While we were dealing with All Things House, we both decided we needed something distracting to read, so we made a little journey to the mall in the next town, where was a bookstore. There I found this, which turned out to be a completely absorbing read:
It's fascinating, and makes a fine companion to other reportage-histories like The United States of Arugula.
As long as nothing untoward happens between now and closing, this will be our new house:
In case you don't recognize it, yes, this is in fact Mr. Kayak's house.
<snoopy dance> <snoopy dance> <snoopy dance>
Sorry I didn't get to post this right away--it's been busy! But more on that later.
I promised some pictures of the noteworthy decor in the Iroquois house. And here they are:
A detail of the installation. Note the painted birdhouse and life-size fake bird in the ivy.
I'll catch y'all up on the actual house doings later on (there are ongoing developments).
Here are the pictures of the place on Washington street that I was finally able to upload.
Sorry to be so brief, but it's all I've got time for at the moment. Teaser for tomorrow though: tune in to see pictures of the truly amazing interior decor at the Iroquois house--because we're going back for another look!
Cat writes:
One good thing I can say about restaurants in this town: You can always count on ice tea that isn't polluted with frelling fruity flavors.
The Gun Room (the restaurant at the Lafayette Hotel)
Mr. Kayak suggested that we try this place for breakfast. "It's fine," he said, "but don't be in a hurry." This proved to be true in every respect. Although there were very few diners for breakfast (maybe 8 tables), the waitstaff of two was completely overwhelmed. There were dirty glasses from the night before displayed on the (unstaffed) hostess station, there weren't enough menus, and one of the chefs was observed turning over and setting tables. The room itself is styled to resemble the saloon on a olde timey riverboat, and I guess it does, but I don't think Mark Twain would've selected lavender and pink as the colors. OK, so forget all that and let's talk food. Nope. Can't. When the waitress doesn't write down the order, you know you're in trouble.
My order:
- Two eggs over hard
- Bacon
- Hash browns
- Wheat toast
What I got:
- One egg over hard
- One egg over medium
- Sausage
- Home fries (burnt)
- Wheat toast
The sausage was good, but I won't be rushing back. Wombat got eggs over easy, bacon, and pancakes. (He forgot that the 'cakes here on the edge of the South are weird and wrong. [Wombat: they're thinner yet somehow more spongy at the same time.] The coffee was good, but came in a cup with no saucer (not a mug) and what do you have to do in this town to get a frelling spoon? From now on, I'm packing my own. We won't be hurrying back to this place.
Brighter Day
My word du jour is "bland." This little cafe (with attached more-or-less groovy grocery) had quite the crowd, including a table of prom queens and their escorts. It's clearly well-patronized by the community, and I guess rightly so. They seem to espouse naturally sourced food cooked simply and fresh. I'm guessing that the best bets on the menu are the burgers and other basic fare and maybe the veggie options. The baked goods looked OK, but more on that later.
We decided to try the specials. We started with mushrooms stuffed with herbs and cheese with a marinara sauce. Bland Flag #1: no garlic. It's not that there was less garlic flavor than one might reasonably expect--there was NO garlic. Nyet garlic!
Um. But garlic and mushrooms. That's a marriage. Nope. Salads next. The greens were fresh and crunchy, lots of dressing options--but what's with the sweet dinner rolls? OK, they're whole wheat, which I appreciate a lot, but why do
they taste like donuts? I mean SWEET. Maybe the butter had honey in it or something. A regionalism? Weird. OK, mains next. The service was very good here, by the way, they really kept the food coming. I had the spaghetti and meatballs, and Wombat had the chicken and shrimp special (is that peck and surf?). Anyway, the spaghetti was some kind of whole grain, but it wasn't gluey or nasty at all. I was chuffed about that. The meatballs were beefy and light, not overcooked or hard at all. They had no real flavor, but they weren't offensive. However, again with the thin, watery, marinara sauce that has no flavor. None. No basil, no bay, no oregano, and absolutely not even a hint of garlic. And what's with the pile of melted mozzarella on top? I would love to know what part of Italy this recipe comes from. It must be on the Hoboken side of the Tiber.
