Episode CII: Living In New England

This Episode of the Ballade concerns my living arrangements.

[This is our living room! Featuring mostly-free furniture]

My wife and I moved to the Cambridge area in September of 2011, having not a clue where we would live, but trusting that we would find a suitable place. After one day spent touring apartments, we settled on a place in Medford, Massachusetts, about two miles from Harvard, my place of employment. The apartment is one of four independent units subdivided from what must have been (a long, long time ago) a very nice house- indeed, with three stories (plus a basement), around 5,000 square feet and a lot of at least a half acre, I might have called the place a mansion.

The house is old. Over a century old. It was built in 1910, which (for those of you keeping score) means that it was built before either of the World Wars, before the Great Depression, and a year before the first human being stepped foot on the South Pole. William Howard Taft was President of the United States. Ford’s Model T had only been around for two years. Point being, the house is over a century old. Moreover, it is likely that the house has not been updated, renovated or improved upon in over a century. Not that I am complaining: I personally find the gigantic wraparound porch, antique crown molding, high ceilings and rickety stairs to be charming. The rain seeping through our bedroom wall, though, not so much….

The house was built in the Victorian Shingle Style. It apparently used to have blue and red paint on the pillars and other decorative wooden touches, but the paint is almost completely faded. The backyard is large enough for Meg and I to toss a Frisbee around, and includes some pretty ancient trees, including a stately maple outside our second-story kitchen window, providing us great sightseeing so far: deep-hued foliage in fall, and a squirrel’s jungle gym in the winter.

 [The view out our kitchen window]

[The backyard is a nice place for Frisbee when not covered in snow (or kindling)]

There are two good things about our landlord: he is renting the apartment to us for cheap, and he has a ridiculous Boston accent. Those are the only two good things about our landlord (as a landlord, anyway.) We have spotty heat, which he hasn’t fixed; we have a leaky bathtub, which he hasn’t even tried to fix; we have the aforementioned leaky wall, which he promised to fix immediately (and which is still leaky, four months later). I could go on, but will not belabor the point. I Googled him recently and it appears as though his rental business is involved with the capital management / hedge fund Entrepid Capital. If all of their investments are as quality as our landlord (shadily taking advantage of the customer to the point of illegality) I can only imagine that it is a highly profitable hedge fund and that you should certainly invest in said fund if you can possibly afford it.

A few final notes about our neighbors:

1) Our downstairs neighbor is a nearly 100-year-old woman who until recently owned the whole property. She and her late husband apparently owned the house for the majority of its existence, but as she was getting old and frail, decided to sell to our current beloved landlord. She's a hoot. Calls us "Adam and Eve" and tells us the same handful of stories every time she sees us.

2) New England is the land of Dunkin Donuts. Their motto “America Runs on Dunkin” is just about literally true here. Accordingly, the nearest Dunkin to our house is approximately a one-minute-and-thirty-second walk from our house.

3) Our neighbor in the adjacent lot is a Southern Baptist Church. It has a nice building, with pretty stained-glass windows. If we are at home at the right hour of the night, we can hear the preacher from our bedroom (with the windows closed). And, BOY DOES HE PREACH IT!