Rosewood Pictures, 1

These pictures are mostly smaller details of the house - the larger views of each room are on that circlepix website from the first post about the house.

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Snowy porch




I'm very pleased with the little details in the kitchen!







Stairs down to the full basement! Washer and dryer, huge amounts of storage space, and enough room for my absolute favorite past-time (hint: I will finally be able to perfect my spin!).

Rosewood Pictures, 2

Pretty porch light, pretty blue ceiling.










Views from the front yard. It's not exactly the most precious tree-lined Ann Arbor street with perfect houses, but I like it.




Blue door going inside from the porch.

Rosewood Pictures, 3

You can get a sense of most of the downstairs layout from this view, taken in the living room. To the right, the open arch leads into the dining room, then into the kitchen. To the left is a hallway, which the bathroom and downstairs bedroom come off of.




The door to the upstairs. I think we're going to remove the door since we're going to be constantly going up and down and don't have to worry about things like a sleeping baby upstairs, which I think may be why they kept the door there? I think it would be a disaster if we kept it, a disaster involving many cats and dogs getting trapped somewhere they don't want to be...




The downstairs bathroom is in really excellent shape. Nothing to change really, except maybe little things like I'm not into the shelf/towel rack combination they have.




White stairs going up.




One view from the top of the stairs, going into what is going to be my office.

Rosewood Pictures, 4

There are these funny back stairs going down from the second floor! A little weird, but they look cool and light and old and creaky.




Two of the windows in the bedroom.










View of the upstairs bathroom. Pretty window, and that white cabinet opens up and has HUGE shelves going into the wall.

Rosewood

We bought a house!

It is on Rosewood Street, south of Burns Park, in Ann Arbor. Jake and his parents put in a bid Monday afternoon, and the sellers accepted it a few hours later. We'll take possession of it on June 24. Yesterday morning they went back so Jake could take lots of photographs and measurements, so that we can start planning. It has been snowing in Michigan and it sounds like it's really pretty right now. Much prettier than rainy Stockholm, which along with all southern Sweden seems to have officially reached the criteria for spring without having a season that fulfilled the criteria for winter. More on the Swedish winter later. The point is that it is white and snowy at our new home.

Our house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a side porch, and it was built in 1930. There are pictures here, and I'll put up some of the ones Jake took when I get them.

It was very interesting to go through this process from afar, and it sounds like once they actually saw a lot of the houses, things were very clear. Like - the farmhouse of my dreams was actually in disgusting shape except for the handful of very clever angles they photographed and would have needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. And - oh, this house is really exquisite but the bedrooms are tiny and even though it's only mildly out of the price range the taxes/maintenance would be ten thousand dollars more a year. Or, very simply, this house is truly disgusting and next to horrible slummy student multi-unit buildings and has about .001% of the cute bungalow look that they managed to convey in the online listing.

So, when they saw our house on Rosewood, it all made a lot of sense. It is in exquisite shape, with everything from a newly renovated kitchen to a new furnace, not a single crack in the paint on the walls, new energy efficient winterized windows, etc. The listing price was insanely good, and means that we can do some work on little things that will make a huge difference. We're going to extend their cute white picket fence so that it encloses the front of the house too, up to the sidewalk. And my favorite part is that we're going to enclose the other part of the yard that's next to the garage and sort of non-continguous with the rest of the yard - and put in raised beds for a vegetable garden! This is what I want it to look like, on a slightly smaller scale.

Apparently the closet in the master bedroom is nasty. It's a walk-in closet although it has sloped roofs which Jake has to crouch down to avoid, but everyone agreed that it would be easy to finish it nicely. The upstairs (yellow) bathroom has unfortunate plastic walls in the shower (the bigger bathroom with full tub, etc., is downstairs) and everyone also agreed it would be easy to redo that with pretty tiles or corian.

