it is good.



Next post I'll talk about how cool our new neighborhood is and some more positive stuff -- sorry if this came across as a big negative -- there's just been a string of problems we've been dealing with.

The trip out

Hi friends and family.

Well, I've finally found the camera cord, so I can download some pictures from our trip and start talk a bit about our move and Chicago. I'm planning to do 3-6 of these posts.

It's been rather crazy for the last couple of weeks. First we were packing like mad before the movers came. They showed up 40 minutes early and we had to finish packing/taping up while they moved.

We drove out in three and a half days, stopping at two national parks: Arches (in Utah -- the first four pictures) and Rocky National (in Colorado -- the remaining pictures). On the last day, we drove for 16 hours, arriving that night at Alison's parents. Here are some pictures from the trip, first of Arches, then of Rocky National.





















We went to both parks after 5 PM, which was nice in both case. For Arches, it meant it wasn't very hot out and we got some nice sunset light. For Rocky National, it meant that there was a lot of wildlife out. That is a baby moose in the picture. Then an adult moose in a river, and finally male deer.

As we left Rocky National Park, there was a huge thunder storm in front of us. As we drove down the Rockies, we were going through a rocky canyon at night. It was being almost constantly illuminated by lightening -- one of the coolest things we've seen.


In my next post, I'll describe arriving in Chicago and various adventures settling in.