The past six or so months, or maybe it’s more like the past year and a half, has been a time of new digs… so why not jostle around the virtual residence of the g*log, too, right? I finally decided to migrate away from the clunky-by-comparison blogger.com, which admittedly served well – and over to wordpress. It’s all very exciting, I know. Actually, what motivated me was this damn cold I have – maybe it’s the fucking swine flu (which I have moved to rename The Oink), I don’t know. It feels like a nasty head cold to me, and nothing more.
I’m not dead yet, so that’s good. Now, where was I?
Oh, right – back to new digs… My last post indicated a corporate move, which actually went pretty well all things considered. When P and I moved to San Francisco, I rented an office down in Jackson Square – the historic epicenter of San Francisco proper – while the building was way cool, in a great little neighborhood, I couldn’t deal with the dramatics of subletting an office from someone in the “high-fashion” PR biz. While most of the time it was just fine, there was a triteness that I just couldn’t accept. Everything was a big deal – I was being over-charged for just about everything – from trash pickup to an alarm system that wasn’t actually monitored by ADT. The final straw was when the woman I was subletting the office from was going to increase my rent, because her rent was being increased… which is normal, right? Yes.. and no. You see, her rent was being increased because the owner of the building couldn’t stand her, so, ostensibly, I’d be paying a “service fee” because she was a pain in the ass. No thanks. That would have brought my per-square-foot cost up to $7.20, some five bucks higher than the current average per/sq-ft charge in downtown San Francisco. Time to keep on keepin’ on.
I found a great space though – the top floor of an old warehouse in the SoMa neighborhood – while the district itself isn’t nearly as enticing or pleasant to walk around, the price is very right, the space is very large, and it’s two miles closer to home, so my life-expectancy has increased as a direct result of cutting 2 miles of biking through the heart of downtown San Francisco on Market St. Here be some pictures:
main work area
lounge, dining area & workshop
I haven’t gotten off my ass to process more photos of the construction of the edit suite and all that, so deal with it!
Backing up further, P and I, after about six months of tirelessly looking at houses all over San Francisco, purchased our first home, right in the geographic center of the city in the Twin Peaks / Diamond Heights district. It’s a sweet little midcentury house, built in the mid-50’s and in fantastic condition, inside and out. We have a back yard, a driveway big enough for two cars, gardens, a garage, workshop, three bedrooms and all of the other normal house-stuff. There’s even a nice south-facing view and a ton of daylight from sunup to sundown. It’s nice to watch the fog swirling just one or two streets below us, while we have nothing but blue skies above, lots of trees around (it backs up to Twin Peaks Park), replete with redtail hawks, ravens, raccoons, and a family of skunky-ass skunks. Needless to say, we love it up here in our perch, some 800 feet above sea level. It’s quite, the neighbors are nice and it’s like living in the ‘burbs, but only in the center of the metropolis. Here be some photos:
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- dining room, looking into kitchen
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- the back yard… Stylish, eh?
Before that, we rented, for exactly one year, a 1 bedroom flat in Noe Valley in a pre-1900’s victorian. It was a cool neighborhood, right in betwixt Noe’s 24th St, the Mission, Twin Peaks, and the Castro districts. Convenient: yes, but it was a rental and the upstairs neighbors were excessively noisy, and they lit the deck on fire one day.
But, here we are, to stay for a while, I’d say. It’s nice to have a sense of permanency and a home in a city which we both just adore. Not a day goes by where I don’t think “well, shit.. I actually live here…”
Not the most exciting post, but it should get you up to basic speed on all the movin’ around and whatnot.
I have to go sneeze now. Buy stock in Kleenex – I’m using a lot of it.
g*log 