Wombat's chicken and shrimp were so overcooked it was sort of amazing. The chicken tasted more like char than bird, and he could barely get the rubberized crustaceans off the skewers (I guess we'll be washing that shirt in the sink tonight). But the veggies on the side came in a quite nice cream sauce on top of some fried potato cakes with gouda that were surprisingly delicious. Really better than what we've had at Austyn's, reputedly the high-falutin' dining option in town.
Next the disappointment that was dessert. We had seen the dessert tray go by several times, and it all looked good, but by the time they got to us, there were only three choices left--strawberry pie, cheesecake, and blueberry cobbler. We both selected strawberry pie (we'll never do that again), but I was really disappointed to receive essentially jell-o in a whole wheat piecrust with strawberry pieces embedded in it. Yuck. Just barf. That's just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I could rant about this for days. [Wombat: later we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few items and noted that they were featuring strawberry "pie filling" which was the same jelly goo--perhaps it's yet another regional variation.]
On the whole though, we would go back to Brighter Day. They are producing as advertised, and I'm sure it's just a matter of figuring out what to order.
Tampico
OK, yes, the farther you get away from Old Mexico, the worse the Mexican food is. We all know this is a fundamental truth. But sometimes you just want comfort food, and for me that means melted cheese and chilis, and I don't want to have to cook it myself all the time, goldurnit! So we asked Mr. Kayak. "Where can we get the best Mexican food in this town?" we asked. "The best Mexican food in town," said he, "is at my house." Bummer. However, he did allow that he found the food at Tampico acceptable most of the time. So we went there for dinner to try it out.
The obligatory chips and salsa arrived. OK, the salsa was Bland Flag #2, almost completely without any character at all. No cilantro, almost no onions. Mostly it was just pulverized tomatoness to put on your chips. OK, let's just keep going. I ordered the tacos de carne asada, and Wombat got the enchiladas suizas with chicken. We tried the tea. It was good and strong. The plates arrived quickly, and my tacos were actually quite good. The meat was yummy and not at all stringy or tough. There was a lot of it, too, more than I could eat on my own. The beans were good with
the chips, and I got cups with both pico de gallo and a smoked chile sauce to go on my tacos. Wombat's enchiladas were fine, although the green sauce lacked oomph.
The Galley
For breakfast Sunday morning we tried out another spot recommended by Mr. Kayak. The place is really more of a bar, but they're smart enough to see the opportunity to open up the kitchen of a morning. I had the chef's breakfast, which included eggs, bacon, potatoes, and half a cinnamon and brown sugar waffle. I gave up on over hard and went for scrambled eggs. They were fine, I guess. I don't really like scrambled eggs. The bacon was a little undercooked. The potatoes were Bland Flag #3 improved by ketchup. And the waffle was tasty, but ice cold. Nothing like
a cold waffle to make you want to cook at home. Wombat had a breakfast burrito, which was actually quite tasty. The hash browns were of the pre-made triangular type--not the snazziest cuisine, but still happily crunchy in a guilty pleasure kind of way.
Tomorrow before we hit the road to collect the parents at the airport (they're joining us for house analysis), we'll try out the local espresso joint and shall report accordingly.
Our firs stop was the house on Warren. What promise it held forth! Across the street from a beautiful park (a Indian mound location), over 4000 square feet, period details....
A handsome prospect from the sidewalk:
Some of the details are lovely. Look at the wood of the door and stairs, plus the ceramic tile in the entry:
More than one light fixture is notable:
The bathroom is of mid-century vintage, but passable:
There are other mid-century updates here and there, such as this fireplace (the gentleman in the shot is, in fact, the famous Mr. Kayak):
Unfortunately, the features stopped accruing and the flaws continued to add up. The kitchen was so yucky we didn't even take any pictures of it. At some point, someone very ill-advisedly enclosed the wrap-around porch to make it a rather useless room:
The near-ubiquitous screened porch/3-season room is not as pleasant as most we've seen:
Not photographable was the ubiquitous cat smell. But the real stake in the heart was the discovery that the garage structure squatting along the side of the house from not 3 feet away is not the 3-car garage that belongs to this property, but actually goes with the residence next door. The four cars parked there, right at the front of this house, bode very ill--one could already imagine the door slamming and car alarms in the middle of the night.
