Taken at the Fly – Butterfly Park behind Audubon Zoo.

Porch with partition and ugly “garden”:

Porch with the partition removed and junk garden gone:

Closets in the hallway in the center of the house, from the boys’ room (notice the door in the middle):

Closets in the hallway in the center of the house, from the (soon-to-be) dining room:

Open hallway, closets ripped out, from the boys’ room:

Open hallway, closets ripped out, from the dining room:

I can see one bathroom from the other bathroom!

This is really freaking me out.

I bought a house this week! We found a house on Constance in the Irish Channel, a historic district in NOLA. Which is to say, after all my talk about wanting to really LIVE life in New Orleans, we will be really living life *IN* New Orleans. We’ll be right in the heart of the city, just outside of downtown, about 7 minutes from my office. You can’t really beat that commute.

Our house is a big old double shotgun that we’ll convert into a single. It’s not a fancy house by any means, it’s definitely going to be a project house, but it’ll be fun and rewarding. At least, that’s what I tell myself. It’s not that different than my last house in which I rebuilt two rooms — but it is on a slightly larger scale. And this house has plaster and lathing walls, which will definitely be harder to deal with than if it were all drywall. But whatever, I can deal with that.

We used something called an FHA Streamlined 203k loan. I’m not going to tell you what we paid (not that that info isn’t publicly available out there for you somewhere. But the loan i’ll tell you a little about. It’s a renovation loan that let’s you borrow above the price of the house to do work on the house. You’d think this would be pretty prevalent here, right? The “streamlined” version only let’s you borrow a modest amount of money and excludes doing structural work to the house. In our case we’re replacing all of the plumbing and electrical in the house, which is no small task, but I’ll feel much better about living an an old house that has new guts.

Buying a house here was so much more difficult than it was when we bought our house in Milwaukee … 6 years ago I guess. Hell, buying our house here was much harder than even *selling*our old house. So many steps we had to go through with seeing places, making offers, inspections, contractors, estimates, more inspections, negotiating with the sellers, getting approvals, seminars, weekend retreats… It took a while . I believe the first time I saw the house was during Mardi Gras in early February. We closed on June 1st and don’t expect to live there till almost august.

Work is being done, though! I’ll be posting pics shortly.

• made an (accepted) offer on a house
• took the family out for beignets
• took my daughter to gym class
• rode bikes to Audubon Park with Graham, my 6 year old
• drove to Pearl River to bring my kids to Grandma’s house and returned to pick them up 24 hrs later
• rode bikes with my wife through Uptown, nola
• saw 100+ scooters with my wife and a friend at Big Easy Weekender
• rode through the french quarter, up Frenchmen St., through the marigny and bywater with those 100+ scooterists (and was oddly cheered on by everyone we came across along the way). It was a surreal, amusing experience!
• met a friend’s 3 month old son at PJ’s Coffee
• took my daughter to her very first little league softball tryout
• took my daughter on her very first scooter ride
• taught the boy next door how to replace his bike inner-tube
• took a relaxing walk around the streets surrounding audubon park

I should be asleep right now!

I stayed up till 3am last night reading Zeitoun, almost finishing it 3 days into reading it. The first thing I did this morning was to read the last few pages. Kim also happened to get a Katrina-related documentary that we watched tonight, about a 24 y/o girl’s experience during and after the storm in the 9th ward. It’s got me a bit burnt on reality. We’ve been thinking of buying a house and this really puts some perspective on decision making.

So Zeitoun is a book by Dave Eggers about a Syrian-American man’s expience staying in the city for Katrina – and the hell he and his family went through after. It’s entirely a work of non-fiction. Kim and I went to see Dave Eggers speak at NOCCA recently and were surprised to see the Zeitouns were there with him. After speaking for a bit about Where the Wild Things Are (the book and movie…) he invited Zeitoun and Kathy, his wife, out onto the stage to talk about their experience and the process of writing the book. It was odd for me, though, to “meet” them first and read about them second. I’m glad, though, that I had faces to put with their names, knowing that this was the real story of these real people that I was reading.

The book was definitely riveting. Dave Egger’s writing… I’m a big fan of his and this level of involvement in the community and across the country. But sometimes his writing gets a bit too…  simple. He tends to create these little gimmicks that he relies on throughout his books: in What is the What, the way Achak continues telling his story as if he’s speaking directly to a passing character in the novel, needing that character to understand; in You Shall Know Our Velocity Will has conversations with others inside of his head, using their words to counter his logic; and in Zietoun he tends to repeat things a lot. It feels sometimes like he’s really trying to make a point obvious – overly so. But the great thing about his writing is the way that he really captures how you would react to a situation. Even in the title Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which when you first hear it you think it’s being zealous, pompous, or just too clever for its own good. But you learn that what he’s really talking about is the ideas you have when you’re young of doing great things, creating astonishing creative works. It’s something you strive for, even though you think you’re going to come up short, but they’re all ideas that you can relate to. They’re big ideas and you feel like you’ve had big ideas like that too.

All of this Katrina stuff though, is  a lot for my brain to handle. I’ve been looking at real estate online a lot lately. We haven’t gotten as far as talking to a mortgage broker yet, but we’re considering options, etc. But it’s hard not to question making a large scale decision like that HERE. One thing that I do know about myself, as much as I like to take my time making decisions, I can be persuaded by my own stupid sentimentality or wishful thinking into doing things that I want because I want to believe it’s the right decision. We all find ways to justify the things that we want. At the same time, though, I don’t want to be overly cautious all the time either. The one thing that I DO want, if I’m going to live in Louisiana, is to LIVE here. I want to enjoy it.

But I also don’t want to be afraid of it.

the correlation
between coffee and bad moods
can’t be coincidence