My new home.

I hope. I think it's going to go through.

The thing I referred to as "the estate" a couple of posts back -- it finally came back to me that I had previously called it "the manor". Forgive me, please, dear reader. I shall refer to "the estate" as "the manor" henceforth to avoid further confusion.

Didn't work today. Long story short -- went to visit Charles after work last night. I love him. Not it a way that any straight man could ever understand. Or even most queers. But I do. He offends everyone -- including me, half the time -- but when it comes time to figure out how I'm going to live or else watch my life fall apart, there he is, and he's got a solution close at hand which just happens to serve everyone well -- himself included, lest anyone think him "kind". One step further, he would be Machiavellian. As it is, he can tell himself he's Machiavellian while actualy doing a freind a favour.

I did some serious heavy lifting at the manor yesterday which is fairly unusual. The lady of the house indicated that the pallet of compost had been there in her driveway for far longer than I had any reason to believe it had been, though it *had* been there for at least the two days since I started working for her -- two days longer than textbooks could sit in the parking lot at Hartman. There was never a command issued. There was just the slightest hint of dissatisfaction at its having been left there, even now. Sounded reasonable to me. So the next day, I cut a few daffodils, and then promptly moved all the compost out of sight.

Charles invited me over to watch "Downfall" -- or so it's called in its English title. That's the "Hitler movie" that caused such a stir, what, one, two years ago? It was amazing. Incredibly well acted. Fast paced enough that only frame-by-frame reviews indicated what was going on between certain characters in certain scenes.

Between that, the well-deserved death of Jerry Falwell (which we toasted), and Charles' best freind in Colorado having just gone into hospital with a mysteriously unexplained high fever, the evening was perhaps a tiny bit more emotionally charged that it would have been had we *only* been watching a movie about the Berlin bunker suicides.

Actually it was a thoroughly enjoyable night.

After the feature, as Charles is wont to do, he showed me clips of countless other films until he fell asleep. I thoroughly enjoyed them all, but finally wore out, and left for home. When I woke up I was physically exhausted. Not fit to work out in the sun, even though the weather's cooperating (for the moment).

I went down to the rental house that I want like I've *never* wanted to live in *any* rental unit. It's so perfect in so many ways that it would take less time to explain what's wrong with it than what's right with it: the refrigerator and stove are both electric and just old enough to not be ideally efficient. And the kitchen is rather darker than it ought to be. Let's see. What else is "wrong" with the property? Drainage is an issue, but that's true wherever I might live in this town. And one of the windows is missing one part of its latch, which the owner's already replaced with a piece of wood which serves better than the latch served to begin with. The house had its porch enclosed at least 50 years ago. But it's 95% what I want in a home. Easily.

All week I'd been planning what I would say to the owner, who is the landlord, about why I didn't call him back sooner (after leaving a deposit on my first viewing), blah blah blah, and if he has any questions about this or that on my application, let me know.

I've underjudged the straights. There seem to be good breeders out there, just as there are scummy queers.

I didn't need to worry about it. I think we've "clicked" so that he knows he's what I'm looking for in a ladlord and I know he knows what he's looking for in a tenant and we're both willing to bend a little bit.

I've never in my life talked with a landlord like I talked with him. And I've never gotten the sense from a landlord that he wasn't just a short-term speculative realtor or broker but genuinely had the time to discuss things with me, in depth, that he would otherwise be spending fixing cosmetic things before I moved in.

I step into that house and he *knows* I respect it. We'd spoken on the telephone briefly before, after I'd tried to drop off my application (having already left a deposit that conveniently, for me, took the house off the market the same morning it went on the market). I ring the bell and wave through the window. He answers the door, telling me he'd left it open for me. I told him I didn't just like walking in to someone else's house. Deposit or no -- hell, rental or no -- it's not mine. We're already on good terms.

Normally when I rent a unit I ask the dumbest questions. "How are the neighbours?", for instance, to which the answer is always "fine". (I know not to ask this anymore, since "fine" can mean anything from physically abusive chauvanist Russians to intermarried Natives whose intertribal family politics I have to negotiate each and every day, to 15 undocumented immigrants living in the one-bedroom apartment above me, whose children take pleasure in climbing in through the balcony from my "private" patio, below, while playing "ninja" games with kitchen knives exposed.)

I don't mean to be racist. I just don't like having neighbours at too close range. Period. I am *very* private. It's one thing renters never can control, and which they're always lied to about when they seek to rent a space. In the eyes of real-estate types, all neighbours are "quiet", which is almost never true, which means almost all real-estate types, be they realtors or brokers, are professional LIARS. They just want someone with a decent credit rating. (Unless they aim to evict you, in which case your credit rating doesn't really matter, in the end.)

I will have neighbours in my new house -- there's a modest apartment building to the North and a sub-sub-sub-divided house to the South. But they're all a good comfortable distance from me, and I've got a yard and fence pretty much all around. If we happen to meet and exchange pies and stuff, that's great, but it probably won't happen. Like I care. It's a peripheral neighbourhood. One side of the street (my side) is mostly university types, the other's mostly worthless speculator yuppies. As long as they stay on that side of the street, I'll be happy. (And really, they're mostly a few blocks off, still: my street's *the* border street between "affordable but unliveable" and "unaffordable but oh-so-fuckin'-charming", and that won't change without major zoning changes and traffic reroutes that would shut down the whole town.)

