In this humble 12 second video shot with my Sony Video 8, is the first house I lived in when I moved to SoCal from the Montclair District of Oakland in 1986. A job transfer with the tuxedo company I worked for brought me to SoCal, they suggested that I look around in the Pasadena area for a place to live. I drove around and at the time, one bedroom apartments were going for $600-$800 per month to rent. So I drove over to Glendale, looked around and saw that this little house with all it's weathered charm had a 'For Rent' sign in the front. I called the owner, there were no cell phones then, so I used a pay phone nearby. He said the rent was $795. He met me and gave me the keys, which were skeleton keys. Seriously. The place had no fridge or stove and the roof leaked. No A/C, but it did have a heater which was one button that lit a pilot light and heated up the air in the big pipes beneath the house with the theory that heat rises. I also trimmed all the overgrown greenery in the front myself (it's all to the left and why that's so dark). While doing that, and elderly man came by, took the shears out of my hand and gave me a lesson in pruning...it was the cutest thing! Then I went up to Glendale College and put a 3x5 card on their bulletin board for a roomate, I ended up having two roomates. Not sure whatever happened to one of them, the other, I still keep in touch with 25 years later. The house was built in 1922 and bulldozed in 1987, so the owner could fulfill his plans (which he disclosed to me) to build eight apartments on the lot. He told me if I could move the house I could have the house! The house had a little apartment to the side, the two tenants and ourselves found another house in about the same neighborhood and had some great times there, just like we did here! . . .

We had a miserable cold snap with no oil. It was up to $3.09/gal w/ a 100g minnimum. I'm sure alot of people got fucked this year. Who fills the tank in August? My native climate doesn't even have oil heat. We got these electric dish heaters from the CostCo, w/ a parabolic dish that eliminates the drain of/ a fan. The electric bill went up, but not by $309 -- about half that, thanks to the fish-smakckin' hydro-electric system of the BPA. We also put up window plastic and weather stripping. I used some early Xmas money to buy curtains for between the rooms. Each one made a huge differenece, but this house is still unreasonably large and uninsulated. Despite our best efforts, it was getting down to the mid-twenties every night. One morning it was 36F in the kitchen. We'd been stuck in one room at a time for about 10 days before it finally broke. In that time I had gotten pretty good at planning about an hour in advance what room we'd like to enter next, bearing in mind the circut would trip if we had more than one on per floor. I could use the oven to heat the kitchen once I put a blanket up across our very strange stairway. Just about the time the weather suddenly turned about 30F warmer, we came into some money for the cause. We now keep it at a houseplant-saving 50F with the space heaters on low. Where I worked they had the same arrangement, but w/ a fireplace. Either way, you have to hold your breath before sitting on the cold toilet seat.