Yesterday was a tiring day. Lots of walking around, rather quickly, trying to get to appointments to see apartments. But interspersed with some really fun time with Roshani -- we went with Zoe to a yarn store in Oak Park, Tangled Web, where I picked up some Himalayan sari yarn to make my sister a scarf for her birthday, and Roshani got some baby yarn for her upcoming baby's blanket and possibly a dress (though that last seems quite ambitious). We stopped a kids' bookstore and I got Zoe a few belated birthday presents -- a book of Indian folk tales, a pink stuffed unicorn. She's four-and-a-half now, and in a painfully girly phase -- anything pink and glittery is an immediate object of desire. "Boy things" like trains and trucks are being immediately rejected as unsuitable. Hopefully it will soon pass. There's signs of hope in the fact that she wants to be Luke Skywalker when she grows up -- her favorite toy is her lightsaber.
Eventually we picked up Tom, had yummy Korean bento box for a late lunch, wandered some more, and finally came back to my place for cheese and apples and plums and tea. Kevin's folks sent him three months of cheese for Christmas; this last month's had a particularly delicious French blue. That ended up being my dinner, accompanied by a rousing two-hour discussion of corporations and NGOs and priorities in economic development. Fun. I have concluded that Tom is not heartless, but possibly somewhat misguided. Then I did some work while they watched A Bug's Life, which they hadn't seen before. And then they went home, and I called Kevin and talked over apartments with him.
I did quite like one of the ones I saw yesterday. It's not as lovely as the one I liked so much, but it's somewhat bigger, I think, and in a nicer area, Cornelia and Broadway (a few blocks north of Belmont). A long, narrow apartment, in a style similar to the places I lived in as a college student in Hyde Park, but bigger and really well-maintained. It would be like living in a nicer version of Kevin's old condo, the one where we first lived together. Oak trim around doors and windows, oak crown molding, a beautiful wood inlay in the floor, a sunroom and roof rights. The building was built in 1900 or so. I'm finding myself really resistant to new places at the moment; I think because so many of them look so very much alike. When I first started looking, the townhouses with their hardwood floors, granite countertops, Grohe fixtures, Brazilian cherry cabinets looked quite pretty. And they are, but gods, there are so many of them that are exactly alike. It's hard to fall in love with any of them -- they're just so generic. So now I find myself actively hunting for old buildings; there are way fewer of them than the new places, sadly.
Today, I finish reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and go to a DesiLit book club meeting about it this afternoon. In between, I need to make milk toffee to leave with Sujata, to sell at the Voices of Resistance event in mid-April, which I will sadly miss due to being in Sri Lanka. Also need to be ready to show the apartment at 1 p.m. -- my realtor has another appointment then, and there's someone who saw it yesterday who wants to come back today. It's tempting to get my hopes up that they'll actually want to buy it, but perhaps that's unwise. If they come back for a *third* time, maybe. :-)