Your Home

i recall the 'name' st kilda used to have andrew. there are similar areas in sydney that used to be the same but now have been taken over by the same type of 'snobby fucks'. pity hey.

The neighbourhood consist mostly of turkish/morrocan/ hindustan immigrants, I think 95 % so there are a lot of exotixc shops/ petit restaurants.

we have a potbelly stove to keep us warm and polished wood floors.

theres a loooooong verandah which stretches acrooss the back of the place where i sit and ruminate in the sun. its 5 mins to 3 beaches and 200m to the waterfront of the bay.

i cleared the gutters of leaves and gumnuts today.

photo

Mine is a 4 bedroomed detached house, built in the early 1900s, hidden away off the main street through the village in amongst fields at the top of a ridge on the site where a Roman farmhouse once stood. I am always digging up bits of Roman pottery/tiles etc in the garden. I found a Roman silver ring once, too.

The village is quiet - there's nothing here, really. A nice pub, a 12th century church, a tiny primary school - but no shop, no mains drainage, no gas supply, no street lights, no public transport system to speak of (I think there is a bus into Oxford once a week, that's all), no broadband internet access or anything fancy like that.

I have a large garden which I share with an assortment of wildlife - I have a badger's sett, several foxes, and some lovely muntjack deer as my immediate neighbours.

The view from my bedroom window looks like this :

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid68/p5bb0480b465ff54f878e5a0f334ad192/fbc00c0d.jpg

and that's not a bad thing to gaze out at when having breakfast on the balcony of a morning.

I love it here.

East Ham is Britain's least white borough: only about a third white people, mostly people with ancestral roots in the Indian subcontinent. This gives it a strong community feel, it's low in crime, the shops are cheap, but some of it isn't for me - the video shops focus on Bollywood rather than Hollywood, for instance. It's the non-white people and the worst ranked schools in Britain that means prices are within my reach - it's one of the cheapest areas in London. Since I have no kids and I'm not a racist, these are not drawbacks to me at all.

It's a low class area in a lot of ways - loads of cheap clothes, but not good ones, and I don't know of a secondhand bookshop surviving in East London - but it suits me well. I might well stay here when I sell this house, though I wouldn't mind being closer to Central London - this is 8 or 10 miles out, and the tube takes over half an hour into town. Moving inwards costs, though.

When we bought this place six years ago, we goggled at the thought of ALL THAT ROOM! But now that we've added another child to the mix, and the one we already had is a huge 7 1/2 year old, it's seeming small to us. We'll probably move in a year to someplace warm...or maybe to Canada.

We lived in Binsey Lane. Botley Park was our back garden. You could see right over the city on the right, and bits of Port Meadow on the left.

Streatham is just a place I have to get out of.

Can a Mod delete the pic for me, please? I feel rotten for making someone sad now.

If I saw the *same* cabal members every day i would at least feel a bit more secure and familiar, but is that possible? oh nooooooooooo, they have to be *different* cabal members each time i venture to step out there, of course, since they keep rotating, its just rad. they poseand posturethemselves right outsidethe parking lot of the famous King king club, which is also right on my street. and i'm not even going to elaborate on all the crazy-nosy tourists and random assorted characters all of which congregate on the Good Olde Boulevard, which i am convinced is the highest-density/most-populated area for all the whackos west of the mississippi to flock upon, it really-truly is Freak Central. somehow they all crawl through the gutters and inexplicably wind up here, each one outdoing the other in outrageousness. onetime i swear i saw the dwarf/midget character with sunglasses in a *wheelchair* whose feet couldnt touch the end of the chair, from that last david lynch film, talking to this overweight turbaned ganja-smoking dealer, on the corner - but they're hardly the strangest of the strange around this place. if i was a gurl i would never walk out there by myself late-late at night; just within the last 3 months a young model/actress (typical young LA Woman) type was reported to have been last seen on the boulveard, and she was kidnapped and found dead in a ravine in the hills, her arms slashed. someone probably swindled her into a sordid scheme of stah-dom, in exchange of a sex act, but then there are so many sex-workers out there after midnite, it's hard to tell.

