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We said we wouldn't buy a brick colonial!
December 2008
Iris writes: big news: we bought a house! Finally, we are now true citizens of the great city of Baltimore. It took us since June of 2007 to find a house that we felt could replace our beloved New Orleans Taj. We were looking for something built before 1920, less than 15 minutes from the train station, and in our price range. Well, two out of three isn’t bad- we now have a 1937 brick colonial nestled in the woods of Roland Park. The house has four fireplaces and a beautiful addition in the back, a large den which adjoins the patio and looks out on the woods. While the housing bubble inflated housing prices badly in Baltimore during the early part of this decade, we hope that buying towards the middle of the current bust (we don’t think it has quite ended yet) and in a good location will mean that we will recoup our investment. (And moving all of our stuff from the Taj here was so traumatic that we don’t ever plan to move again.) Meanwhile, with a recent good score on one of my two long-term grants, we have accomplished half of the four things we need to totally recover from Katrina: (refunding of my two NIH grants -which support my salary; buying a house, and obtaining a stable job for Chuck rather than the contract work he is now doing for the National Gallery). Hopefully in the next year or so we will accomplish the remaining two goals.
We are slowly getting attached to Baltimore. Every day I drop Chuck off at the train station and drive through town to get to the University of Maryland. I notice a new architectural detail each day, from the whimsical (a building façade decorated with a log-like motif) to the grand (the Enoch Pratt libraries, the many churches). We are starting to make friends and have curtailed our trips back to New Orleans to one or two a year. While we still miss the southern warmth and tree-lined ambience of New Orleans, we don’t miss the spectacular inefficiency of the city and its institutions, and the soul-wrenching lack of municipal progress after “the storm”. Someone actually answers the 311 phone in Baltimore, and that person provides accurate information!
Click here to email Iris at UMB
Click here to email Iris at Yahoo