Now I'm already onto things like wallpaper! I love Farrow & Ball. I love their
yellow bumble bee wallpaper and also
this more flowery one. Jake and I have been negotiating who gets which of the other two bedrooms for desk/office space. I desperately want the upstairs bedroom that is currently blue and white, because it's such a cute attic-like space and faces right onto Rosewood, but the downstairs bedroom is going to be the primary guest bedroom because it's pretty big.

When they went back yesterday after the bid was accepted, they met the woman, who was on her way out the door with the two kids. Her husband is just finishing his residency in pediatric oncology or radiology or something, and they're moving to Kentucky because Michigan didn't make him a good enough offer to stay. Apparently she was totally tearing up - both happy that it had sold and sad to be leaving because they love it so much, so I thought that was an excellent sign.

Hagaparken

Today, P., Luna (who I am dog-sitting for the week starting today!), and I went to Hagaparken, which King Gustav III (the one who was murdered at the masked ball at the Stockholm opera in 1792) designed in the 1700s. We walked for a few hours around the lake (inlet?) Brunnsviken, about 8 miles in all. I finally got to see the copper tents, and we saw funny things like Ålkistan, which translates literally to eel coffin. It's actually the name of a canal coming off of Brunnsviken where they used to trap eels using some sort of hatch back in the 1600s. We had fika at Bergianska trädgården (botanical garden), where I had a chocolate ball about four times the size of the ones I made last night, and ten times better.

The first two pictures below are of the ruins of the foundation of a castle Gustav III started to build before he died. The cellars were as far as they got. He wanted to build a whole Versailles-style park, and appropriately the architect for all this stuff, including the copper tents, was a French architect named Louis Jean Desprez. P. told me that he also wanted to build a huge promenade where Sveavägen is, so that he could sit in luxury in Hagaparken and observe central Stockholm down the boulevard.

The bottom two pictures are of an EXHAUSTED Luna.

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Koppartälten

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These are the koppartälten, or copper tents, in Hagaparken, built between 1787-1790. They're so strange and beautiful, and there's a cafe in that middle one now.

Two views of two desserts

Last night L. came over for dinner and I made havreflarn - Swedish oatmeal cookies - for dessert. They took a grand total of about five minutes to make and five minutes in the oven, and they are lacy and crispy on the outside and slightly chewy in the middle. It's the kind of recipe that makes you feel like you must be a really stellar baker, but my cats probably could have made them just as well as me.

Tonight I made chokladbollar - chocolate balls. I have only three months left in Sweden and I don't want to go into some terrible withdrawal from all the pastries and things I've become used to, so I'm trying to learn how to make them now. I got this recipe from a really great blog I found today while being distracted from looking at odds ratios and confidence intervals at CHESS. She does a Swedish version also which helps me learn. The chokladbollar came out really well, but they're also so simple it would take major effort to screw them up. I like them with coconut outside, not perlsocker/pearl sugar.

4880 Pratt

I have fallen in love with a house:

http://www.surovell.com/lid=23663364

It is from 1850, it is right off of Ann Arbor-Dexter Road but is still geographically in Ann Arbor, and it is an honest-to-god farmhouse that has a big red barn. For years when I talked about moving to Michigan I said I wanted to buy a big old farmhouse in Dexter because Dexter is this weird sweet nothing little town right next to Ann Arbor (the house on Pratt is literally 5.00 miles from the med school, and basically equidistant to everywhere else in Ann Arbor that we'd want to go) that has old farmhouses and actual farms and railroad tracks and Queen Anne's Lace and it's like as close as you can get to living in a corn field in Boonville, Iowa, while still being literally minutes away from Ann Arbor and the med school and the law school.

It's 329, which is a little higher than most of the cute houses right in town that we're looking at, but it has 2750 square feet which is insane, and 1.60 acres, and a barn for god's sake. This is the farmhouse of my dreams - with Ann Arbor schools! - where we can have a kitten for Hazel and another old dog for Nero - and lemonade on one of our many screened-in porches and oh god, I think I'm going to have an acute myocardial infarction just thinking about it, especially because J and parents will think it is an adorable but completely impractical idea.

