The General Situation

Live from New York

Over the past two-and-a-half years, anyone who asked what I missed about New York City got the same answer: friends, food, and walking. So for our visit there over the past week—my first time in a year and a half—that's what Adam and I did. I don't think I've ever eaten so much, especially without exercising. (Gyms and pools aren't yet allowing day guests, and walking doesn't really count when you're having French fries each of the first four days.) I've stopped paying attention to the city's dining scene, which meant we ended up back at old favorites, sometimes for more than one meal. Below: Alta's herbed guacamole, Morgenstern's hand-mixed rocky road, and Altro Paradiso's mozzarella with artichoke hearts.

All but one meal was outside, and some restaurants are handling it better than others.

A few friends remarked that restaurant staffers seemed nicer than in pre-pandemic days, which I would agree with. One notable exception, however, was the sommelier who dismissed a wine we like at home as "entry-level." I have yet to decide whether that was better or worse than the shop clerk who, upon seeing the pair of pants iI was taking to the dressing room, questioned whether I was sure I had the right size. (I ended up buying an even smaller pair, hopefully not just to spite him.) And then there was the post office.... We'll likely put our New York apartment back on the market, but we also have lots of empty shelves in the new house, so we're moving select stuff to California in the least efficient way (i.e., FedEx). I insisted on sending books by the U.S. Postal Service, however, because media rate is reliably cheap, but it entails dealing with a postal clerk. After hauling an increasingly heavy box over to the post office, I waited for the indicator to direct me to a window. Nothing happened, and eventually another customer came up behind me and told me to go to window six. "She's just sitting there," he said, as if that meant she wanted to be doing something else.

Me: Are you available?
Clerk: Am I?
Me: Are you available?
Clerk: Am I?
Me: I honestly have no idea which is why I keep asking but this box is heavy so can you please just tell me whether you're going to help me or not?

She didn't seem regretful enough so I lied and told her I was partially deaf. When I went back two days later with another box, I made a point of trying a different clerk. This time I just plopped the box on the counter and shoved it onto the scale.

Clerk: What are you doing?!
Me: The box is heavy and I didn't want you to have to move it.
Clerk: But do you see what it says on the box? It says FedEx!
Me: I feel it's better to reuse a box than to buy a new one—you know, for the environment.
Clerk: You have to cover that up! That's our competitor!

I sincerely doubt FedEx views its relationship with the USPS in the same terms, and I refrained from asking if she found it triggering to see the name of a company that would actual fire her. And as a result of my considerateness, she cut up a bunch of stickers for me to slap all over the boxes, so I didn't have to take them home and find new ones.

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Public service announcement: For years I haven't been able to tolerate spicy foods, or even some vinegars; my tongue burns. I figured I was just getting old, and when my sister had the same thing start happening, I assumed it was a result of genetics, for my Northern European ancestors surely didn't encounter much chile de árbol. I had tried asking my dentist once; she told me to ask my doctor, who told me to ask an ENT, who told me to try my dentist. Having switched dentists when we moved, I tried again, and the hygienist said she has had the same issue, as have other people. She recommended switching to toothpaste that doesn't include sodium lauryl sulfate (which means certain varieties of the Pronamel brand). It's still too soon to declare victory—I've gotten good as avoiding spice—but I'm confident the sitch is improved because vinegar doesn't bother me anymore. Just passing it along in case it helps anyone.

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The house is in pretty good shape! There are still a few holes in the decor, and of course we have many blank spots on the walls where we're waiting to find the right art. I'm hopeful that will happen by 2029. In the meantime, we look out the windows instead. Some days, it's like the Wonderful World of Walt Disney out there: bunnies that live in the front yard, squirrels treating the trees (and bird feeder) like a Habitrail, and gophers that ruin the lawn. Adam is taking his mother's advice and pouring cayenne pepper down their holes.

Meanwhile, three neighborhood cats regularly prowl the perimeter, and every now and then they come closer. One morning around 5 a.m., I walked into the kitchen to make coffee, and just about jumped out of my skin when I saw a cat staring through the glass door at me. Another time, we were standing in the kitchen talking to our contractor when, for reasons to remain unknown, the same cat flung itself from God knows where and splatted right onto a window screen, hanging there just long enough for us to figure out what it was.

