The General Situation

Light My Fire

This is odd, even for California.

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Adam is always telling me that I drive too fast, too recklessly, especially on our street. So you can imagine my delight when, at a party, one of our neighbors said, "Are you the guy in the BMW who nearly runs me over all the time?" That's Adam's car, which I can't drive it because it's stick-shift.

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One of the best Christmas gifts I got this year was something I gave Adam. (That's marriage for you.) It's an electric candle lighter—a current zaps between the little prongs like a device in Dr. Frankenstein's lab—that charges via USB. It's a giant leap forward from the butane ones. I also gave him a vintage snuffer that's more fun to use than you'd ever imagine.

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Today at the house, we discovered that the kitchen window is busted and one of the guest room showers doesn't turn on at all. We're both exhausted by the damn place, and any goodwill I might have felt for the former owners is long gone. (That's what cleaning someone else's filthy kitchen cabinets will do to you.) Truthfully, it was gone when I saw the bonkers letters that one has been writing to the local paper.

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The spy game ain't what it used to be.

Ruthless Women Who Ruled the Waves

We're finally getting a bit of forward momentum on the house: the gas leak is fixed, the irrigation leak might not be in the worst possible place, the bathroom designer is engaged, the light fixtures have been put up for consignment, the landscape drains have been cleaned out, and so on.

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Doctor: Are you and your husband monogamous?

Me: Yes. But when he comes here next month, you might let me know if he answers that question differently.

Doctor: You know I couldn't do that.

Me: Well, the least you can do is suggest strongly that he sit me down for a little chat.

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Tough choice at the magazine rack.

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Received this email today in the Siteline account:

I'm writing to get in touch with Erik Torkells. I'm a New Yorker, and came across your Tribeca Citizen piece about your bag-snagging outing. Since I live on a street with two trees decorated with heavily filagreed plastic bags, one sporting a bicycle tire, and one with a hula hoop (!), I'm desperate to get ahold of one of the snaggers. Ian Frazier told me they aren't producing them anymore. So I was aiming to write to you and see if I could rent your bag-snagger. Since you are now a Californian, I wonder at the fate of the device. Did you leave it in the care of another tree-lover? (Who might possibly respond positively to someone asking to borrow it?) Thanks for reading this bananas email.

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On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the 1:25 lane and the 1:30 lane swim together, for reasons I don't need to get into. The idea is that we'll swim at the 1:30 pace, but the other day, it sure didn't feel like it. After practice, in the locker room, I asked the lead swimmer if we were on 1:25. "Yes," he said. "I thought about you, because you were the only 1:30 swimmer in the lane, but I figured you could handle it. You're starting to get into shape."

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We had dinner the other night with some friends, Laurie and Joe. She's fairly reserved; he's not. The talk turned toward TV, as it always seems to.

Joe: I really loved that show "Dirtbag."

Laurie: "Fleabag."

Me: Adam, that's the British show we gave up on midway through the first episode. It's the one with the woman who—

Joe: GETS SCREWED UP THE ASS!

Me: —has anal sex with a man.

Adam: Yeah, I got that.

 

Deferred Maintenance

My friend Beth informs me that the housing tract I grew up in has rebranded itself. If anyone asks where I'm from, you know what I'm going to say. (The aggressively retro typography is a kooky choice.)

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The house drama continues. Adam repeatedly kicks himself for buying it at all, while I wish we had paid more attention to the obvious signs of deferred maintenance. The previous owners appear not to have done a thing during their decade there—lucky for us, I suppose, that the house is only ten years old. Even the cleaning the house reputedly got after they moved out was less than perfunctory, and yet there's no point in cleaning with renovations on the horizon.

Or perhaps that's a mirage. We need to figure out which renovations to make, but we don't have an infinite budget, because we might very well put it on the market as soon as we spruce it up, and there's a limit to what it might sell for. And we don't necessarily know what can be done, let alone how much it would cost, and what would the backup option be? What can we live with? What can we not? What would make the house more appealing to the next buyer?

Simultaneously, things have been breaking. We discovered a massive leak in the irrigation landscaping, a gas leak at the water heater, a broken heat pump, clogged exterior drains everywhere, etc. The leak remains unsolved, which is a problem, while many of the other issues only get addressed as slowly as the insurance company allows. (The gas to the water heater was turned off, so there's no hope of the house just blowing up.)