i live next to a tall building in which i once encountered a gay hustler; i was told that rock hudson's manager used to live there, and he would always hang around there as well, and that scorsese lived there from '71-'73 or so. there are tons of aspiring and starving actors and writers and media people and filmmakers all around; next door to me lives another aspiring filmmaker himself, who is friends w/ jean-claude van damme and that el mariachi dude, and this neighbor of mine (who was also in orgasmo and was a stuntman in buffy - and whose father died due to an accident on waterworld) used to be friends w/ cuba gooding jr too but cuba got too big for his boxers and never calls him back now, not after hitting the big time - but hey, that's life and "friendship" in this city of hell, the city of angels~!~~~

always exciting, never invituing, i love my hood: hollywood!!!!!!!!

Our development is isloated - about 200 homes in the middle of nowhere. Originally this land was landscaped and the lots divided during the heyday of the space program - it was to be called "Rocket City" - a manufactured community for the space program workers. But then the bottom fell-out of the program and now all sorts of people live here, including many in the law enforcement community, for some reason. Anyway, although the main roads for the community have been laid-out and paved, only about 1/16th of the development has been developed with houses and duplexes and so forth.

I love my house - for a rental it's in decent condition, I have a gigantic backyard, and we've empty lots both behind and to one side. An empty lot in Florida means dense underbrush and palmettos and towering pine trees and all sorts of vines and native flowering plants. You can't even walk through the mass of vegetation. And these empty lots house oodles of wildlife - here I've seen seven different kinds of snakes, many armadilloes, raccoons, oppossums, squirrels, rabbits, and other assorted small critters. We're loads of different anoles (small lizards) and frogs and toads and other types of lizards and snakes. The birds here are fantastic, too - we've cardinals and blue jays and blue birds and scrub jays and doves and tiny doves and all sorts of finches and mocking birds and thrushes and so forth.

Because it's not a full developed neighborhood, there's new homes being constantly built, which means that the lots are always being cleared - in Florida whey just bulldoze down everything and burn the plants - they literally scrape down to the dirt. It's sickening. Whenever I hear a lot being cleared, and think of all of the habitats that are being destroyed and all of the animals who are unable to escape the heavy machinery, I find myself getting sick to my stomach and it's all I can do to refrain from throwing myself down in front of the bulldozers in protest. I know that 'progress' is inevitable, and that all of this place will be developed (right now it's cheaper to build one's new house than to purchase one that's already been built and inhabited for a while) but that doesn't make things any easier - Florida is horrible for urban sprawl - here people build out and not up, which means lots of natural landscaping is sacrificed.

I've tried to make-up for some of the losses by planting only native plants and developing bird and butterfly gardens, and providing housing options for critters, like bird and bat houses. But it's so little compared to what is lost.

Sheesh. Sorry. I didn't mean for this to get all depressing.

i have a balcony

oh, and i have a dishwasher too - EVEN THOUGH I DONT OWN ANY DISHES!! how cool is 'dat!! and i have a fireplace EVEN THOUGH I DONT HAVE ANY ROMANCE how cool is 'dat!!!!

I have modern appliances but nothing romantic like a fireplace or balcony. East Dallas is not as cinematically colorful as Vic's neighborhood but it's nearly completely recent Mexican immigrants and other poor, usually drug-addled, folx of various ethnicities. Lots of good authentic Mex food in my hood. Also lots of gunshots and crackheads found rummgaing in yr car in broad daylight. Damn crackheads; they're worse than the possums.

^ No, really, that should be my adopted city's official motto!

My room is painted white with green carpet. I've got a drafting table in one corner, next to a little writing table that currently has my paper cutter on it. Then my bed that my brother gave me. Coming around we've got a wall-mount magazine rack where I keep my issues of Dwell, ReadyMade, Juxtapoz and various photography mags. Then my computer desk - Mac, 17" LCD monitory, Harmon-Kardon SoundStick speakers, Canon FS2710 negative scanner.

My small DVD shelf - going from Carrie in the top left down to the Anniversary Party in the bottom right.

I would have a new Philips 30" widescreen HDTV (thankyou Fry's credit), but I had to take it back today 'cuz it was fucked (that's what you get for buying a demo model that's marked down 65%). Instead I have a TV stand with my TV on top of my Sony receiver and DVD player and DirecTV box. Then my door.