The property is zoned for four househoulds per plot. (Forgive me if I don't know real estate stuff here.) But basically: The house to the North is now (apparently) an eight-unit apartment building, and the one to the south has had three "guest houses" added on to the main house. But the landlord/owner seems determined that his plot remain a single-family residence, and I'm willing to help him.

He could *easily* add three cinderblock garages, call 'em all "casitas" and ruin the incredible backyard, but he won't do that. He's more concerned that I not step on this or that seedling. He's not the only landowner on this block who feels this way. It's nice to have mixed detached housing and apartment housing in the block, but no more apartments are needed.

I ask him if it's OK if I build a compost heap -- his response? "No problem. I'd even encourage it."

The owner warns me that there's "heavy traffic" on this street, to which I want to say, but don't quite say, "oh honey, I've lived on Central these last three years, what with all the Harley-Davidson yupppie freaks cruising at all hours who fancy themselves Oakies for roaring down the post-1937 stretch of things in their designer leather jackets at the one point in town they know they won't get stopped on noise ordinances".

I just say "I live on Central". He just smiles and nods like he'd heard it before, but not in the way that he knows I'm trying to pull something on him. The bedroom on the "busy" street is the guest bedroom/study, as I see it. And *my* bedroom? You can not hear a thing.

This time, rather than asking dumb questions under pressure, I came with measurements of all my furniture, determined to decide where big things would go before they went there. It will save a lot of trouble knowing "this goes there" before I start to move stuff in.

I may actually live in an uncluttered space, for once in my life. I'd say things like "this window is two inches lower than what I have now, but I think I can live with that" and he would smile and nod. He even offered to replace a closet door that had been removed generations before. I told him it would be nice but it wasn't a dealbreaker.

I asked questions like "how would a piano do here, as opposed to there" given the flooding that happened last summer, and what it did to the foundations"? See, I have been down in the basement and actually have some sense how the house is constructed.

I go out back and survey the entire back yard as though it were my personal fiefdom. We have some honest disagreement over the desirability of Chinese Elms, but none over where that *one* that's taken root is, given how the water runs off during rainstorms. He's got one seedling coming up he's clearly protected. Makes sense to me in terms of how it's positioned in relation to the bedroom -- it'll water itself and will provide useful shade in the late afternoons. So I sit on myself a bit here -- just a bit, since I don't plan to live here longer than the elm will live, and we're effectively agreed.

We're passionately discussing the pros and cons of allowing a single random seedling that has taken hold to live. That's a good thing.

Massive, incredible thunderstorm directly overhead as I write. Powerful stuff.

He uses Roundup to control the weeds. I'm deeply disappointed, clearly, since this is the same man who's gone well out of his way to plumb a "greywater" system from the washing machine out to the trees in front, and the stereotype is that anyone who does such things cares a great deal about chemical contamination of soils. I tell him, wholeheartedly, I'd rather grow bermuda grass than have him spraying roundup, on which he promises me plugs of bermuda grass from his own yard, if that will help cut down on the weeds, which run rampant, and only asks me that I keep them watered.

Hell yes. I agree. Even though I'm not a big fan of lawns. I aim to grow food in at least one good-sized plot back there. The less Monsanto contamination in the soil when I do, the better.

I ask him about whether the trees out front can survive occasional bleachings of laundry, given how the greywater system he's devised is set up. He seems delighted by the question, having apparently never seriously considered it before. He says it's not a problem where he lives, where he's installed a similar system. I don't press him on the chemical pesticides, assuming that I may actually be able to maintain some sort of groundcover or other.

He knows I give a shit.

I know he gives a shit that I do.

Then the big thing: the backyard's been dug up. Bigtime. He volunteers the information long before I even get to ask. The water line broke between the time I put down the deposit on the property and the time I came back. The piping was from the '20s. Corroded through and through. He showed me massive chunks of pipe, left over, which literally fell apart in his hand. To most renters, I can only assume that seeing that would mean "thanks, I'll look elsewhere". To me it meant "this is no longer a problem".

We talked at length about galvanized steel versus copper versus what he replaced the corroded steel with: something called "PEX". He shows me a sample. I write down all sorts of details and remember what he says about polymerization. Am I a little nervous about it? Yes. But I also know enough to see I'm renting a place from the '20s with 100% new gas and water lines, which at least aren't PVC. So I'll filter my water. Sure beats losing most of it to underground leaks that might flood the cellar, besides dealing with having a military contractor in your backward.

When I first met him he said he'd allow me to store "a suitcase" in the cellar, as long as I didn't go and try to make a living space out of it. He saw from the way I looked around under the foundations (and pointed out a black widow spider to him) that it wasn't worth that, so today, he said he wouldn't even lock it up, meaning I can keep old utility bills and the likes down there with no problem at all. So I've got storage too, for my unslightly things. And it's even got a "ridge" running around it where I can protect my papers from all but possibly the most severe of floods.

The front bedroom, which is the smaller of the two, is painted in a sort of robin's egg blue on one wall. While I did take precise measurements based on my furniture, there's no sign he intends to paind things differently in there, which is fine with me. I didn't ask him -- but I don't think I will have any problem painting rooms if I ever want to do so competently.

Next challenges: the hectic, short-term chaos of moving.

I'm happy.