At least till the cats wreak their havoc, there are also birds. Little birds, big birds, even ducks that took to hanging out in the pool. Our pool guy urged us to discourage them; he has clients who didn't, and then the ducks nested there, and they had to deal with a bunch of ducklings, too.

I hadn't minded the crows despite their bad reputation because they glide so beautifully across the backyard, make a tight circle around the bird feeder, and land at the birdbath. We noticed them bringing things to dip into the water, which I learned is a way to get hydration to babies back at the nest. The problem is, they must be bringing prey. Some days, we literally have a bloodbath. 

For the Birds

The house, the house, the house. That's all we do, and all we talk about, and yet somehow progress is elusive. No, that's not true. The dry rot under the back porch has been fixed, and the brick relaid, so now we just need some stucco repair and the drainpipes reinstalled. And then we can finally get rid of the porta-potty that's sitting in our front yard—although the gardeners and UPS guy will be disappointed.

Inside, meanwhile, is stuck in neutral. We were supposed to get our furniture delivered this coming Tuesday, but it just got pushed to Friday. I understand that this is the definition of a first-world problem, but I don't care. I want carpets! And I want to stop eating at the uncomfortable kitchen table! And I want to have people over and be able to show them around without having to say, "Someday, there will be a table here. And a chair here." 

We did have one interior breakthrough: the contractors rotated the kitchen island, which had always felt 90 degrees off. Electrical wires ran through two of the legs down into the crawl space, which meant that once the island was turned, we were left with two holes in the floor. MacGyver would be proud.

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I was so pleased with myself for fixing the bird feeder in the backyard, because I mainly do the day-to-day maintenance stuff and Adam handles the repairs. But I figured out a way to make the thing work, trimmed the nearby plants to foil the cats who prowl our yard, talked to the pet store staffer about birdseed for a surprisingly long time, and rejoiced when the birds began noticing the feeder and adjacent birdbath.

I knew squirrels are tough to discourage, but I still can't figure out how they manage to get up there. (They wait till I'm two feet away to leap to the ground.) Recently, we've reached a detente: I fill the plastic cone, the squirrels pick out all the sunflower seeds and scatter the rest of the seed everywhere, and the birds swoop in to clean it up.

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I've forced myself to start reading more. I had stopped because I read on and off all day for Siteline, but I'm always trying to get away from my screens, and a bunch of books bought early on in the pandemic keep staring at me. Two I'd recommend: I wasn't excited about the prospect of reading Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet, but it ended up being a delight, even if the grieving wore a bit thin. And Ben Lerner's The Topeka School was the most ambitious novel I've read in years. I won't say I enjoyed it, per se, but I was enthralled and impressed by it.

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We went to L.A. for a night, just for something to do and to eat at a different restaurant (Rustic Canyon, which was having an off night but still beat almost everything in Santa Barbara). The hotel—the Viceroy Santa Monica—was all about Covid protocols: no housekeeping, no room service, no sharing the elevators with people outside your household, and so on, and every unoccupied room had a "sealed for your protection" tape across the door. Except ours.

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Me: The bubble wrap on the living room window seat—did you move it from the office?

Adam: No.

Me: Then where did it come from?

Adam: The office. [Pause.] So I guess the answer to your first question was yes.

The Book Fairy

We've been in the new house for two weeks now, and it's starting to feel good. At first, everywhere we looked we saw something else that needed to be fixed or cleaned or organized or just dealt with somehow, and the days were exhausting. Unfortunately, the work inside has been ongoing, with one room in particular cursed: the paint job showed off how bad the skim coating underneath was, so that had to be redone, but then the skim-coat guy messed up the new finish on the floor, so the floor has to be redone. As rooms go, it's not essential—and we don't really have any furniture for it yet—but still, it'd be nice to have.

The furniture, for now, is whatever we had in storage or shipped from New York City; the effect is bare-bones. When the new stuff arrives, we'll undoubtedly love it simply because it'll be a real sofa and a full-size carpet and so on. (My nightstand is a box of books.) I have enjoyed unpacking boxes from our old house in Santa Barbara, the one we had years ago; much of it I have no recollection of, so there were moments that felt like Christmas.

