Seeking My Dream-partment

I haven't been up to much this week other than looking for apartments, which for the past couple days has meant driving my still packed-up car north into town and tromping around looking for "For Rent" signs, plus tracking down whatever likely properties showed up on craigslist the previous day. This actually is not too strenuous. The prospect of not driving to work anymore becomes much more concrete too -- I've been looking at places about 15 minutes from downtown by bus -- which has me very excited in a sad, displaced-suburbanite way.

At any rate it shouldn't be too long before I find a satisficient place to live/ be safe, hopefully with an early enough move-in that I won't need to do any 75-minute Hell Commutes into the office from McMinnville.

At the moment I'm at a coffee place in the Hawthorne District running down the clock until I go wherever my Garmin tells me to go to tour an available studio apartment. I think I'd be happier near here (the hipper-than-you part of town) than the other close-in neighborhoods I've seen, even if my glasses obviously are not cool enough. For that matter, I'm also wearing a horizontally striped t-shirt under a plaid overshirt; living out of bags and big Tupperware bins for three weeks can have that effect.

Weather remains needlessly wonderful. I'm still not over the way the nearest, largest volcanoes (Hood, St. Helens, Adams) appear totem-like on the horizon on clear days.