I’m Baaaaack!

I’ve been gone for three weeks, housesitting for my pastor’s family. It’s been a lot of fun and, quite naturally, a learning experience. For instance, I’ve discovered I’m not really a cat person. This means that those three months I spent researching cats and cat breeds as a teen, so I could convince my parents to get me a kitten, are pretty much wasted.

Now I need I new retort for dog people.

Okay, oddest moment of the whole she-bang: having a cat jump up on my puzzle and start to eat it.

Best moment: coming “home” on thursdays to a quiet house and a bag of fresh veggies dropped off by some garden fairy.

Tips for when I actually move out: put hot pink sheets on the guest bed. That’ll make them wonder.

The house I stayed at was in a neighborhood that puts San Fransisco to shame. It’s the hills. It reminded me a lot of the streets of Japan, narrow and twisted, with intersections at impossible angles. Of course, in Japan they have orange mirrors placed in all the really dangerous spots (and in many not so a dangerous spots). These past few weeks, as I’ve been driving more and more, have made me really long for a good intersection mirror. But I digress.

The house is down a bit from its cul-de-sac by about four steps, placed randomly on the leafy path as if dropped there on the way to the door. In the back of the house, looking out the glass doors to the raised deck, you can see these tall, ivy wrapped columns just rising out of nowhere and going up, up past your field of vision. It’s gorgeous and makes you feel like you’re in a tree house in some exotic local. So I loved the back of the house. But I think I’d like a bit more sunlight, and having the front built into a hill, and then surrounding it by monstrous trees, doesn’t really allow for that.

Every time I go off by myself I’m always shocked to learn that I can eat just about anything. Usually when I say this I mean I’m not picky, but here I mean that I’m lazy. Popcorn, and the olive oil and salt that that implies, was pretty much the staple meal for me. I made bentos at first to take to work, but by last Wednesday they had deteriorated into cheese sandwiches. If  I don’t cook dinner then I don’t have exciting leftovers, which means I have to put the same old into a box. If I’m going to eat the same old thing, my lazy mind reasons, why not spend two minutes on it instead of thirty? I’d like to think that a rice cooker with a timer would fix this problem, but guns are only effective in the hands of people who know how to use them.

That might have been a jump.

My brain is trying to get me to write about Montpelier, which I visited weeks and weeks ago, my job, which I’ve had for two months now, and all the books I’ve been reading. But I’m going to “leave those for another post” as it were, and log of now. I’ve happy, happy news about my progress with Hangul, so hopefully my next post will be of a more learned variety.

じゃ、またねえ。