It’s been chaos around the Nerd’s Eye View HQ lately. I was down with the plague that everyone in Seattle seems to be contracting and oh, yeah, I bought a house. For a while there, it felt like I would never be off the phone again. Mortgage brokers, escrow, long calls to the foreign office to negotiate closing dates, driving back and forth between here and the new place, signing my name over and over and over again… There’s been little cooking and restless sleep and much stress.… continued…
As I prepare to move to the urban/suburban frontier, the politics of the suburbs have been much on my mind. If you’re interested in the issue, here are a few links.
- Suburban Nation: Internet book club, anyone? “…their visionary book holds out hope that we can create “places that are as valuable as the nature they displaced.””
- Radiant City: Those crazy Canadians get all the goodies first. It’s on the film festival circuit here in the US; I’m sure it will hit our commercial screens soon enough.
“What is this, Eugene? We’re in Eugene!” I insisted. We weren’t in Eugene, we were in C&P Coffee, the place that is sure to be the new answer to that ever present Seattle question: Where do you want to go for coffee? It looks like Eugene in there, and I don’t mean in a bad way, I mean in a hippie kinda way. Not the shiftless hippie kinda way, I mean more like in the hippies that went grad school in Santa Cruz and then lived in Amsterdam and then came back and decided to open a really cool coffee house kinda way.… continued…
Freecycle is a fine thing if you’re moving. It’s not just a good way to get rid of stuff that no way are you going to sell. (Plus, who has yard sale in Seattle in March?) It’s also a good way to get boxes. I can almost guarantee that someone in your neighborhood has just moved and empty boxes are piling up about the place. The newly moved and exhausted resident knows they ought to recycle those boxes, but they are too busy finding where the power cord to their speakers has gone or buying shelf paper or they’re unable to leave the apartment because for the life of them they can not find the key.… continued…
