Finally, a free moment. I arrived in Eugene on Thursday afternoon, and immediately hopped into action. Since then I've had nary a moment to myself, and especially one long enough and internet accessed enough to post. But here I go; are you ready for the saga?
Thursday I drove into town and arrived at Shady Pines, a potential house, with the big drawback that it wouldn't be available 'til July 1. Still, I met Jacob, with whom I'd already had a couple of fun phone conversations and saw the house. Great house, six housemates, three chickens, space for concerts and bike fixing and art making and gardening, and a table with 45's under glass. Lots of fun details, lots to look at. Jacob and I chatted for a while, then he hooked me up with a bike from his friends' house, where there were also rentable spaces, but a two-person and a three-person spot, so I filed away the info and thought little of it (insert foreshadowing here). I got to ride a very small road bike around for the next several hours before the bike parade (!) that Jacob invited me to, so I hopped on and headed to the university to look around. Not much doing in Lawrence, the architecture building, so I decided to time a 10 minute ride south and mark it on my map, then a ten minute ride east, and mark that on my map. That gave me a very rough approximation of where I ought to look for housing, which turned out to be pretty much anywhere in the city of Eugene.
There weren't many For Rent signs up, except on the exceedingly ugly apartment buildings, so my plan wasn't working. I wound up at a bike shop and started my job search, but pretty much everywhere I asked required a resume, which means I have to find a printer, rather than having some sort of application. Good to know, and when I get housing figured out, I'll move on to tweaking my resume for non-office work. Before I went back to Jacob's house, I found a coffee shop with free wireless and hatched a plan to get up early in the morning to get back on Craigslist for a serious round of research and cold calls.
Off to the Bike Parade I went, along the way getting decked out in light pink spandex tights, a bright pink full length princess gown, and a matching visor, which I wore upright as a tiara. Little did I know, but I was underdressed for the occasion - the best costume, in my humble, was a full body yellow spandex unitard that actually went over the wearer's head, to which was attached a yellow balloon. Bikes were also decked out, and as we rode to the sounds of our boombox, we received hearty cheers from all directions. In several locations, we stopped to get off and dance. I felt a bit out of place, what with being entirely sober, but it certainly was a full-immersion introduction to the town.
I stayed the weekend, including Thursday night, with some of Eugene's solid frisbee supporters, who were very kind in opening up their house to me. It was great to have such flexibility, since I knew that my car would be safe parked there, and that I was welcome to go in and out of the house as I needed. Friday morning I did indeed get out early and get to work on my housing research. I found that many of the houses were recently occupied, which greatly shortened my list of possibilities. To put it in a positive light, I figured that it was making my choice easier. I checked out the first place; it was a mess, but livable.
Thus started my day of looking at uninspiring housing and sitting in my car between appointments wondering what I had gotten myself into. Why hadn't I applied to more than one school? Why hadn't I visited? Why was I doing this all anyway? Out of the corner of my eye I saw a for rent sign, pulled into the driveway of a large house, and wrote down the number. A guy about my age was coming across the adjoining parking lot and sat on the front stoop on his cell phone; he motioned for me to join him on the stoop. When he got off the phone, he told me that he had just talked to the landlord who was sending over the handyman to show him the house, and I could join in the tour if I'd like. How convenient! I said yes, but as we went through the house, I quickly realized it wasn't ideal. It was a 10-person boarding house, with a few nice features, but nothing that would make me actually want to live there, including the price of rent. I invited my fellow house-seeker, Erik, to go get coffee.
It turned out that Erik was also a new Option III M.Arch student, currently living in Portland and down for the day frantically trying to find a house amongst the uninspiring offerings. It also turned out that he had worked with Tina, my co-captain for the Manti, at the Green Roundtable in Boston. We chatted and agreed to go look at the two-person house I had written off on Thursday when I picked up the bike for the bike parade.
We searched through town using my vague recollection of its approximate location and found the spot as one of the people living in the next house (also for rent by the same landlord) got home. The two-person house is in the center of the block, surrounded by houses on three sides and a fence to give privacy from the alleyway/parking lot on the fourth side. We walked around, but all the blinds were closed and no one was home, so we knocked on the door of the adjacent house and asked the girl there what she knew about the house. During her positive report, the girl living in the house came home. After much convincing, she showed us the house, which, though small, was well kept and good-looking. We finally got in touch with the landlord, who was at the beach for the weekend, and scheduled to look at the house officially on Monday.
Erik and I talked a while longer and agreed that we were serious about the little house. We'd sleep on it and we had a lot of details to work out, but I left feeling pretty confident.
***
Saturday morning, I headed to the frisbee fields for Solstice, Eugene's home tournament. It was two days of a lot of sun and a lot of new people. I saw Q, a nice familiar face, and also it turns out that Sadie, a former Mantis that I also met last year at Potlatch, is a Eugene local, so I had an immediate connection on the team. I played horribly to start on Saturday - the long car ride had done my game no good - but I quickly warmed back up to the game and by the middle of the day I felt almost normal again. The women were all very nice and explained the various city leagues and teams to me as we played. We went 1-3 on Saturday and 1-2 on Sunday, but had a fun time as we did it. It seems like it's difficult to play mid-level on the West coast because good players go to the major population centers, leaving the smaller, far-apart towns with few great players.
The tourney party was at a bowling alley, which was awesome since it meant free beer for three hours, free snack food, and free games. Unfortunately the approach was a bit shorter than regulation, and since it was a party atmosphere, the lanes were covered in enough gunk and moisture that it was impossible to slide. Still, after the party died down, I bowled a 151, tying a new friend. Also, now I know that I'll try to find another alley for league play, if I can fit it into my schedule.
So, now I'm staying at the house of one of the lovely ladies from my team this weekend, where I crashed last night after the exhausting weekend (I also got home at 1:51 on Saturday night after winning the party). In a few minutes I'm headed out the door to my appointment for the house with Erik. I woke up to thoughts of furniture painting and thrift-store hunting. So hopefully my next post will be of how I have a new Eugene house and am no longer living out of my car in this petty-theft plagued city!