So: Warren went off the list.
I'll save the Washington house, which we also saw this day, for a later posting, mainly because the photo upload to this site is being a bit wonky at the moment.
OK. Here we are. Getting here was largely uneventful, except for the iPod that went missing. Dangit.
Let's focus on something more positive. Here's a view from the flight of Glacier Peak with Mt. Baker in the background:
We saw three houses today, all in the development that's out of town a bit.
The House on Strecker: quite nice, no problems of note except for decoration which is easily changed.
Someone has put a bit of work into staging the place, with varying degrees of success (to our tastes anyway). Here, for example, is a handsome pie adorning the kitchen counter:
OK, I guess they're really ceramic garden hats adorned with decorative twiggage. But still....
The second bathroom has...interesting lighting:
On a positive note, the basement has fantastic potential for our offices, though it does lack natural light.
The Wombat, however, is unnerved by the unusual M.C. Escher-esque gravity situation in the kitchen:
The next place, on Sylvan, was, well--let's call it "sub-optimal." Serious foundation issues. Not even anything interesting to photograph. One note though: in contrast to the pie judiciously displayed in the Strecker kitchen, the "staging" at Sylvan comprised a magazine featuring some recipes laying on the kitchen counter.
Our third visit, to the Iroquois house, revealed a cute little property with a lot of potential. The kitchen has already been redone with some quite nice cabinetry and appliances. It also had some truly breathtaking interior decoration which sadly we cannot share with you because--this is true--all of the cameras came down with dead batteries at the same time. *sigh*
So try to use your imagination on this one: you step into the front door into the entry hallway. Immediately to your left, next to a coat closet, the wall has been painted in the semblance of an outdoor scene, including fruits near the ceiling. The effect is amplified by a white picket fence which runs along the length of the wall up to about waist height. I do not mean that there is a painting of a fence. There are actually white pickets nailed to the wall.
But wait, there's more: along the top of the wall and working in concert with the painted fruits, there is plastic ivy-like foliage all along the length. In this foliage are fake birds.
No big rec room/basement; the basement is strictly utilitarian. However, the living room, which lies directly in line with the front door and has a lovely window into the back yard, could make a pretty nice office, especially with the addition of French doors to separate from the rest of the house and to open onto the back patio.
Still, of the 3, 2 are still serious contenders, so overall that's pretty good. We've even been provided with some remarkably extensive lists of every improvement made to the places in the las 10 years or so.
We've just had a little snack (missed lunch), and later on we'll try dinner at Brighter Day, a "natural foods" restaurant.
An odd little literary review of Florence, especially as it was viewed by English ex-patriots. Stumbled across this by accident while researching Florence after a recent visit there. Worth a read for some fascinating anecdotes, especially if you've seen or read any version of Room with a View. (Or if you have or will visit Florence--which you should.) It's short.
A collection of some shockingly bad tattoos. Curiously, some of them are extremely well done technically--even while topically they still leave you wondering: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
For some different and interesting perspectives on skin art, try these sources:
The blog of Needled.com (run by an attorney)
Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium
Inked, Inc. (aimed at professional people who happen to have tattoos)
An Irish fantasy with slightly annoying characters but nice prose:
Hello. We're C & J.
We're starting a grand adventure: moving almost all the way across the country so that C can attend a school to learn how to train horses to do dressage.
It seemed like it might be fun to chronicle the whole thing from finding a house to moving to learning how to work remotely (J's and C's jobs will still be back on the other coast) to getting used to living in a significantly smaller town. So: this blog.
The first item of business is, of course, finding new digs. We've been analyzing the offerings for months and are now ready to make a journey to try to choose from the litter.
Later on, look for postings on our cross-country move (theme: BBQ across the USA!), restaurant reviews of the Mid-Ohio Valley region, and a smattering of other random stuff.
It should be fun!
