Last weekend we went to the Sacramento city archives and two historians very nicely helped us get started on our quest to learn the history of our house. We now have an official ‘build’ year – 1913 – and the name of the house’s first owner. We saw maps of the original neighborhood, back before there was a highway that cut through this part of the city instead of train tracks and trolley routes through the brand new streets. We also got some wonderful pointers for where to go next – who to contact to do a reverse title search, and where we might find more information on all the changes that have been done to this house over time. And we found out something new (to us) about our house – something which convinces us even more to hang on to these wonderful old windows as long as we can. My boss and I went to a meeting Monday, down in Yosemite, and since it made sense to carpool, we met at my house before combining cars and heading down in just one. While I was giving him the abbreviated tour, he asked if the windows were double-hung, and then noted that if this was the case, that meant the tops should open as well as the bottoms. News to us – I don’t think either of us has ever lived in a house with double-hung windows before and it had not even occurred to us that such a thing was possible. But sure enough, they open just like he said they would.It’s been a huge bonus to learn this, since most of the windows upstairs – the part of the house that tends to get the warmest during the day – don’t have screens, and the screens that do exist tend to be of dubious strength. There’d been only a few we were comfortable would be cat-proof, thus limiting the number of windows we were able to open. Just being able to open the top half of an extra half dozen windows upstairs has made a huge difference in the air flow in the upper half of the house (and has allowed us to avoid having to turn on the air conditioner completely).

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It is late morning on a Sunday, and I have been downstairs, working furiously on some knitted lace, in an attempt to catch up to the rest of the several thousand people who have been working on the same project. After several weeks of feeling restless and unable to focus on knitting anything more complicated than a simple stockinette sock, it is lovely to find myself right back into it, as if I’d never left.

Most of the cats have assumed their usual midday positions – zonked out on the couch and loveseat upstairs, or curled up in some favorite hiding spot downstairs. The lone exception is Checkers, who has has spent the past hour skittering around the bedroom floor with one of my hair ties. I picked it up off the floor this morning and put it away, assuming Azzie had been the one to knock it down, but it didn’t take more than a minute or two for Checkers to ‘capture’ it once more, and she’s having so much fun with it I don’t have the heart to take it away again.

Richard is off at a writer’s workshop this weekend, and it’s obvious from his excitement and his energy in the evening when he comes home that he’s been having a wonderful time. I think both of us have been in a holding pattern for our respective crafts for some time now – our minds just too distracted by everything to do with buying/selling/moving/renovating houses. We still have not sold the old house, but right now I think we are both at peace with it – at least for the moment. Every time I start to worry, I remind myself that we went into this whole experience prepared – that we set up our finances specifically to cover this sort of scenario, and while things might be a little tight for a few more months as we face paying double mortgages, we will be okay.