What I'm really doing

Earlier this fall I signed up for a class: "Introduction to Interior Design" through Berkeley's extension program. Since then I've been driving madly up to San Franscisco one day a week, turning in homework assignments late, and reading the book well behind schedule. I am far from a model student.

And yet I now know:

• You need about 3' for a walkway between furniture & the wall.
  
• If the room looks "off," make everything symmetrical. That'll let you see what's not working.
  
• There is no standard solution to a room with a TV at one end and a fireplace at the other.
  
• It really is different when you draw it. It's different again when you draw it to scale.
  
• Balance matters. Once you draw the room, divide it into squares - and then into triangles. Sketch in the furniture on tracing paper. See?! See how it's not symmetrical and how two thirds of your belongings are crammed into a tenth of your floorspace?!
  
• This is kinda fun.
  
• I do not want to be an interior designer.
  

I'm not sure I ever thought I did want to be an interior designer, but it's an inevitable question when you take the giant step of signing up for night classes. Somewhere in the second (third?) hour of the first class, though, I realized that this is fun, but as careers go It's Just Not Me. Imagine: largely solo work, no one to delegate to, having to do your own marketing - blech. Not to mention drafting. I love scale sketches, but drafting is what happens after you're already done with the idea and just need to make it pretty. I feel about drafting much the way I feel about PowerPoint: you want me to do what?! That'll take hours. Here's a nice flowchart instead, now please just go get to work on it.

End result, though, is that I am getting out of the class exactly what I wanted: the ability to lay out a room so that it actually works, plus a few designs for custom furniture I plan to get built one of these days.

And I'm convinced that my solution for what to do with those pesky laptops + iPods + wallets + purses + cellphones + random batch of papers when you walk through the door at night and really just want to drop everything on the floor is . . . nearly perfect. Is a $995 price point too high?

Done!

It's all ours! Isn't it cute?!

Well, actually it's all ours as of December 1st. Meanwhile we get to run around our current home, madly sorting and packing (at least I do - I think the guy is more Zen about the whole moving thing). We signed the lease this morning. And while we were driving away from the leasing office, we realized that not only is it walking distance to downtown Palo Alto Ave, it's also walking distance to downtown Menlo Park! Two for the price of one.

Isn't this a great photo? This is one of my favorite kinds of weather: perfect California winter. Wet streets, not too cold, soft colors, just a little mist in the air.

You can't see it here, but the house is actually across from a creek, rather than another row of houses. And we'll be able to just barely hear the train (I like trains, so this is a good thing, and for those of you who knew me when I lived in Louisville, no, it's not near enough to rattle the windows!).

After feeling so uncertain yesterday, today I can't wait to move in. If you're someone I called while I was stressed out about deciding, thank you for holding my hand! And come for a visit real soon. . . .

Girly

I am posting this photo purely for my own amusement. This is my Halloween costume - the first time in years I dressed up, thanks to the Los Altos Costume Bank & the Junior League (I previously had no idea what the Junior League do. Apparently they rent costumes. Go Junior League go! I swear, if I'd known it was this easy I'd have been dressing up for years.)

My new Halloween strategy: wear the things you couldn't possibly get away with any other time. At work I wear faded jeans & t-shirts; on the weekends, I wear more t-shirts, fuzzy sweaters, & occasionally a leather coat. But come on, when do I get to wear bright orange tulle?! Not to mention sparkly purple wings.

Added benefit: if you have a shiny gold wand, you can tease a cat and mesmerize a baby. Or, in the words of the baby's father, "those things are like baby crack!" :)

Ambivalence

We scheduled an appointment to look at the house at 9am - the latest we could make it and still both get to work for our respective 10am meetings. It wasn't a big house: from the street we could see how far back it reached, and it wasn't far. But it had a one-car garage, and a yard with a tree (and way too much ivy, but that's another story).

An absent-minded man named Fred showed up at 9:20, miniature very excited Doberman in tow, to show it to us. It had hardwood floors and a working fireplace. At 3 bedrooms (small) and 1200+ square feet, it was just barely big enough. It wasn't recently redone - the kitchen cabinets couldn't possibly be more 1960s - but that makes it a blank slate, ready for us to put our mark on.

We sent in our application forms & our credit reports. We explained that we want to move because of our current commutes, and to be near a downtown. We crossed our fingers.

And tomorrow morning, we have an appointment to go sign the lease papers. This is good news - it's just what we wanted! But the place we live now is the first place we lived together. It's spacious and has a two-car garage and an amazing landlord and besides, I'm sentimental about it.

And yes, that's balanced out by the traffic on highway 85, and the complete lack of anywhere to go for a walk, and the rock trucks that roll past our bedroom at 6:30 am going bang-bang-bang, and the living room being way too dark. I have no doubt that moving is the right idea.

I'm just sorry I can't shove our current living room over next to the kitchen, get rid of the rock trucks, re-route all the other commuters off 85, and carry the house magically through the air to a place with a real downtown.