The duck lamp probably won't make the final cut, but it gave me joy. The thing itself is what it is, and not without charm, but I really love it because I saw it somewhere years ago, on deep sale, and because it was right before my birthday, I made Adam go buy it for me. And now, every time I look at it, I get to imagine the purchase happening.

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Outside is another story. When you look out the living room window toward the backyard, you see red caution tape warning you about the giant hole in the porch. Dry rot remediation.

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I believe people should only hold on to books they love, and I could make a compelling argument to release those, too, except now I have a lot of bookshelves that need filling. I took a box of meh to a used book store and got $12 for a handful of them. The clerk and I chatted about what to do with the rest, and he said he generally recommends that people donate them to those Little Free Libraries you see here and there. I said that I could carry the books around in my trunk, and when I come upon a box, drop some off. "You'd be the book fairy," he said, not meanly but I scowled anyway.

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I haven't enjoyed much of anything on TV lately. We tried watching Broadchurch, but who thinks the murder of a child is entertainment? (Everyone else, apparently.) We made it through one episode of Bridgerton, a shoddy imitation of Jane Austen if ever there was one. (The race-blind casting is refreshing, sure.) And I thought Tenet was absolutely stupid. The sole female main character's only motivation was to save her child, even though the entire world was at risk of being destroyed. It was clearly a man's idea of what women value, perhaps because that's what men value in women. So we keep watching Frasier, and even the lame ones are good, although I couldn't believe that each season—and there are eleven—is 24 episodes. There are 264 total. Maybe we should consider it as research for next Halloween....

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The other evening, my phone rang. Adam was calling from somewhere in the house.

Me: Yes?
Adam: We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. It’s late.
Me: Over the phone?
Adam: Oh, it’s you! Sorry, wrong person.

Cheesehead

Funny how?

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At some point in my erstwhile travel-journalism career, I must have written critically about Global Entry, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that lets you get pre-approved for re-entry (i.e., so you can skip the lines), because while everyone else gets to renew online, I have to do it in person. If I found that annoying when I lived in New York City and was often at airports anyway, I had no idea how good I had it. This time, I had to drive 90 minutes to L.A., then 90 minutes back, all for a three-minute interaction. The officer asked a few questions—along the lines of had I been convicted of a felony—and took a new photo and a new set of fingerprints. Before I could finish asking why I get to do this in person (having coached myself to phrase it like an opportunity), the officer insisted that the system is totally random. If that were true, I wanted to say, other people would get to renew in person, too. No matter, they still clearly hate me.

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The house is moving forward, which is a relief, because for a long time the contractors seemed to rip something new out on a daily basis. It should be done by year end, which is when we have to move out of the rental, but just in case, we've rented a place in wine country for the first week in January. That sounded much more appealing before the state issued a three-week stay-at-home order likely to be extended into January....

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Adam: What state is Wisconsin in? Not Minnesota.... Not Illinois....
Me: I don't know what to say.
Adam: Help me.
Me: Wisconsin is a state.
Adam: Oh. But there's a city called Wisconsin, too, right?

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Three cultural recommendations: 1) Barack Obama's new memoir, A Promised Land, is fantastic; the writing is so clean and smooth, it goes down like water. I read a chapter a day, which makes the 700-page length seem achievable. 2) Deutschland '83—along with its sequels, Deutschland '86 and Deutschland '89—is excellent television. Unfortunately, the first two are on one streaming platform and the third is on another. 3) As members of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's Cinema Society, we occasionally get early access to films, such as Assassins, a documentary about the murder of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's estranged brother by two unwitting young women. I worried it would be sensationalized, but with a story that good, it didn't need it.

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I also enjoyed watching Broadcast News for the first time since it came out in 1987—the movie has aged terribly in some ways and not at all in others—not least of all for this kid, who looks just like Adam did as a child.

Of House and Home

Our time at the ridiculous rental is coming to an end: the owner has accepted an offer, and the inspection process has begun. Even if the buyer pulls out, we'll need to find somewhere else to live, because the owner would much prefer to rent it to someone who will pay much more than we do. And the rental market being the way it is, that won't be hard to accomplish.

We've had a great time there, so this is all very bittersweet. Our neighbor apparently agrees.

