Dear Spokane, never change

Pretty sure these are unrelated, but pretty sure do not want.^^

The HIzzy....

Ok....Here's the new hizzy, as you might walk through it.

It's 1325 square feet, two stories, 3+ bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and probably not enough storage space.^^ (You may click on photos to embiggen).

First, one must pass the troll at the gate.^^

This is the view from the entryway to the living room - it's bigger than it looks here.^^

Here, looking from the living room into the dining room. I'm sure that all of percipient readers have already picked up the nice touches like the leaded glass window in the living room and the cool lighting fixtures throughout. That door you see is to the one room on bottom floor, the smallest one, which will be my office/R&R Dungeon.

Stepping further into the dining room, the R&R dungeon to the right, kitchen entry and stairway straight ahead, and bottom story bathroom to the left.

Turning around to look back into the living room.

The downstairs bathroom (shower only)

Interior of the R&R Dungeon. Again, bigger than the lens makes it look.

One side of kitchen.

Other side

Dickensesque stairway.

Little hobbit room at top of stairs.. like, 8x7, or something.

Yvonnes spacious office (with big closet to the left, off camera)

Master Bedroom ... the thing looming on the right is a giant walk-in closet. There's a bit more space beyond it and to the right.

The upstairs bathroom (tub)

The deck and backyard, which are utterly indistinguishable as they are coated in snow.

Now, none of you have to visit (as if anyone but Ed and Jae would!).^^

Thanksgiving at the new Pad

Well,

Here we are in lovely Spokane and Yvonne, or course, made me go out and buy a 13lb turkey despite the mathematical, physical, and theoretical realities that we could never get near finishing it. Also bought an entire pie for both of us, FOUR boxes of stuffing, and wanted to buy extra biscuits... Anyway, when it was ready it became clear our kitchen did not have enough serving plates, but it looked something like this:

You will also notice our lovely table and chairs, purchased right off the truck as they were delivered to the thrift store...

Also, as I look at this picture it occurs to me that we never made the biscuits.

Dessert was what you would expect. We had one pie and this is what it looked like after our pieces were cut out:

And in case anyone had questions about how that worked out in practice? The piece in the front is Yvonne's and the one in back is mine.^^

And, of course, breakfast today was a cup of coffee, a slice of pie, and a long walk in the semi-rain to try to work some of it off.

Winzz...

Some people pretty damned EMO about Trump's win..

The guy is subhuman, but the combined amount of tear-hearing/garment rending mixed with liberal condescension (" I will always be in a state of triage, a state of "wokeness" that many of you are just encountering and it hurts doesn't it?" - Damn, aren't you a special little flower?) in this is mind-boggling (names redacted to protect the guilty).

Why in the name of God, did I ever live in Berkeley?^^

The Well Spokane Life..

So we now have our lovely home in a kind of transitional neighborhood in West Central Spokane.

The house is like this:



And it looks even more white pickety fence when Yvonne takes ownership...



The entryhall is adequate sized (with a bizarre light fixture)



(That's the front door on the left and the door to Yvonne's office on the right).

As you can see it has a pretty large living room.


Yvonne's office is medium-sized




(What you can't see their is a bizarre "Winchester Mystery House Door to Nowhere" on the right.

And the bedroom is pretty small



Kitchen is pretty nice



Bizarrely, that door to the right goes to the bedroom.. the layout is kind of weird (the bathroom is off the utility room between the kitchen and garage, which is also kind of weird).^^

Yvonne uses the kitchen (well, the microwave)



And there is a garage suitable for bleaching bones.^^



The previous tenants left us a lovely Halloween gift, Billy the Magnetic Bat



As well as a shelf full of underwear(!)



Including the "Snoopy as Guns' n' Roses" pair...



(I wear them under EVERYTHING!).

It's within walking distance of downtown, a block off the river, and directly on a bus line...

We're reasonably content with it.^^

Another Job App in...

A not extremely well-paid job in Western Nebraska, but I'd happily take it.. multi-campus district, near a bunch of nature.. would certainly be the anti-Seoul

At this place:

Checked out the school and neighborhood demos and it seems like an alright place.

The usual problem of me being here and they being there are likely to arise, but we are getting closer to vacation.. so...^^

Anyway... good to get back into the practice of all the steps to the hiring process in the US. Quite different than here.

Feeling Moved

So...

