Mitt liv som Tobin

It's my housemate Amol! Welcome him to Livejournal as dhondu (we just have to coax him into posting).

Last night at the Lux, I made some comment pertaining to our co-op to Jon. Then I explained to bystanders, "Oh, we're starting a cooperative house."

"Ant Hill?" asked the bystander.

"Yeah! How'd you know?"

"Saw it on the Wiki."

Turns out the bystander was Jason Olshefsky, local internet celebrity who authors Jayceland.

* * *

Surprisingly the co-op feels a lot more abstract now that it "really exists." Now there is a house (two houses!) with people living in them and food being bought and cooked and eaten and chores being done, but it feels more abstract now, because now you have to peer through the cracks to see that it's a co-op. Whereas, before, a co-op was all that it was. Make sense?

The six residents of the Main House have been living there for two weeks and I was quite impressed with their work. They'd gathered an impressive collection of furniture from tag sales and from the otherwise wasted resources of undergrads throwing away (!) their furniture on dorm move-out day. They set up a food share. They set up a chores rotation. Lounging about in the co-op living room, I can hardly imagine that a few weeks ago this was dingy, junk-filled place we surveyed then. It's come a long way.

I've now moved into the second house, one door down from the main house. This house is a beautiful old brick house, more than 150 years old, entirely hard wood interiors. It's a bit spartan so far since we haven't augmented it with furniture. I put up christmas lights and the rainbow flag. The landlord called with compliments.

Right now the food share is basically just a collective food buying scheme. Right now the main house residents have an ad hoc cooking scheme that seems to basically consist of everyone cooking for himself, possibly sharing with whomever is around. My highest priority for the co-op right now is developing a group cooking system with regular dinners every night (or five or six nights a week, or whatever regular system is decided upon). To jump start things I cooked cheese enchiladas (with black beans and rice) for dinner last night—I had hoped everybody would be around, but we had only 2 of the 6 main house residents, plus three brick house residents, plus three out-of-house members/co-conspirators. It was fun, though, and I think the food turned out decently. I volunteered to cook every Thursday.

I don't really know how you're supposed to make enchiladas, but here was my scheme: Mixed a lot of chili powder with a little water to make a bath in which to coat corn tortillas with chili. Dipped a tortilla in the chili-water (whereupon it turns all red with chili clinging to it), then fried it on both sides really quickly in some vegetable oil, then put it in a baking pan, covered half of it with cheese and chopped onions, folded it over. When the pan was full of these proto-enchiladas we baked it at 400 F for something like 10 or 15 minutes so that the cheese became all gooey. Served with rice and black beans + corn + green peppers. It was good.

In the next couple days, Amol is moving into the co-op. He's an electrical engineering graduate student from Northeastern Univ doing an internship here; before he started grad school he was from India. It looks like we will also have a guy named Ben who has just finished medical school at University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill (after attending Oberlin for undergrad, where he was an avid co-oper) and is doing residency at Strong Memorial Hospital here in ROC. Finally, our tenth resident may be Zach from Wesleyan.

Following whitewhale's cactus-adopting lead, I posted an add on craigslist advertising my desire to adopt unwanted houseplants that has already netted a few leads.

I've been reading Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies which I picked up at Moe's in Berkeley. I strongly recommend it as an interesting look into the machinery of our government and just how much they knew about Al Queda before Sept 11 and how they knew it. Very readable—the editors did a good job. (-:

Tonight I am travelling to Ann Arbor, MI (flight: NWA 3507) for some kind of conference. We're even presenting a little note, but if I had my choice I'd rather stick around in the ROC for the weekend.