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The good news is that we have another house, the relatively tiny one we bought. The bad news is that the chances of the necessary repairs being done by December 31 are slim; we'll either move in anyway or have to find somewhere else to be for a while. Back to the good news: we still like the place!

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This caught me by surprise. I guess it's better than putting bleach in the oral hygiene aisle.

Silver, If You Must

"You have so much white in your hair!" is not a correct way to greet someone, no matter how long it has been since you've seen each other. Just FYI.

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This pretty much sums up where we are with the house.

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Mom: Oh, I have a voicemail! [Listens.] It was Jan Brown.
Me: Who's Jan Brown?
Mom: She's married to Big Dick.

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One of the local magazines asked me to write a couple of items, which was nice of them. One was about Revolver, a new pizzeria with a raffish vibe. It included this line: "The small room is decorated with Bodden’s own artwork, records, and cookbooks, and the handful of tables out front look straight out a thrift store." As you might have noticed, it's missing a word; I meant to type "straight out of a thrift store." (Italics mine.) Someone changed it to "straight out onto a thrift store"—and, unfortunately, (a) they never ran the edited version by me, and (b) there is no thrift store nearby. It put me in the unenviable position of having to tell Bodden that I had my actual point was that his furniture looks cheap and used, a line he otherwise would've glossed right over.

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I couldn't resist seconds....

Me: Is Jan Brown happily married to Big Dick?
Mom: Oh, yes.

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Wisdom from designer Ron Arad in the Financial Times:

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Adam: I need a new book to read.
Me: You could try the John Banville book I just bought. It's a mystery.
Adam: What about this one on the coffee table?
Me: Sure. It's about mushrooms.
Adam: Is it fiction? [Pause.] Why are you laughing?

Stag Party

At the farmers' market....

Farmer: How are you today?
Me: Not bad, thanks. And you?
Farmer: I'm completely housetrained and socially acceptable!
Me: Are you really the best judge of that?

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I passed the last "Jeopardy!" test and participated in a final tryout, which involved playing a mock game via Zoom, clicking on a pen and answering when called upon. I think the point was less about what we know, and more about how we perform under stress; we spent more time doing game-show banter than playing. The whole thing was taped, which means that if anyone chooses to, they'll see the look on my face when I noticed that one contestant had propped up Alex Trebek's recent memoir behind her. Anyway, now I'm in a pool of a couple thousand contestants, and over the next 18 months, about 20 percent of us will end up on the show. After that, we can choose to try out again.

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I assumed the noise outside the window was a hiker, but it was a stag. It stood still for the longest time, looking at me but also as if it was posing—a spray of grass was caught in its antlers, like a Philip Treacy hat in a John Galliano show.

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Mom: The other day, I asked A-L-E-X-A to play Prince.
Me: Did you enjoy it?
Mom: Not really.
Me: Why did you do that?
Mom: I wanted to feel closer to my children.

I didn't bother recommending the "super deluxe" reissue of Prince's main masterpiece, Sign o' the Times; it's eight discs' worth of material that's mainly for us fans. The highlight so far for me is the 10-minute "Highly Explosive" version of "La, La, La, He, He, Hee," a throwaway B-side that he gave a full, funky workout.

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Maintenance on the house continues: termite and dry rot repairs, then tenting, then the roofers come back to assess the damage done by the tenting, and so on. The landscaping, at least, is perfect—or it was till we found out about a broken pipe and valve.... We probably won't move in till December.

Cotswold Cottage

As I mentioned back in May, I murdered the "Jeopardy!" test available online to people in this area—the questions answers whatever were deep in my wheelhouse. So I wasn't surprised to get an email about a follow-up audition (also online). I wavered a bit before accepting the invitation, knowing that the whole thing would stress me out, and what were the odds that they'd ask the right questions answers stuff again?

The Zoom call got off to a rocky start, because when you say "audition," I'm naturally going to imagine Emma Stone in La La Land, where the spotlight is on me and my performance. Instead, this was a group call, which I only realized after a bit of babbling. As for the test itself, it was 50 questions done in a separate browser window, with eight seconds to respond. You don't have to reply in the form of a question, but you do have to type—and ideally spell correctly—meaning longer responses were more troublesome. We were all being recorded as we took the test, so the producers could make sure we weren't cheating. What they got from me was a lot of furious typing before the question was even done being read—I was in the zone—and then staring straight ahead trying to look telegenic. I know I missed three, and I made educated guesses on three or four more, but I felt good about the rest. Crossword puzzles may end up being useful after all.

