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here's something that will make you happy every single day of winter: in the morning, after you shower, lay your pajamas on the radiator. when you're ready for bed at the end of the day they'll be toasty.

i feel the process of aging is accumulating knowlege like this.

that's our sparse bedroom. the blanket is made from old dinosaurs and i'm convinced it gives me allergies. we have two. the other isn't as ugly but is worse for allergies because it was in the room when i beat the rug senseless. so it's in a corner crumpled up.

the drapes are short like that on purpose. that's what missy says.

here's the "dining room" area, with the kitchen-closet behind. we have one table and it's skinny. you can tell in the photo how missy feels about skinny tables. it holds laptops mostly, and sometimes food. there's a great stone tile floor that really gets the echoes going.

the kitchen has two hot plates. we bought a big toaster oven and we're thinking about what size turkey can fit in there for thanksgiving. one of the shelves has a big gold "Ralph Lauren" imprinted in it for some reason. gives the place some class. the microtable we got for under the oven has a couple wine rack shelves in it. good thinking! i've been trying to keep a decent selection on hand, but it's not easy.

and the living half of the main room, of which the dining room is the other. that's corey text messaging on the phone in the foreground during his visit. so euro!

the glass (french?) doors close letting the room double as a guest bedroom. missy's sitting on the little fold-a-bed contraption they call a clic-clac, for the sound it makes when you operate the folding mechanism. so far three of the springy wooden slats they use instead of box springs here have been broken just from normal sitting. now it's kind of tricky to sit in without falling in. plus the foam part was really chintzy to start with and the slats are pretty far apart so it's more like sitting on a horizontal ladder for all the enjoyment you get out of it. we're tracking down leads on where to find a supply of backup slats. i hate getting what you pay for.

and what tour would be complete? this is one of the two half-bathrooms. the big munga water heater is perched right above and kind of overlapping the toilet, getting into its space. you can't really sit up straight. i'm only somewhat conscious of how mass and volume and all that other sculptural and architectural stuff affects your mental well-being, but man if that isn't a foreboding unsettling arrangement. you don't have to be any kind of aesthete to get spooked in there.

there's pipes for the water meter and vents that seem to only work backwards, pumping in smells from other flats. it really feels like the room with the least attention paid to it. or with the most malicious attention maybe.

this is the stairway leading down to the street. pretty bourgeois but pretty tattered too. there's a whole host of old ladies in the building that seem to run things around here. one is about 80 and rides a heavy steel bicycle around town, all full of energy. she's awesome.

they're all wonderfully friendly and helpful. they're insistent on helping to the point that i feel i'm missing some obvious social cues of some kind and not upholding some part of the neighbor bargain. but they haven't bitten me yet. sometimes one or another will have a large dinner party in their lavish apartment. we'll hear all the guests at night in the hall leaving. boisterous crowd noise sounds the same in every language.