After sixteen years in the country, I moved back to San Francisco, where I was born and where I lived most of my life, other than when I was in college and a short time I spent in Italy in 1984 and 1985. Among the epiphanies of my newly urbanized existence:
If you want someone to come to your house and fix something, there are lots and lots of people who'll do that, and they're all listed in the phone book.
In the country, no one who is listed in the phone book will come out to where you are. They act, in fact, as if the 25 minutes you live past the outposts of civilization they recognize may as well be strewn with landmines and infested with crocodiles.
Everything is really close. I'm used to thinking, if I want to go to the market, I need to set aside the better part of a day to do it. Now I can run out, buy a week's worth of groceries, and be home, inside of an hour.
Last night, one of the smoke alarms the draconian California real estate laws forced the guy who sold me this house to install in every room was flashing and beeping, presumably because it needed a new battery but perhaps because it was irritated at me for some slight, such as not checking it when we went into Daylight Savings Time.
Tragically this smoke alarm was in my bedroom (and I do want to point out that by the time the smoke hits my bedroom, I'd be pretty well screwed). I'm tall, but my ceilings are taller, and my step ladder didn't even get me close enough to check the beeping flashing demonically possessed artifact of paranoid technology that was going to prevent me from sleeping.
I called my mom to see if she had a ladder, and she suggested I call my brother McKenzie, not in his capacity as an electrical engineer, since even I am capable of changing a smoke alarm battery, but in his capacity as a really tall person with an even taller ladder.
"Mom! McKenzie isn't going to want to come all the way over here after work just to check my smoke alarm!"
She answered patiently. "Christie? McKenzie lives ten blocks from here. It'll take him ten minutes."
Duh.
The dogs have been adjusting well, although I'd say calling it "thriving" might be an overstatement. Rebel had surgery so he's been on leash walks for the last week, but Kyrie could use some more exercise. I'm not certain she's put on weight, because I'm letting her coat grow in (another benefit to urban life, she can't trail into the house with half the forest tangled into her coat anymore). She feels pretty lean but her back has that "table" look I associate with fat dogs. I think I'm going to invest in a visit to a local vet and have her weighed and maybe get her microchipped, although there have been no repeats of Kyrie's Excellent Escape since the day we moved in.
Yesterday I met three friends for lunch and then went to the home of one of them who has a litter of 9-week-old Silken Windhound puppies. This is a new breed, something I used to oppose on principle but that I have a new take on these days - although that will have to wait for another post on another day. The pups were of course adorable, and if there's any therapy better than puppy breath I have no idea what it is. And then I made the long five minute drive back to my house and thought, wow, that wasn't exhausting at all.
My favorite urban experience so far, though, has to be the one I had Tuesday night, when dozens of darling kids dressed up as princesses and action heroes and old-fashioned prisoners and even the Grim Reaper came to my door and let me give them candy, lured up by my candle-lit jack-o-lanterns. I love Halloween, I love the fall, I love the city.
So, guess what? My insurance company is paying for this, and they're actually being great about it. And today when I asked about getting my new stereo, I asked if it was possible to get it enabled to play my iPod.
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