It's been too long since I've blogged, so I've accumulated too much to blog about. Rakassah was awesome, amazing dance and music, the usual. But we also had a new experience: Djinn rented a car and got to drive around San Francisco in the carpool lanes!

I finally did a dance performance, klezmer bottle dance, in Ithaca, with the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble. Klezmer dance has a lot in common with belly dance, just as the music has a lot in common. Doing floorwork while balancing a wine bottle on one's head is an old Sephardic tradition. I was nervous about two things: dropping the bottle, and using inappropriate belly dance styling, but I think it went fine.

But the main thing that Bob and I have been busy with has been house shopping. Bob has disliked his current house for a while. Me, I'm hardly ever there, so it doesn't matter that much do me, but I will concede that it has a tiny, shady garden, and I want a much bigger, sunnier one. In my previous life, I was a Plant Science major at Cornell. I am doing nothing with this education besides watering my houseplants, but, if I could pick the perfect house, it would have room for more plants around it.

Bob also has other complaints, like saying that our kitchen is too small. I tried telling him that it's huge, maybe even too big, but he didn't belive me. He doesn't even cook anyway. He claims that if our kitchen were bigger, he would have room to cook. Whatever. I'm realizing that a person from NYC and a person from Kansas have completely different senses of scale.

I concede that our house is not ideal, because a perfect house would have one huge room, with a nice wooden dance floor, for parties. That's all I need, basically: one huge room for parties and a big garden. Throw in a bathroom, a microwave, and a little cot I can set up to sleep on when the guests leave, and I'm all set.

Switching houses is a complicated process, since we didn't even know exactly how much we'd have for the new one, and when we'd get the money, until we sold the old one. Selling a house means you have to hide half of your furniture, and all your clutter, including all the stuff you actually use, to make the rooms look more spacious. Our house looked great, but when I wanted a tissue or a doumbek or some basic necessity like that, I had to dig it out of hiding. And forget about hand-washing clothes and laying them out to dry, taking up space and looking cluttered. My cashmere sweater ($6 from the Salvation Army) was starting to smell like it was still on the original goat, which couldn't have helped sell the place.

But we finally sold our house, which means we can sprawl out again until the closing in July. The buyer came in and marveled at the nice spacious kitchen. She asked about gardening, so I said that it was possible to fit a few tomato plants in that little strip of earth next to the driveway, and she was delighted.

It's actually quite a nice house, and I'm glad we sold it to someone who appreciates it. It was built in 1880. When my sister saw it, she marveled at the intricacy of the hinges. She can't believe we'd sell a house with hinges like that. They don't make hinges like that anymore. Also, they couldn't build houses out of wood like this anymore even if they wanted to, because American chestnut trees are virtually extinct.

Bob and I have found some very nice houses to replace our house with, but now we have some tough decisions to make.

We've found a beautiful house, newer than our old house, as it was built in 1900. It has a huge living room, with a great hardwood floor, that just begs to have dance parties on it. Plus, it has all sorts of charming details, in the craftsman style, whatever that is. It has cleaner lines, more to my taste than the fussy Victorian style of the old place. It looks down on Cayuga Lake. It has a huge yard. There are lots of old trees in the neigborhood, yet our yard is positioned just right so it's sunny. It's a very short block away from a park with a stunning view down into Ithaca Falls. Bob can walk to work, and I can walk to the Commons to busk there. It even has a separate staircase for the servants. What's not to like?

It's a good thing I'm married to Bob, since he pointed out some rather important things, such as the fact that this house looks like it's been neglected since the 1940's. In some ways, that's better than bad remodeling, but in other ways, it's inconvenient. Like, the electrical system needs some updating. I believe it's currently set up to be illuminated by gaslamps that protrude out of the walls. It has no insulation, and the leaded glass windows, while too charming to replace, are awfully leaky, so the heating bills would be higher than rent I've paid for a spacious Ithaca apartment.

Bob also has objections to cracked walls. He said that our old place had cracked walls before he fixed them, before I moved in. This is lath and plaster we're talking about, so after you take off the wallpaper, then you have to laboriously remove the plaster, lath, horsehair, whatever the Victorians chose to make their walls out of, then replace it with wallboard, which is a huge job. Me, I say if we have cracked walls, that means we hang some large paintings. I think his irrational urge to have nice smooth walls might be attributed to the lead paint dust he no doubt inhaled when he did all this work on our old house. You'd think that anyone who'd done all that work once would know better than to do it again.

Well, he does know better than to do all that again, since he is proposing we buy a house that was built in, like, the 1960's. It also has a large yard, and a pretty large living room, which is all I said I needed at the start of this blog, so I should be happy, right? And Bob is sensibly pointing out that, for all the effort we'd be expending to make the beautiful house practical, we could be instead be making a practical house beautiful. We could install wood floors. We could remove the horrible plastic foam imitation brick from the inside walls. We could remove the horrible plastic imitation wood beams from the ceiling that are trying to make the place look rustic. As for the outside, well, we could plant vines. If we really wanted, we could install a seperate stairway for the servants, but I don't think that would be a high priority.

It's more complicated than that of course. This practical house is in a neighborhood of similarly practical houses. I look at this neighborhood, and I think "suburbs." Sure, I would be planting an interesting garden, but the rest of the neighborhood is all about boring monoculture lawns. There are no sidewalks. It's closer to the mall than to a waterfall. As a New Yorker, I have a deep-seated racial hatred of all things suburban, and I'm finding this prejudice difficult to overcome.

Bob would have to take the bus to and from work, and I'd have to take the bus, or drive, to get pretty much anywhere. Now, in NYC, I have no problem with taking public transportation, so I should not have any aversion to it in Ithaca. But still, it is nicer to be in walking distance of things.

Complicating matters further is that this suburban place has a huge rental apartment in back. Add that rental income to the lower property taxes we'd be paying out there, and there would be a big difference in our yearly budget.

Maybe what this means is that we just haven't found the perfect house yet. Of course, if there is a perfect house out there, it would be too expensive. Hm. Anyone have any advice?