jimsjournal
| Home sweet home -- 12/01/03 |
jimsjournal |
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Sunday Brunch (I realize this is Monday, but I never got the email about it until today) 1. How many people and pets live in your home? Four people (Nancy and me plus Jill and Jeremy) and Tiger (the feline member of the family) plus Jill has a pet rat and a large fish tank with many fish in it. 2. Do you rent, own or live at home? We own. 3. How many rooms are in your house? Ten? Twelve? I mean how do you count? Upstairs we have a hallway, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. On the ground floor we have an entry foyer/hallway, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a den, a laundry room, and a half bath ("lavette" seems to be the current term in Rhode Island real estate advertising). Oh, and a two-car garage. The basement is "unfinished" -- that is, just one big room with one end of it as sort of a fitness area (treadmill, exercise bike, weight bench, weights, etc.) and the rest just general storage (lots of shelves, tons of "stuff"). 4. Is there enough room in your house to comfortably accommodate overnight guests? Yes and no. (Or what do you mean by comforably?) I mean there is no guest bedroom but there were times a few years ago when we accomodated significant numbers of teenagers for sleepovers. More usually, for example if Adam and Leah are coming, Jeremy would turn his room over to them and he'd sleep on the couch in the den. 5. How close do your neighbors live? Do you know them well and are they welcome in your home? The houses in this neighborhood are on half acre lots. You do the math. We know them casually... i.e., we chat when we see each other outside, etc., but we don't have dinner parties for each other.. I think some of this has to do with the relative ages of children -- the dozen or so families closest to us all have children of elementary school age or younger (with the exception of one neighbor who is retired... and he and his wife have grandchildren in that age range) and Jill is 21 and Jeremy is 18. The younger children are back-and-forth playing at each other's houses and that tends to draw the parents closer. Also, we tend to socialize more with Nancy's family and with people who live elsewhere in town. And maybe it's partly the difference between the distance imposed by half acre lots compared with the closeness of six houses to an acre? That was the kind of neighborhood we had when we lived in Binghamton -- but also the people we socialilzed with the most tended to have children were roughly the same age as ours. I wondered about that in an entry last year -- "Front porch memories" 6/14/02 (scroll down toward the end of the entry) |
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