Tonight's sunrise from my lovely if slightly industrial view

Lägenhet, soluppgång, solnedgång, is

Sunrise.




View from the bedroom.




Some ice the day before yesterday.




Sunset.

Lussekatter och lägenhet

soluppgång

Soluppgång means sunrise. Apparently you can also just say "solup."

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I am sitting on my couch on Bergsunds Strand, eating "havre gryn" ("oats grain," aka oatmeal) with cranberries and walnuts, drinking earl gray tea, listening to Kate Nash (which reminds me of Lindsay sitting on my couch on Jaktvarvsplan), and watching the sun rise.

It is actually now a vaguely appropriate time for a sunrise. It's 7:20, and the sky is getting a lighter blotty blue although the sun won't actually rise until 7:43. It was amazing to get off the T-bana yesterday on the way back from the airport and find that it was still mostly light out, rolling J's huge Swiss Army bag along Bergsunds Strand at 4.

Now I have lightness to look forward to. I think I already wrote about this but by the time I leave at the very end of May, dawn will start at about 2:30 am and dusk will end at 11 pm. I've already made J promise that since I am missing high summer this time around, we will come back next June and ride the train way up north.

flyga

More Ann Arbor houses:

I am OBSESSED with this one on Ashley Street. It is a little out of our price range, and it's in a slightly sketchy neighborhood, but oh my. Look at the virtual tour. This place is SICK.

Wildwood. More affordable, also may not be in the nicest micro-neighborhood. But all neighborhoods are basically nice in Ann Arbor.

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I am flying (flyga) back to Stockholm tomorrow, after a miraclous flight extension. I got a cold the day before I was supposed to fly last week - or, as Boss said, "the sniffles," and did not want to have searing sinus pains for twelve hours. Also, there were all sorts of wedding planning things that it was very good for me to stay and help with. Also, I just couldn't bear leaving.

It was another excellent week. Some days it rained hard all day, other days, like today, it was sixty degrees and sunny and beautiful. I heard that Stockholm had its first real snow the other day, so it looks like I will be flying from summer to winter wonderland. Last night we cooked a truly delicious meal: lightly fried salmon cakes with corn & heirloom tomato salsa, an endive & watercress salad with blue cheese, toasted pecans, and grapes, and gooey lemon bars with a brown butter crust.

Now, I am drinking english breakfast tea, taking a break from packing, and watching the primary returns trickle in on CNN. I voted for Obama this morning but had a pang of sadness about Hillary while I was filling out my ballot. I am returning to Sweden with way more than I left with, due primarily to:

+the 45 minutes I spent at the Barney's sale before my Columbia interview
+the 8 DVDs I bought at "Busterblock" because I require a high level of entertainment in Sweden and DVDs there cost FIFTY DOLLARS.
+new running shoes, wicking socks for running, and a couple boxes of GU packets, which I am obsessed with and find to be simultaneously indispensable and repulsive.

I was able to get quite a bit of work done on my birth weight and depression project this week, at least, and I have many fun articles about things like the neurobiology of depression to read on my flights tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to my flight in a sick sort of way. I fly straight from San Francisco to Amsterdam, in a whopping 11 hours, then a short flight on to Stockholm. I think this is way better than having a six hour flight to the East Coast, then having to switch in a hell-hole like Heathrow, then a third bloody flight to Sweden. Also the flight doesn't leave until 3:30 pm, so I don't have to get up at the crack of dawn.

I will probably bust into tears when Jake drops me off at SFO tomorrow because I won't see him until he flies out for the Zurich marathon at the end of April, but I'm actually really excited about going back for my final four-something months. I love the two projects that I've finally developed, I get to dog-sit for Luna at the end of February, we have a fully-funded Fulbright trip to Berlin in early April, I'm going to try to get to Dublin in March, and I'm coming up with plans for places in Sweden like Gotland and Umeå. It is slightly unbearable to leave Berkeley this time, though, because when I finally come back at the very end of May, there will only be about six weeks left of California for me.