May 3, 2002. The "Adventures in Culinary History" class was great. There are about a thousand topics to be covered there, and it's too many to do in two 2-hour classes. The teacher obviously loves all of it, and was fun and enthusiastic. He'd set an essay about "Chocolate, Chicle, and Chiles" at each of our seats, and given us (actual) samples of New World foods: a corn chip, a peanut, a tomato, a can of pineapple juice, a chili pepper, a stick of gum, a piece of chocolate, and a potato. Of course Amy and I ate most of our stash during class. No one else did. He said we could eat them.

We talked about the history of the cookbook, as well as the history of cooking in general, and how foods go in and out of fashion (well, not how they do so much as the fact that they do). We looked at a lot of slides of old cookbooks, and talked about their formats (ancient Greek cookbooks talked a lot about life in general; there were several sort of "famous chefs" cookbooks by guys who cooked for Pope Pius V and King Richard II), about the authors (first only men, then, around 1747, only women -- and now a mix, but we didn't really go past 1910; that's for next class), and about what they were cooking (not all that different from what we're cooking now).

Amy and I have been totally ruined by James Lileks and his book The Gallery of Regrettable Food (buy it through his site if you're going to buy it, so he gets the Amazon credits). We've been hysterically laughing over this book for weeks, and now I'm afraid we can't look at any food-related marketing pamphlet, especially from the 50s, without cracking wise about it. Our teacher would show some slide of a pamphlet for Jell-o called "Dainty Desserts for Dainty People" (apparently "dainty" meant "healthy"), and Amy and I immediately started in with, "Dainty? That food doesn't look dainty! It's a Jell-o mold the same size as that weird chef baby's head!" "And what's with the cow? Are they putting beef in the desserts?" Etc.

We drove by our soon-to-be house after class, and I'm happy to report the street was really, really quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Amy and I were practically whispering while I was giving her a quick outside tour (this is notable as we're not really naturally whispery people).

Driving home, I checked our home messages to see if Dave had called (he was on his way back from being out of town), and my mom had called to say that she found out they tore down my childhood house. Such a shame. It was a really neat old house (probably built around 1870?), with two porches and a little maid's quarters where my room was. She did say she thought it was interesting that we found out that it had been torn down just as Dave and I were buying a replacement. Our poor old house, so great, just a victim of geography. No one wants a neat old house in Northern New Jersey. They'll probably put 14 townhouses on that lot.

And, continuing in the House! House! House! theme this week is taking, my mom also today bought the house next to hers. She's been trying to do this for a while, but it's been a mess because the property was a foreclosure. She lives in the country and nabbing the house next door means she suddenly has great hiking and views and spots for swimming ponds on her property. She's not sure what she's going to do with the actual house next door yet. I went through it with her when I visited recently, and my only real memory of it is "cat pee." Anyway, congratulations Mom! We'll have a lot of fun house things to do in the next few years.

May 2, 2002. My cousin Amy and I are taking a class tonight and next Thursday: Adventures in Culinary History. I have completely misplaced the class description, since we signed up about two months ago. I'm remembering it being something about studying culture through old cookbooks, and discussing why certain cultures used certain foods and cooked certain meals. I think it's something like why Aztecs ate what they did, versus why casseroles were big in the 50s. I'll let you know tomorrow what it's all about!

Still so excited about the whole house thing. In many ways I'm glad it's happening so quickly. This way, in just a few weeks, we'll be in our new house! The idea of packing everything and securing our mortgage is totally overwhelming, but I guess it's better to have a deadline.

May 1, 2002. I held off on posting about this for a while, but it looks like it's going to happen, so...Dave and I are buying a house! I am so unbelievably excited. We'd been looking for a while, but hadn't really seen anything we liked, or that seemed reasonably priced. Sometime in the beginning of March we looked at this old house right in downtown Portland (but on a quiet street), and we absolutely loved it. We took the plunge and bid on it, but we ending up going back and forth in negotiations and we went as high as we wanted to go, and the seller went as low as he wanted to go, so that was it. We were sorry we didn't get it, but were glad to have gone through the bidding process to see how that worked.

We continued to look at houses, but really didn't see anything we liked. Then, last week, the seller for the house we loved came back to us and said that the buyer he had fell through, and he'd like to consider our offer. Yay! We went back through the house to make sure, and it was actually better than we remembered it. We bid on it last Tuesday, then frustratingly had to wait a week for the seller to get out of detox (oy). But now, the papers are signed, and we have to do a million things to close and move by the end of May.

Ok, the house: built in 1874. Tall, tall ceilings (Dave finally gets a house that doesn't make him feel like a giant), big old radiators, hardwood floors, claw-foot tub, rambling rooms. Big basement for Dave to do all his Dave stuff (there is a garage but it's weensy, like it was built for a Model T, which it probably was). And we're going to use the sunny master bedroom as an office/craft room. It has a sink in it! How cool is that? The only downsides to this house are that it has absolutely no land (but that's ok since I only appear to be able to do container gardening...things die the minute I plant them in the ground) and it's in what I might refer to as a "transitional" neighborhood. But that also means that it's walking distance to everything.

We've never owned a house before and I'm a bit freaked out about all the things we have to do in order to get it. I'm not actually freaked out about owning the house; I'm just really worried that we won't get everything done in time to close when the seller wants to.