We'll hear in a few weeks.

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Adam and I have bought a house, and the goal this time is to keep it. Technically, it's not ours yet: we've released contingencies, which means that if we back out before closing on September 15, the sellers get to keep the deposit. In the meantime, we're getting to work organizing the many necessary repairs—new HVAC ducting, new roof, pest remediation (including tenting for termites), and so on.

If you've visited us at the house we've been renting, you might be surprised at how different this one is. Technically there are two bedrooms, but it's really more of a one-bedroom, which is why we'll eventually need to do the addition that the current owner had designed but never started. The house is old and tiny and really cute, in Montecito not far from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, but a world away from their house in terms of style. Although it does have an English name....

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I rather enjoyed the movie An Easy Girl (an unfortunate translation of Une Fille Facile), but then I have a weakness for French films. It's streaming on Netflix, which defaults to English dubbing. Turn that crap off.

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It's that time again.

Cheeky Tomato

"You hadn't posted anything in a while, so I was worried something might be wrong," said a friend, explaining why he called, as if I needed a reason. I'm delighted to report that nothing is wrong in our little bubble—except my vision, that is, because I gave in and got progressive lenses and something needs adjusting. My left eye is functionally dead when it comes to reading. Brace for typos.

I've just been busier than ever with Siteline; readership is been up, and this past week likely set a record, thanks to the news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have moved here. (They're about a half mile from the house we're renting, and no, I won't tell you the address.) It's funny how that put Santa Barbara on the map for a lot of people we know.

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Speaking of Siteline, I posted this the other day, so if you saw it there, feel free to skip ahead.

I’m generally irked by the F45 Training fitness studio: its loud music makes me not want to sit outside Dune Coffee Roasters as much as I used to and its patrons often stand around outside Dune with no masks on. This morning, I went to Dune anyway—the café was selling breakfast burritos as a pop-up event—and I was glad I did, because an F45er made my day. After complaining that F45’s cook-at-home recipes use foreign measurements, she wailed, “I mean, what the hell is an ounce?”

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We still haven't found a house, but not for lack of trying. The market here has turned insane with people from L.A. and elsewhere snapping up everything in sight, in an effort to wait out the pandemic somewhere more delightful. 

We could always buy our old house, which came on the market this week. Not! I loved that house, but you can't go home again. Still, the listing photos brought back a lot of memories—we had sold a lot of our furniture along with the house. The current owners got about as far as we did filling those bookshelves....

A Bird's-Eye View

As I mentioned last time, the pools are open, which is fantastic, but we're not allowed to change in the locker rooms or by the pool, using a towel to perform what's called a deck change. That didn't stop one old woman, who was under the impression that if she turned her back to us, we couldn't see her.

Somehow, I have found it possible—but awkward to the extreme—to change out of my suit and into shorts while sitting in the driver's seat of my car. Naturally, I try to wait till no one is nearby. The other day, however, I was midway through the act—i.e., the worst possible moment—when a couple pushing a stroller approached. They must've come from inside a building. I dragged my towel over my lap right as they reached the window. It was not a good look, but it beat the alternative. I did wish I hadn't been wearing my Joe Biden shirt.

Later on, and I don't even know if I was thinking about all this, I couldn't recall the word exhibitionist. Opposite of voyeur, starts with ex.... In hindsight, I should not have asked Adam. That afternoon, while we were looking at a house, the broker explained that the windows in the master bath can be made opaque with the flip of a switch. "Erik wouldn't use that," he said. "He's an exhibitionist."

I objected, strenuously, probably making it seem even likelier to be true. And Adam explained that he was thinking about my attempts to change out of my swimsuit. But I suspect the damage was done. 

P.S. These birds must like to watch, because they built a nest in our shower window.

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I've really struggled with Gary Shteyngart's novel Lake Success, despite loving his Super Sad True Love Story. The characters are unlikable and unbelievable, a sour combination. But this line, about a Greyhound bus trip, was gold:

The PA system screeched to life. "Tuscaloosa," the driver sighed, as if he had had his heart broken there.