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Now that I’ve been outed by both the Lala and the Feral, I’ll admit it — I did the unthinkable this weekend.

I bought a knitting machine.

This was after taking Nancy Robert’s all-day knitting/dyeing class. Oh, my god, was that fun. You should do it. She taught us machine knitting AND dyeing, all in one day. Can you imagine?

And a knitting machine followed me home. You should have seen how it cried. I had to. Sadly, I’ve been too sick to even open the box yet, and that’s very unlike me, but I have something to look forward to over the weekend.

Sick with bronchitis. I hate being sick, and I hate lung stuff (although I hate strep throat more, I think). Staying in bed/on couch for the next 24 hours and hopefully I’ll burn it out. Lala’s on her way over to bring me tea and crackers, so I’ll feel better soon. The candle only burns at both ends for a while and then the flame meets in the middle and burns the person who’s holding it, the person who starts to wonder why the hell am I even holding a candle that burns from both ends when lighting from Ikea is so remarkably inexpensive?

Off to cough. Get some more sleep, people. Yeah, that means you, too. Nasty bugs going around….

So here were the housing options presented to us today in our realty crawl (this is after driving around together yesterday, looking at approximately one million listed houses, only to find out they’re almost ALL already in escrow, even though they show as active in the listing):

61st: Oh, my god! The perfect house! (Shut up. Yes, again.) It’s yellow! It’s in a great neighborhood, has a crawl space that could be turned into something COOL, like a painting studio or a place to put yarn, just imagine, and it has three bedrooms, meaning one for each of us and one to share, and it has built-ins and a fireplace, and a huge yard, and it’s a great location, and it’s a great price, and it’s everything we want.

We’re so writing an offer on this one. The market’s dropped. The owner’s dropped his price thirty thousand dollars from his original asking price last month.

Then we hear from the owner: He doesn’t want to sell for the reduced price that his realtor placed on it, and we can’t afford the inflated price, so he’s just going to hold on to it and rent it out.

Oh, the sadness. We send in the offer anyway, and hope for the best. There’s still the chance that he’ll review the offer and grant us our crazy-pants wish, and we hope for that. Hoping….

57th: From the outside, adorable. Or, as I like to say, ah-door-ablay. Low peak and red garage door, great street. A sweet pink cottage. Love it. Older guy on the front porch smoking, looking with little interest at us as we drive by at one mile-per-hour. I ask my realtor about it, and she says that per the owner, we must write the offer on this fixer-upper, tilted roof and all, SIGHT-UNSEEN. No getting into the house for a lookee-loo, to see what the bedrooms look like or whether there’s a toilet in the bathroom or not, until the offer is accepted. Then we can go in and look around and have an inspection.

??

We write an offer anyway. ‘Cause we’re like that. Crazy. Reckless.

Yikes.

63rd: I know, location, location, location. So we’re not sure about this location. There is a car with tags six years expired parked in front of us. But we look, and the house is wonderful, in that “fancy” way. You know, granite countertop/stainless steel appliance way. Lovely, new, burnished hardwood floors. New paint (red and orange, loved it). Best part: the converted garage in the backyard, with a full kitchen, bath, living room and bedroom. Can we say, hello, Lala’s practice space? Damn. That would be cool. The dogs running between houses, us sharing a kitchen and a bedroom, but able to get our own space, too. That’s damn attractive.

We drive the area to see if we can feel it out. Not too bad! Only yelled at once, and it’s more like the complimentary yelling. Lala finds a cop, and I get out and talk to him, having no fear of cops, even when they’re dealing with someone handcuffed in the back of their car.

“Hey, I’m local 911. Thinking of buying here. Whatcha think?”
Wince.
“What about two girls living together here in this neighborhood?”
More than a wince, now I’m getting a shake of the head. “No. Not for you two. Rough neighborhood.”

I give him the numbers on the street.

“Nope,” he says, “two blocks from Avenal? That’s a huge drug deal corner. Really. Go somewhere else.”

He’s a young guy, too. The young cops are the tough ones, the dumb ones, the ones who refuse to see a threat on any corner, so when he tells me that, I listen.

We write the offer anyway, thinking that a compound like that, basically two houses on the same lot, is a very good idea for two very independent people. However, if it turns INTO a compound, that would be bad.

We get a call later that night, that they’ve accepted our offer, contingent on the provision that we keep the tenant in the garage apartment. Hell, no! Zap. At least we don’t have worry about the neighborhood.

Sigh. It’s harder this time, wanted the most for our limited resources. Fun, yes, and house or no house, Lala’s my girl.