Some tasks, of course, are our responsibility. For instance, the back patio has narrow trench drains running along the retaining wall: a gutter is covered with a grate, upon which stones are stacked. The entire thing was thoroughly caked with dirt, mud, dead rosemary leaves, and other debris, from the bottom of the gutter to the top of the rocks. (It's been a long time since I've seen so many earthworms.) Cleaning it all out has involved scrubbing and rinsing every single rock. I must've looked like a mad washerwoman.

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This was an exciting discovery. It's spices more than herbs.

Life Is Short, Use Big Spoons

It's been a while! The more I work on my new website, Siteline, the less inclined I am to pay attention to this blog. But I'm taking it easy on the Siteline front this week, so here we are.

The big news is still that we've bought a house. (The photo above shows where it is in relation to our rental.) Immediately, Adam second-guessed the purchase, despairing that we had made a mistake, that he didn't want to take on the renovation project, that he doesn't even like the house. There were sleepless nights, half-eaten meals. I told him that we could put it on the market right that minute, if he was prepared to lose quite a bit of money, or we could see how we feel after replacing the floors and bathrooms. If he doesn't want to live there, we can try to sell. (Is it fortunate that we didn't get married early in our relationship...?)

Having passed through the initial operatic stages of grief and regret, we entered the part where we put out fires and stem floods. Literally: a storm dumped 2.5 inches of rain on Montecito, and water got perilously close to flooding the master bedroom because the upstairs terrace drain was clogged. Then a heating unit broke. Then another heating unit broke. And so on....

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Meanwhile, our rental doesn't seem likely to sell anytime soon; there have only been two showings. Still, I'm tempted to arrange rat traps and fire extinguishers all around, so anyone looking at the house will understand what he/she is getting into.

The rat traps probably wouldn't be a bad idea, regardless. We've always had a rat problem outside the house—never inside!—which is unavoidable, really, because the property abuts the national forest, and this is as much their turf as it is ours. Many folks around here use bait boxes, but poisoning rodents leads to poisoned raptors. So we ignore the rats, which is generally easy, and every now and then—i.e., before we have houseguests—I put on my face mask and sweep up the rat shit.

The other day, however, a rat got stuck on our master bathroom balcony.

It repeatedly flung itself at the wall, trying to bounce off and up and onto the top, parkour-style, to no avail. As much as I don't like having rats around, I like less knowing that an animal is suffering, so I tossed a broom onto the balcony from a nearby window—luckily, it landed so that the handle leaned against the wall. At first, the rat didn't understand, but after 20 or so minutes, I saw it approach the broom and climb a few inches up. Then a few inches more. And a few more. And finally it was over the wall, free once again to poop with abandon.

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A few months ago, I had physical therapy for my shoulder—just a few visits, and a lot of exercises at home, and everything was back to normal. More recently, my back started hurting, so I called to make another appointment. The receptionist asked if I'd wait while she looked up available times, and I said yes. But instead of putting me on hold, she set down the phone. 

"It's that Erik Torkells guy again," she said, with a sigh, to a colleague. "He only came three times before and [inaudible inaudible inaudible]. What should I do? I guess I should ask Art [the owner]."

When she came back on, she offered me a time and date, and I quickly accepted it and hung up. But I was shaken. What had I done during those three visits? I feel like I have a good sense of when I'm being weird, and I didn't think that was the case. Was it because I'm gay? Were they all hateful Christians? The whole thing threw me for a loop, forcing me to question whether the way I think I'm coming across is how I'm actually coming across. New-house issues distracted me for the next few hours, and then my phone rang: the physical therapy office was calling. Art left a message saying that he just wanted to know whether the whole fraud situation had been resolved. When I called back, he explained that my insurance company had inadvertently sent a check to some other PT firm, which cashed it, and as a result, a flag went up in the fraud department, which forced Art to deal with a bunch of paperwork. As I told him, this was the first I had heard of it. And then I told him that even though I was sorry for the hassle he had to go through, I was also hugely relieved that I hadn't evidently been such a freak after all.

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At the risk of sounding even older than I am, something really has been lost in regard to customer service. Take, for example, Bon Appétit magazine. My parents have given Adam a gift subscription for years, but we haven't received the magazine in months. I went online to look for a phone number. (A) The "customer service" link on Bon Appétit's website leads to an error message. (B) The phone number is listed as 800-31-0337. (C) I found the correct number online, only to get a recording saying that the Condé Nast customer-service department is "closed for the holiday and will reopen on [click]." Every single one of those missteps is an easy fix.

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It looks like we might sell our apartment to a neighbor, so while we were in New York, I went through some old stuff. This was from my friend Kristen, in late 80s or early 90s.

