Monthly Archives: June 2009

House hunting

We’re here in California looking for a place to live. It is not a particularly pleasant task. You call about an apartment, and people don’t call you back. You talk to someone who says the apartment really isn’t for rent yet, but it will be soon, and they can’t show it yet, but they can show it soon, and it’s all very vague, and you realize that this person wants to make sure that only The Right People get to rent in this building, like probably only white people who seem “respectable.” You go to see an apartment in your price range, and it’s in a building that is well-maintained but was originally poorly built. We’ve always been lucky in the past, and have always found a good landlord renting a decent apartment at a fair price — but every time we go house-hunting, we realize that our experience is probably not the norm, which seems so sad.

Published (almost)

The preliminary edition of Liberal Pilgrims: Varieties of Liberal Religious Experience in New Bedford is now up on lulu.com. I call it a “preliminary edition” because I’ve never worked with lulu.com before, and I want to see a physical copy of the book before I decide it’s really OK. I’ll let you know when it’s really ready for release

The back cover copy reads: Continue reading →

What I’ll miss

As we get ready to move to California, I’ve been thinking about what I’ll miss. Of course I’ll miss my dad and sister, although they live just far enough away from here that I only see them about once every two months. Of course I’ll miss eastern Massachusetts culture and accents (that’s plural on purpose), since I’m used to cold undemonstrative people who speak God’s own English.

While I was taking a long walk today, I realized that I will also miss eastern Massachusetts birds. I’m used to the eastern Massachusetts ecosystems. I’m used to watching Common Grackles come back each year (no grackles in California). I’m used to hearing the song of Northern Cardinals (no cardinals in California, except a few feral escapees). It’s a whole different ecosystem out there, with completely different birds. It will be fun learning a whole new ecosystem, but I’ll still miss this ecosystem.

Indexing

I am deep in the process of creating an index for this book project I’m working on. Who knew indexing could be so much fun? It’s just as much fun as mapping out all the links in a fairly large Web site — for after all, a book with an index is merely another kind of hypertext, using slower technology.

Binging on writing

I have spent the last few days binging on writing, trying to meet a self-imposed deadline on a big writing project. I have been writing in every spare moment (except those few spare moments when I was reading). I am going to miss my self-imposed deadline by a few days, but it has been an entirely delightful process: writing, revising, rewriting, and now proofreading and doing the final polishing. Tomorrow I get to start work on the index, something I am really looking forward to.

And what will be the final result? — a book-length project that perhaps only a dozen people will ever bother to read. Funnily enough, I have not been adversely affected by the thought of the small size of my expected readership. The dozen people who will read this book-length project will really care about the subject, and what I’ve written is reasonably well-crafted and well-structured. Above all, the process has been thoroughly enjoyable, from the initial conception right through the final revision. I guess I just like to write.

Changing neighborhood

T— told Carol that he’s going to sell his condo and move out of our neighborhood. It’s getting too noisy, he said.

There have always been bars and nightspots in the neighborhood, but in the past few months several new bars have opened. Fortunately for us, we’re three or four blocks away from the really noisy bars, but at closing time on Saturday night, even we can hear the hooping and hollering and revving of engines. We all wanted our neighborhood to have a little more life, but I don’t think any of us were hoping for a little more drunken noisy life after midnight.

One of the new bars that recently opened up is called Rose Alley, and at permitting time the owners implied it would be a place that would emphasize eating over drinking. Carol and I happened to walk past Rose Alley in the afternoon a few days ago, and Carol pointed out that they have already had to put a sign on the building: “This Is A Residential Neighborhood. Please Respect Our Neighbors.” The sign was placed right where the neighbors will see it when they walk past the building, but not where the clientele would notice it as they leave, drunk and noisy, at two in the morning.

You can’t blame the bar owners for wanting to attract lots of people to their bars. But it does seem hard on people like T—, who also have a financial investment at stake — and who actually have to live here, unlike the bar owners who probably live out in the suburbs where it’s quiet.