When we last left our hero, he had overcome an ajussissy's stupidity and actually got moved into his rather grimy place. Now it's time to take a look. It's cheapish and scheduled to be demolished in the name of urban renewal. Walk about a kilometer away and you can see it already happening on the edges:

Houses and businesses already sacrificed on the altar of progress.

But this also give the neighborhood a certain cool griminess that I like. Here is a completely random abandoned storefront worrying about forest fires:

Right in the middle of no hills whatsoever

And a studio that is never open, but is always cool.

Tattoos? Book Covers? Paintings? I duuno, I just want one.

The rest of the neighborhood is typical "old" Korea with a bunch of shiny new stores selling crap from Samsung on the two big roads that cross and then funky little restaurants, veggie (야채)  stores and various little knick-knacks that I can't believe anyone would purchase. The funkiness is partly dented by the fact that, because it is a marginal neighborhood, it is also a kind of artist area, and there is even a two hour walk through the hood that shows off the various murals and art installations people have created. There's a map and a dotted yellow-brick road.

"follow, follow, follow, follow

But that picture should also give you an idea of the narrowness (if not the windiness) of the hood. And then, there's the fact that to even get to the place from the closest station on line 6 you must ascend Grim Mt. Doom.

And he's climbing a stairway towards infarction.

Then, finally, you get to the house and enter a small, always unlocked door which reveals an alley always ratpacked with junk - 김장 day was particularly dire as it was a veritable cave of cabbage and many other vegetables I could not begin to name:

Door inside door is to landlady's mad pad

On the right, which you can't see from the picture above, are some six-foot ranger (ask Jennifer) stairs

There's a double-back at the top of this that leads to my front door.

The next photo is the actual front door... please note utter pinkess of windows

It's all pink on the inside

And then to the inside, where the greatest feature of all is the bathroom. The space between the toilet and the overhead stairs is so small that the toilet cover will stand up, but the toilet seat will not. The old tenant acknowledged this cheerily and added, "so I just piss in the kitchen sink."

LOL.. not only too much information, but immediately changed how I thought that kitchen sink smelled.

Out came the bleach!

Yes. those are stairs to the rooftop behind the toilet, which make it impossible to keep the seat up. That metal you see on the lower left is the shower (You have to close the bathroom door and slide shut a curtain to keep from drowning the kitchen, and, yes, for some reason there is pink styrofoam on the bathroom seat. Don't think of it as "weird", rather think of it as a motif.

 The toilet had been "modded"

There's that pink styrofoam again

And you have the convenience of being able to both shower and do laundry from the convenience of the toilet itself.

The careful eye will see the edge of the toilet seat down there in the lower right-hand corner.

But someone had the sense of humor to put this on the bathroom door

The inside is cold... as you can see from the following pics, some previous tenant had invested in some pink styrofoam and tried to close off as many places as they could:

Yep, all that pink is styrofoam.

Part of the problem is the boiler is apparently assembled from parts salvaged from the Civil War - both the on in the Korea and the one a century earlier in the US:

I continue the efforts to insulate the place - fortunately this is the kind of neighborhood where people just toss shit out on the street, and I am the kind of scavenging rat which will pick up anything useful. Inside is actually nice and spacious"

Small, but more than adequate 

where the genius will be done

carefullly mosquito-netted bed, as they do manage to creep in

The hood, being a mix of family, art, and wreckage, is great... outside my kitchen window there's a pavilion where grandparents hang out to chat during the day (the inevitable bottle of makkeolli and anju always present). There's a school a bit up the hill, so there's about an hour each day that the kids wander home, playing and joking with each other. At about seven the sounds of ajjumah making dinner start banging around the neightborhood and then, with the exception of a sometimes whiney dog, all goes pretty quiet. It has a very "neighborhood" feel like Gyeongnidan (the old hood) did before the Kyuppies descended, so I'm rather happy with that.

I suckle away at a 40 oz bottle of soju, contemplate which of my kitchen knives is sharpest, and cruise the Internet for pictures of a dubious nature. So, all things told, pretty good.

When it gets below freezing I'm a bit worried about the hilliness of the area, as my fat ass and gravity seem to have come to an agreement to meet as often as possible and devil the hindquarters (so to speak), which are usually my elbows or the back of my head. We'll see how that works out.

I describe the place as adequate, but the kind of place I would NEVER move into if I were single, because the minute a woman saw it she'd run screaming, probably for the police. Til March, it should work. If June becomes necessary, it will work. After that its lack or Air Conditioning must make it some version of hell on earth, but on a hill.

Homey won't play that.^^

Any questions, class?^^