We Bought a House

Yes, we finally bought a house. It doesn't check every box on our wishlist—for one thing, it's a much different style than we ever saw ourselves in—but the setting is lovely and the rooms and windows are big. So the stress and anxiety about whether to follow through on the house has been replaced by stress and anxiety about all the work we have ahead of us. The house needs new floors (wood instead of glossy black tile), new bathrooms (with no glossy black tile), and softer, less geometric landscaping. We don't expect to be in it for at least six months—and we have to hope that no one buys the house we're renting before then. If so, we'll find an interim rental.

P.S. While the house generally needs warming up, we plan on switching out the extra-spicy Chihuly School chili-pepper pendant light. If you know anyone who might want to buy it, get in touch....

P.P.S. Adam mentions backing out every few hours, so this is all a bit touch and go.

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I highly recommend Knives Out, the new murder mystery—as much for the humorous dialogue as for the twisty plot. I'll be interested to see whether right-wing types embrace the film, given its bent.

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And don't bother trying to communicate with me for the next 72 hours, as I'll be deep into the reissue of Prince's 1999. I managed to listen to a few tracks in the car; the 8:47-minute version of "Possessed" is a keeper.

This Is 50

"Thanksgiving Creepy" is more like it.

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I'm pretty good at not thinking about my age, so turning 50 this week was a shock. Not because I didn't know it was coming, but because I had to talk about being 50 all day long (along with the requisite discussions of colonoscopies). It started with my doctor, whom I had an 8:30 a.m. appointment with about a muscle strain in my lower back, which seems like an apt way to kick off this decade. Then I was off to the drugstore for anti-inflammatories and a heating pad. Fifty is the new seventy!

On the plus side, I got to go to two new restaurants—one truly new, the other new to me—and that's a rare treat in this relatively small town. Dinner was at the Rosewood Miramar, with a drink first at the resort's Manor Bar. Smoke, followed by fire. (The second photo is of a crème brûlée flambée, a.k.a. my new drag name.)

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Regarding the house that we're close to buying: I was correct when I wrote that we had passed through the initial panic attack, and while I was prepared for the second wave, it has been much more vicious than I anticipated. Last night, Adam was so overwhelmed with agita that he could barely speak or eat (or drive, but that's all I'll say about that). This morning, our cars met on the street as I was heading home and he was driving to Ojai. We rolled down our windows, and I said I thought we should just pull out of the deal. He said he had just come to the conclusion that we should move forward. But that was at least six hours ago, so who knows where we stand now.

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Maybe names really are destiny.

Berry Interesting

We're in escrow on a house (again). That's all I'm going to say about it, except to note that we seems to have made it through the panic-attack phase. Inspections are next week, and if all goes well, we close at the end of the month. The house needs work, though, so we wouldn't be moving in anytime soon.

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Finally, good-movie season is here! I'm resolved to seeing Parasite, even though it sounds rather tense, and I look forward to Ford v. Ferrari, Driver v. Johansson (a.k.a. Marriage Story), Little Women, Knives Out, and The Two Popes—perhaps we'll even see one or two in a movie theater. We did make it to see Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, which I didn't think held together quite as well as critics seem to believe, but enjoyed anyway.

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I've been mesmerized by this bush, at the start of our street. We moved into this house around January 1, so we wouldn't have seen the berries before. 

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After reading an article about how the wide-angle option on my iPhone is worth playing with, I've been giving it a go. I'm not a fan of fish-eye distortion—it's how you make a small room look larger—but it suited the hairpin turn below our house.

Season's Greetings

For the past few years, we've sent out holiday cards because I like receiving them, especially when there are photos of the senders (and not just their kids), and/or a note. I prefer to put my own stamp on this kind of thing, so we hired an illustrator each time, and the results were really fun. She's know for drawing pugs, so it was a good match.

After last year, however, I vowed not to send anymore out. For one thing, they're a fair amount of work; second, recipients don't ever acknowledge the card; and third, we receive fewer and fewer cards each year—last year we got like six. Still, it's a rare chance to remind people that we're alive, particularly now that we've moved to California, so when I got a catalog from one of those holiday card printing companies, well.... Adam vetoed it.

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I've praised David Marchese's interviews in the New York Times before, but this week's, with Shirley MacLaine, is a good reason to do it again. Also, kudos to Martin Scorcese for pointing out the problem with the glut of superhero movies.