On the small wall with my closet, I've got a new component stand with my turntable, an old five-DVD changer that I use for my CD player and a floor to ceiling bookshelf.

For decoration, I've got three framed posters - High Fidelity (above my drafting table), Trainspotting (above my bed) and one that's a photo of Keith Richards holding a paper that says "Pope Declares Keith Richards God", above my closet. Also a tin repro Indian Motorcycle sign, a Kids in the Hall concert sign/poster, a tiny Edward Hopper print, two photos I took while rolling.

I have more crap than room.

Oh, and on the other wall above my bed, I've got one of those French advertising poster reproductions, for "Maurin Quina" with some devilish green sprite jumping. At one place I worked, there was a 9-foot tall version of this that I wanted to steal very badly.

I live in a large 2 bedroom apartment I can't afford the rent on by myself in East St Kilda, Melbourne. The area's often known as little Russia or little Israel due to its high population of migrant jews, a lot of whom are orthodox. I have a lovely sun filled modern flat with a dishwasher and loads of space. I currently live alone with my cat, but usually have some form of company, be it a friend or my boyfriend. I wish I didnt rent - I'd love to paint some walls, change the carpet and blinds.

A ten minute walk down to the nearby Carlisle st shops and I'm surrounded by bagel outlets, bakeries, cool little bars, funky clothing stores... it's becoming a very nice bohemian area, and this means the prices are going to start going up horribly around here. Mind you, the settled in large jewish family population settled round here should keep the obscene DINK style development at bay. I like this.

Up the road a bit, I have a rabinnical college and a very old pretty cemetary. I found out past generations of my family lived, married and died in the area long before I'd ever been born, and I often wonder if thats what drew me to move down here.

My cat loves to sit on the windowsill in the sun and stare at the birds. She never tries catching any. I'd love to love into a small house with a little garden. Sadly I can't afford to.

the house is a modest, weatherboard, californian bungalow. built on stumps mired in clay, the house literally moves with the shifting soil, cracking walls and making some doors impossible to close properly. it overlooks a house the neighbours designed that resembles "a cresting wave" (to quote the architect). people stop and stare, marvelling at it's structural smarts. nobody stares at the peeling weatherboard.

the neighbourhood is really controlled by marauding gangs of possums, who liberally piss and shit everywhere and stage pitched turf battles during the evenings. occasionally they get into the walls, become trapped and die, filling the house with a pungent dead possum smell. competing with the possums are the fruit bats that settle in the mulberry tree out back and strip it of its delicious fruit. in addition to this wanton animalistic destruction, australia is experiencing its worst drought in a hundred years and after another dry summer melbourne was looking very brown. even with winter, gardening enthusiasts now contend with water restrictions and infrequent rain. so the garden lurches from one season to another, ever at the mercy of the sun and the weeds.

i live a kick away from an large park and three kicks from a freeway. every sunday a marching band practices in the velodrome. so at 9am they start ba ba ba baaaa ba ba ba ba ba baaaaa ba ba ba ba baaaa ba ba ba ba baaaaa (Star Wars). freakin' marching bands on sunday mornings!

nightlife is limited. the pubs are either dives, replete with poker machines or attract a clientele who've travelled a long way to get their freak on with young, rich, bottle blondes (The Glenferries anyone!). this also goes for Hawthorn's two night clubs. so for diversity you must travel closer to the city or st. kilda!

ugh. i never go out in st.kilda. somehow i always end up in the north.

Our block was featured in the Evening Times last year as our neighbours put in an loft extension which was the first of its kind in an ex-council house, and they said one of the main reasons they extended rather than moving was because they had really good neighbours. All the families in our block are lovely, the kind of proper neighbours who water your plants when you're on holiday and invite you in for a coffee and a chat.

We have a supermarket right over the road, and a large park to the side of our house. It's a quiet neighbourhood with a lot of old folks. Lots of people with dogs too, for some reason.

It is a pain in the neck to get back to late at night from Glasgow though.

The house is full of 20 years of collecting crap, but other wise would be large enough. I get 'possums, squirels, and neighbors' cats in my yard (and also dead possums under the house), and used to smell a skunk now and then but haven't for years. I'm trying to make the back yard more lush.