Schreiber

Right, the other news. (And sorry this is late: I started this post like a week ago, and then never got around to actually posting it.)

Roommate #4 - a.k.a. the one we never see - moved out at the end of last month, so we started interviewing potential replacements. Fortunately, he was able to find several, and we now have somebody who's hoping to be at grad. school at Tufts in the Fall. She seems nice enough, although she's been here only slightly more often than her predecessor (I think a week elapsed between when she signed the paperwork and when she actually spent an actual night here), so it's hard to say for certain.

But that's not the big news.

The news is that all of this meant we met with our landlady a couple of times, and in the course of that it emerged that, contrary to what she'd said on earlier occasions, she's not going to raise our rent by much next year. Possibly even not at all.

And that, perversely, puts me in something of a dilemna. I mean, I hate moving. Likewise, it's seems relatively unlikely that I'll be able to find an apartment that I can actually afford that's as well situated as this one is. Double that if I'm trying to find a place of my own; and if not, I have to find new roommates,* which is something I view with extreme trepidation.

But in a weird way, I was looking forward to moving out. No, let me rephrase that: I want to move out. (I'm just not sure that there's going to be anything I want to move in to.)

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My roommates are nice enough, but I often feel like I'm the only one who ever really cleans around here. And more than that: This apartment has been continuously occupied by an overlapping series of renters for...as least the last fifteen years. That's fifteen years since the carpeting was replaced; there may be stuff LIVING in the heating system; and let's not even talk about the back side of the fridge. Or the cracks in the flooring.
Or anything about the bathrooms.**

Plus of course all the upstairs bedrooms leak heat like anything, so that our heating bills are alarming even while I'm sleeping under a -20°-rated sleeping bag so I don't freeze.

And then there's my stuff. My roommates have plates and pans and glassware; the apartment has plates and pans and glassware; and that'd be great except that it means almost all of my kitchen stuff is in a box in the cellar somewhere. And I stress "somewhere": one of the roommates broke the one wine glass I had upstairs the other week, and now I can't even find where I put the rest of them. When I tried to locate them, I instead found a set of milk/margarita glasses that I'd forgotten I owned.
It should go without saying that this also applies to books.

So I don't know. I guess what I'm going to do (if I can get off my arse) is to look at the market and see what's out there and what I can afford. If it turns out that I can't afford anywhere where I'd want to live,*** I'll deal with this apartment for another year, save up some money, and hope serendipity happens. That's how I got into THIS apartment, after all.

*wiv' aaahlll tha' that entails.

** New!roommate has, admittedly, been working on cleaning the upstairs bathroom; but there's nothing we can really about the tiling, or the fact that getting the sink to train occasionally requires a plunger.

***I have been asking around among my coworkers a bit. Several of them rent, but mostly they moved into their current apartments years ago, and so don't really have a good sense of current market conditions. The one dude in the department who DID move recently was moving as a group with three of his friends; moreover, he says that one-bedroom apartments in his area go for $1500/month and up. And granted, that's in Newton, but still. I ran the numbers, and I can probably, technically afford that much; but there'd be no margin for error, and I wouldn't have a cent left over for savings.

1. I'm able to post this at this semi-sane hour because they for once sent us all home after eight hours sortin yer pakujes, instead of the usual 11.5-12. Maybe Christmas actually means something?
Nah, they just didn't have that much mail to do. Still, yay actual sleep.

2. My grandfather died last night, not unexpectedly. God keep his soul.
My uncle *did* make it there before Grandpa departed, though since the latter was apparently under a lot of morphine at the time (ouuucchhh...) he presumably didn't know who was holding his hand when.
Mom was less broken up than I'd expected; I gather because one of the things that had been preying on her was the uncertainty of the whole business; and now at last she knows. (That said, she did thoroughly vent/talk my brother's ear off when she called this morning; I guess I should have accepted his offer of being the one to actually pick up the phone.(See #3 and #4 below for explanations.)
The funeral is going to be held in North Andover, date t.b.d. but probably the second week in January. My brother and I may also see about going down for a visit with Grandma (and my Mom) beforehand. There is a possibility, however, that after that Grandpa will end up being buried in Arlington National Cemetery; if so, I may at least look into the feasibility of going down to represent the family.

3. OK, a couple of my brother's friends were just killed in a car crash? Fuckin' hell. December 2014, that's beyond fail-ly, that's ... just plain LOW.

4. I heard about all this because I actually did SOMETHING to celebrate Christmas, in the form of going over to my brother's for a Christmas brunch for the two of us before I went to work. (Incidentally, don't tell him I said this, but I think my adaptation of Bettina's recipe for biscuits produces a superior result to whatever he was using. (tree_and_leaf, feel free to disown me now.) But yeah, tasty, and we talked about whiskey and computer games, and made each other laugh, which we both really did need.

[I also gave him his Christmas present, in the form of tea, some of which we sampled over the second round of scones. He gave me my gift from Mom, in the form of Benjamins,* and also loaded me down with some extra Christmas desserts, which were also very welcome as I haven't managed to do any baking these past weeks. Well, except for baking a Stollen for the PO Xmas party, and I think I finished that at work today.]

5. Anyway, I should sleep, assuming the instant coffee will let me. Yeesh, yeah, it's like 2260 hours. And work out logistics for Christmas shopping, Peter pickup, etc.

* Inevitably leading to a conversation about whether a proper gangsta would carry his around in a wallet; the likelihood of Macklemore doing a rap about opening a bank account; irony; and what the heck the children of hipsters are going to be able to do to rebel. Oh, and R. Kelly.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I made it here alive. Getting through German immigration etc. is actually remarkably easy. Sharing airplane cabin space with unhappy toddlers is not.

Update, 10:30 local time: So yeah, I got very little sleep. But after three good meals (I'm not counting airplane breakfast at 6 AM, involving a ham and cheese roll and some Lorna Doone shortbread) and some apfelwein at my local brewery, I'm a lot happier. I've met 25 other Fulbrighters, and although in orientation session 1 the program director noted that they were avoiding spending extra money on luxurious accommodation in Frankfurt, we all have single rooms with their own bathrooms. So life is pretty good.
One thing still puzzles me, though. In New York, they charge you for your baggage cart--yet still can't provide carts with working wheels. In Frankfurt de, the carts are free, functional, and possess brakes. This does not make much sense. But perhaps this only because I'm still sleep-deprived.