Our house is out there. We just have to find it. That’s it.

Knit-Out!

Just a reminder:

Saturday, January 14th, 1pm at the Temescal Cafe, 4920 Telegraph, Oakland.

I have more to tell and show you (SOCKS!) but I’m running out now to meet Lala for dinner and then a movie at the best theater in Oakland, the Parkway, so I’ll catch up with ya later. Mwah!

PS – I think it was a rat, driven up from the sewers by the rain. Ew. Is that better, or worse?

https://rachaelherron.com/knitout_just_a_/

I opened the door to my kitchen in the dark when I got home this morning. The light switch is annoyingly placed across the room, so I have to walk through the kitchen in the dim light from the outside fixture in order to see. I could just see the forms of four catnip mice on the kitchen floor. I’ve been pleased recently that they’re playing so much with the mice, throwing them all over the house.

I flipped the kitchen light on.

Three catnip mice were on the floor. And one mouse with beady red glaring dead eyes, stopped in death and probably terror.

Ew. Ew ew ew. We had just been talking at work about how mice can die of fear, and this one wasn’t mangled or eaten (weird, but thank god), just frozen on the floor.

What I hate is that foot nudge you have to do. Will it move? Sure its eyes are open, but is it playing possum? When I use the toilet paper (WILL I NEVER REMEMBER TO BUY PAPER TOWELS?) to pick it up by its tail, will it wake up and double up on itself to bite me viciously in the wrist? Of course it won’t. In rigor mortis, there’s a pretty good chance it’s permanently dead. But the fear is there.

It’s the first mouse. Hopefully the last mouse. Cats are good for lots of things, this being one of their best features. But ew.

Threw it out. Ew. Ew ew ew. Took out the trash. Then Digit, in his excitement, threw up all over the kitchen floor (not on the rug, yay!). WILL I NEVER REMEMBER TO BUY PAPER TOWELS?? Toilet-damn-paper SO doesn’t work the same way.

Ew.

But the kits were nice and warm to sleep with today. There’s that.

New Year’s Eve found us driving up the coast to Bolinas, a small beach town north of Stinson Beach. It’s the town that the state of California has given up signposting – every time they’d put up the green direction signs, residents of the town would go out to Highway One and take them down. It has no stoplights, lots of dogs, two restaurants, and one saloon called Smileys. The saloon, and by proxy, the town, has embraced the Whoreshoes as their own personal band, and the girls are celebrities when they come to town. It’s kind of nice to be a celebrity by association, actually. Once the main restaurant re-opened late at night, just to feed the band and friends free quesadillas and root-beer floats.

I was a little worried about going up – you might have seen on the news the flooding we’re having in this part of the world. There are three roads that lead to Bolinas. Two of them were having flooding problems, and we’d never taken the third. But Lala was driving, and we made it out just fine, her reliable car fording the small rivers running across the twisty back roads.

There was no power anywhere on that part of the coast. It was quiet when we pulled into town. The one grocery store sold me a pack of emergency cookies by candlelight.

The saloon, however, was the one place in town with a generator. So when I walked the dogs down the pitch-black road toward the water, this is what I saw when I came back.

The saloon is also the hotel, so I had electricity to run the curling iron, thank god.

Anyone know what’s on the back of my jacket? Present from sister Bethany, and I’ll get a better photo later this week…..

We ate dinner before the show, as we always do, at the restaurant across the way from the saloon. What’s it called? The Coast Café? Something forgettable like that, but it’s a delightful place. The owner lived in Thailand for seven years, so he’s used to running on propane, and they were offering their full fare minus deep-fried products, all served by candlelight. We walked in to hear tinny music, and Lala was the first to notice that a real live Victrola propped on a front table was making the sound.

I had a lovely catfish sandwich. We were merry. We were actually shushed by another diner, but Kirk was in the middle of telling us about catching a mahi-mahi in the lobby of a Hawaiian hotel last week after bribing the hotel lobby security guard (thirty-four pounder! Dude!), so we probably deserved shushing.

The show was great. The had an opener called KemoSabe, a great boy-band who rocked out, hill-rockabilly style. The girls put on a great show. Of course. They always do.

    Being a rockstar is rough.

    Nate, great knitted beer-cozy maker.

    The objectification dance. Don’t ask.

Then, when we woke up to another incoming storm on the morning of the New Year, I said to Lala, "Hey. The holidays are over."
She said, "Thank god. I might throw a party to celebrate."

https://rachaelherron.com/new_years_eve_f/