house-sitting | thekalechronicles

July 31, 2024

I am in my last week on Howe Street. I have finished the first of the two novels L. lent me to read and am working my way through History of the Rain, slowly because the Paris Olympics are on and I spend late nights and early mornings watching gymnastics on my laptop.

I have checked out the closest pizza place and the Chinese takeout joint, had breakfast with a friend at Mama’s Royal Cafe and dinner with another at Teni East Kitchen. Dinner out or takeout provide me with food for at least another meal.

A breakfast out is an exception though: morning usually finds me feeding cats, grinding coffee beans and cooking something for breakfast: today it was an egg and two slices of sesame bread with honey. My leftover Chinese lunch is heating in the oven (brown rice, string beans and spicy eggplant).

I am becoming adept at bathtub laundry, tossing like-colored clothes in with me when I bathe or wash my hair, leaving them to soak for awhile, wringing the water out and carrying them to the drying rack on the front porch. The secret is to do laundry every few days so that I do not have more than I can hang out. We are having typical Bay Area summer weather with cool, overcast mornings and warmer afternoons.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off from a vexing situation. My friend J. spirited me off to Tilden Park in her little red car. We rode the Merry-Go-Round (my choice) and the Steam Train (hers) and capped our day off with ice cream at iScream on Solano Ave. I had a coffee malt (no dinner necessary) and J. ate chocolate and blueberry ice creams.

Pandora, the chunky cat, stays close to me, almost always in the same room. Cassandra, the skinny one, remains aloof, although she did give me slow blinks from afar the other day. She is not ready to be friends.

It has been a lovely stay in a lovely neighborhood. The house is quiet and cool. My hosts sent me a postcard of Yeats from Ireland. I have a new favorite cafe and a couple of restaurants I like here, having found them just before I leave California. I still have some food to use up — sauerkraut and sausages, cheese, ramen noodles, frozen blueberries and maple syrup and more coffee than I can drink.

Dear Readers,

I am in the house-sitting, couch surfing phase of my travels before I take off for England on August 17, 2024, although I am still clearing items out of my childhood home in Kensington, CA. Today I began a diary of my house-sitting experiences in North Oakland.

The Howe Street Diaries

July 21, 2024

I am staying in the home of S&L, whom I met through a mutual friend. On Thursday July 18 they flew off to Ireland, leaving me in their beautiful house in North Oakland.

It is the kind of house I like, all wooden floors and windows, perched above the street with a front deck shaded by bottle brush and a backyard. In the last four days I have made a tour of comfortable sitting spots: the front porch chair where I ate lunch yesterday after a three-hour online sesshin with Natalie Goldberg, the living room couch where I sat for the sesshin and lay to read more of Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, which L. lent me, reading about the adventures and inner states of two Irish middle-aged drug smugglers.

Now I sit at the kitchen table, plain plank, having eaten a bowl of Irish oats cooked in milk with salt, maple syrup and walnuts. To my right sits a cooling mug of coffee with cream (I must go out and hunt more half and half today at the Piedmont Grocery).

Late in my sixty-some year sojourn in California I discovered the pleasures of Straus half and half. It comes in a glass deposit bottle. It is far fresher and more flavorful than any other brand of half and half I have tasted. L&S left behind a partial bottle of Straus whole milk — I used the last of it to soak my Irish oats for breakfast.

Yesterday I had planned to make Irish oats for breakfast. I found a small saucepan in the rotating pot cupboard. What I could not find was a measuring cup. While I was searching for measuring cups I found a few slices of buttermilk bread tucked in a drawer. “I’d better use this,” I thought, and switched my breakfast plan to French toast.

I went on a hunt for vanilla extract, nutmeg or cinnamon. I found four bottles of orange blossom water. But S&L had left a few juice oranges on the table, so I made French toast batter from eggs and orange juice, fried the toast in butter and ate it with some frozen blueberries and maple syrup I brought from Kensington. I heated them in the small saucepan because there doesn’t seem to be a microwave: there is a mysterious black box on the kitchen counter to the right of the six burner gas stove, but I am not sure what it is and I am not sure how to open it.

S&L left me with two cats to care for. Pandora is neurologically challenged, fat, and friendly. Cassandra, her litter mate, can leap from the top of the high platform bed to the floor. She startled me the other morning by doing just that. She seems afraid of me: I have to put her food down and back away. They are both black cats. Pandora has soft fur; Cassandra is a touch-me-not.

The end of the afternoon finds me sitting on the living room couch again writing to my constant readers. Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for further adventures and an August guest post on https://thekitchensgarden.com

The Howe Street Diaries, Part Two

The Howe Street Diaries, Part One

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