The Indoor/Outdoor Lifestyle

Ever since the snake, we've been vigilant about not leaving doors open. At first, that didn't include the balcony off the master bathroom, which Adam liked to have open, even though I was concerned about rodents coming in. (There is plenty of evidence that they enjoy the balcony.) Instead of rats or mice, however, we got a scorpion.

After that, we've been hypervigilant about the doors. But once the house started being shown, we were vulnerable again. The brokers like to open every door in advance of the potential buyer's arrival, to emphasize Santa Barbara's famous "indoor/outdoor lifestyle."

At least it wasn't a snake (which would've come in handy...). I don't blame the mouse for venturing inside—the nights have grown chilly—but you'd think it would know better than to walk around in front of us. It was there for so long I had time to get my phone, take a photo, and post it on Instagram. We spent all of dinner with one eye on the kitchen; we're not afraid of mice, but the sudden movement, in places you don't expect it, is shocking.

We caught the mouse that night. And reinforcements arrived. (Do watch the video. It's amazing.)

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At the farmer's market, I decided to buy eggs from the woman who sells chickens. She was helping a customer, so I waited. When their transaction eventually ended, the customer didn't move; instead, they talked about other things. I was growing antsy, but I made myself count slowly to 60. Even though the chicken vendor saw me waiting, she did nothing to move the other woman along. I turned and left—and not in an outward huff, because this is a small town.

I told Adam, who was waiting for me, about it. He asked if she was selling chickens—the farm has been quarantined for a while—and I said I didn't know. He decided to find out. The other customer was still there. When the chicken lady saw Adam, she interrupted the customer, telling her that she needed to help Adam "because he had just been waiting so patiently."

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Then what on earth is the point of the thing?

Tumbleweeds

The house we've been renting went on the market this week (for $10.9 million, so, no, we will not be buying it). The brokers took photos a couple of weeks ago, and I was tickled to see that my tumbleweed made the cut. I found it on the driveway as we were moving in, and I thought it was important to have some bit of decor that was ours—otherwise, the house is too generic. Also, I happen to love tumbleweeds. When Adam and I were at JFK airport recently, we were sitting by the gate when a small tumbleweed blew in from the jetway and across the terminal floor. Then another came, and another, and so on. It was very mysterious—this was New York City!—until we boarded the plane and saw more tumbleweeds jammed into the luggage rack that they use to gate-check bags. The plane must have been coming from somewhere much more arid, and when the gate door was opened, they got sucked inside the airport.

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When I left Travel + Leisure magazine a million years ago, the lovely copy editor in the cubicle next to mine gave me a terrific gift: a mock synopsis of a sitcom based on my life, or at least the work part (and/or whatever he heard me yapping about on the phone). He meant it fondly, I'm positive. I'll need to look for it next time I'm in New York City.... Anyway, every now and then I meet someone so quirky that I think I really am in a sitcom. (Not "Frasier," thank you very much.) Take the guy who cuts my hair, Pete. I think he's always stoned—actually, that's probably true of most people around here. I think he's superstoned, or possibly just very, very mellow. Adam went to him first and recommended him, and when I went, I had to hear over and over how hysterical Adam is. "Adam is so funny!" Pete would say. "He cracks me up!"

When I told Pete about my parking ticket, he shared strategies of his that had worked in the past, including putting a bag over the "no parking" sign then taking a photo of it as proof that he shouldn't have been ticketed, and showing up in person at the police department and asking them to just let it go.

At my last visit, probably apropos of lunchtime, Pete told me how he had been watching online videos of ways prisoners hack their food into more ambitious dishes. Inspired, he went to the liquor store and bought the ingredients for a prison "burrito": instant ramen, Doritos ("but some people prefer Cheetos"), and a Slim Jim. Through some alchemy, hot water makes the ramen congeal into a sort of tortilla, which you essentially steam in the Doritos bag—or at least that's what I understood of the process. He mentioned that his girlfriend's birthday is coming up, and I suggested that he make her a prison cake.

"With Twinkies!" he said. "I could write, 'Happy birthday to my prisoner' on it."

"Or 'to my ball and chain,'" I said.

"Yes!" he said. "My ball and chain!" (I recommended a backup cake, just in case.)

He lost favor when I told him I'd be turning 50 in a few weeks and he didn't object; I expect everyone to think that such a thing is impossible. But then just when I'm sure he's not paying attention, which is not great in a hairdresser, I remember that I only had to tell him once how much I hate being shown the back of my head, and he never bothers to hand me the mirror anymore.

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I'm cracking myself up on Instagram. Not sure the Four Seasons thinks it's funny, though.