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practical house
Wednesday, April 8 2009
setting: Hogwaller Neighborhood, Charlottesville, Virginia
This morning Jessika and I had coffee from a salvaged fire engine red espresso maker and then took her little dog Ramona on a walk down a small trail through a forested public park called Locust Grove along a branch of the Rivanna with access from Holmes Avenue (38.044618 N, 78.46287 W). Locust Grove is a narrow patch of woods, and up at the top of the ravine its horizon is defaced by a line of brand new McMansions, some of which look like they're still under construction. The trail itself is sometimes hard to follow, as it's not anywhere near as well defined as, say, the Stick Trail. The most remarkable thing about Locust Grove are the little buildings here and there constructed entirely out of bundles of branches. They look to have been erected by a parks and recreation employee with a bit of an Andy Goldsworthy spirit. This led to a conversation about Deya's new job working for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, a job nearly as coveted in the City as that of zoo worker.
Jessika and Aaron have grown tired of their Hogwaller neighborhood and yearn for a bigger house with fewer problems, and since Aaron has been pre-approved for a respectable loan, they've been looking at a number of places, mostly in black neighborhoods (because that's where the most affordable houses are; Charlottesville is still a sharply segregated city). The alternatives for their price point are redneck neighborhoods such as, well, Hogwaller, but Jessika suspects that having black neighbors would be a huge improvement. I went with her to look at a couple of places, the first being on West Street (38.035351 N, 78.488817 W) in the Rose Hill neighborhood. It was an elegant house with three gables and huge windows that went from nearly ceiling to nearly floor. Unfortunately, though, its large lot had been subdivided and a large ugly cheaply-built house (the kind with a scattershot arrangement of small windows on a large, otherwise featureless wall) had been erected next door, leaving no opportunities for a driveway on a crowded street with parking only on one side. The house was old and had the potential elegance that escape today's houses, but it had some serious maintenance issues and the parking situation seemed like a subscription to torture.
The second
[REDACTED]
was on Ridge Street and was just a simple boxy ranch house with a steep city-owned strip of woods in the back and some fancy new development at the end of an otherwise dead-end road. Jessika referred to it as "the practical house," and it seemed to me like the better choice. It's always more fun to work on æsthetic issues than it is to work on fixing someone else's mistakes or neglect. A ranch house can be thought of as the functional core of a house with nearly-unlimited æsthetic potential. Put a gothic tower on it! Put a deck on the back! Hell, just paint the wooden part of the front something other than white. And of course, by all means, decorate the porch and shrubbery with mannequins and doll heads. I looked around and wondered what Jessika's new neighbors would think of her decorating sense and concluded that perhaps Ridge Street was a little too nice (in that she would get a few too many anonymous notes slipped under her door).
Back in Hogwaller, Jessika and I walked to her new favorite Mexican/Salvadorian restaurant, a place called Aqui Es Mexico situated in a tiny retail strip in a neighborhood otherwise dominated with ugly boxy warehouses. "Aqui Es Mexico" initially struck me as poor Spanish grammar (shouldn't it be esta and not es?). But then I realized that perhaps es was appropriate if Mexico is thought of as a culture and spiritual cloak as opposed to a place. Mexico isn't locationally aqui, instead it describes the way the restaurant is (es).
I was excited not about its Mexican pretensions but its Salvadorian ones. As I do at La Pupuseria in Kingston, I ordered nothing but pupusas, and I ordered them in Spanish. The waitress didn't believe me at first when I said "seis." But I was serious, and I also wanted a Negra Modelo por favor. Unfortunately, this particular place was a little stingy with the cortido (shredded pickled cabbage), though the cortido was delicious and completely different from the red cabbage stuff I'm used to. It was more pickled, to the point that it sort of melted in the mouth. As for the pupusas, they were a little larger and a bit more fragile than the ones with which I'm familiar, but they were plenty good. And, being very hungry, I ate all six.
This evening, Jessika had some business to attend to with her roller derby, and, since her household WiFi was a bit slow, I went off in search of a coffee shop. I was hoping to go to the one in nearby Belmont, but it was closed, so (as always) I ended up at the Mudhouse, where I ran into Azer the crazy Bosnian dude from the wedding. He invited me to something later on, but I had no intention of going. At around this time, I realized I couldn't do certain remote website management tasks because the Mudhouse was filtering the ports I needed to use.
So there I was, back at Jessika's house. Aaron came home, went out and bought some frozen pizzas, Peggy showed up, and then we all watched an episode of the series Lost, which Jessika and Aaron love. Talk about being lost, the show made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, and nothing the slightest bit interesting seemed to happen. The plot, such as it was, was propelled by snatches of wide-eyed dialog spoken mysteriously, punctuated by instances of extreme violence. And then we'd cut back and forth between the present and the past. At some point there was a smoke cloud that rose out of a grate but it didn't anything all that remarkable. What was the point? Aaron told me I'd come to it four and half years too late.
Jessika and Ramona on the trail today.
Jessika inspects a twig hut seemingly made by a creative park employee.
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