That home survey that's going around (or was, ages ago) in survey time

Want to write, need to write, not inspired to write. What’s the answer to that?? Well, a survey, obviously. I’ve seen bunches I like lately but oddly I don’t usually do them immediately. I wait awhile. Let them simmer for a bit. I’ve had this one for quite some time. And I apologize for how the questions are SHOUTING AT YOU. But I’m much too lazy to redo them.

DO YOU LIVE IN A HOUSE OR AN APARTMENT?
A house. A house that I’ve lived in for almost 18 years. I can not tell you how shocking I find that. Before we moved into this house, we were nomads. Three years was the longest we stayed anywhere. I’ve had Moving Fever for a number of years now.

WOULD YOU SAY IT IS BIG OR SMALL?
It is.... hmmmmm. It’s not a big house, especially not for Ginormous America. It is a kind of weird house- two stories, very very small rooms. It was built in 1969, I think, and we believe it was a vacation house in its early years. We have two actual bedrooms upstairs (tiny) and another room downstairs that is Baker B’s study (also tiny). The kitchen is just separated from the livingroom by a bar/counter thing. (If we ever move I really REALLY want a separate kitchen). The bathroom is so tiny that you can stand in the middle and touch two walls, and then touch the other two if you take a step each way. Downstairs in The Basement, there’s a fairly large area that we just throw junk into. Then there’s another totally unused bathroom with a non-working toilet. That’s too long a story to go into, but we do plan to replace the toilet SOON and actually have two working bathrooms. Which we’ve, ummm, never had here in 18 years. Then there’s what we call the Basement Basement. To distinguish it from The Basement. The Basement Basement is just concrete walls, and is where the washer and dryer and furnace live.

I hate the downstairs area. I don’t know why. It’s always made me anxious. It’s dark and cold and damp (that part of the house is half-underground) and the ceilings are low and I do not like going down there. So, yeah, I avoid half of the house. So we have an average-sized house that is reduced to a quite small house because we only really use half of it. Except for Baker B’s tiny study downstairs and a place to throw junk. And do laundry.

DO YOU HAVE A WELCOME MAT?
We do. In a mostly futile effort to cut down on the dirt and mud that gets tracked in.

DOES IT SAY SOMETHING?
It does not. It’s just your basic brown bristly mat with a black outline. Boring! I saw the Welcome Mat Of My Dreams when I was looking for one, and I can not tell you how badly I wanted to buy it — it was also a brown bristly one, with big black letters that said GO AWAY. I thought it was hilarious, but I did not buy it because we are the Weird Antisocial Neighbors and nobody would realize it was a joke.

DO YOU HAVE A DISHWASHER OR DO YOU HAVE TO DO YOUR DISHES BY HAND?
OMG yes. This was the first place I’d lived in YEARS that had a dishwasher, and let me tell you, the 30 year old dishwasher pretty much sold me on the house all by its magical self. When the 30 year old dishwasher died a few years later, I immediately, and I do mean IMMEDIATELY, went out and bought another one. Because if there is one thing in this world I hate hate hate, it’s doing the dishes by hand.

Currently, being US, we are having a plumbing issue that involves a totally broken pipe under the kitchen sink, which means we have to have a big rubber bin under there for the dishwasher to drain into, and it has to be dumped out half through the cycle and again at the end. Into the bathtub. It would probably be easier to do the dishes by hand, but I will by god use the dishwasher and drag the bin of water to the tub twice and risk snapping my back in half dumping it out before I’ll do the dishes by hand. Baker B is supposed to fix it. I’d scoff since this has gone on for months and Baker B is not a fixer (nor am I), but one of the pipes in the ceiling of the Basement Basement sprung a leak last week, and Baker B went to the hardware store and bought stuff and FIXED IT. I was quite stunned. SO there is still hope for the under-the-sink leak.

HOW MANY PLANTS DO YOU HAVE INSIDE?
This is quite sad, but I do not have a single living plant inside. I have a bakers rack by the deck door with a bunch of empty pots, but no plants. We get very little light inside, but I do need to get some low-light ones.

DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL PLACE THAT YOU PUT YOUR KEYS?
I do. There’s a hook on the wall by the weird bar thing where I hang them as soon as I come in. Otherwise I would be like Baker B and never know where my keys are.

IS YOUR REFRIGERATOR STOCKED WITH ANYTHING?
Beer, milk, peanut butter… one egg… cheese....olives.....yogurt… and some stuff that needs to be thrown away. It is very poorly stocked.

WHERE DO YOU KEEP YOUR BREAD?
For some reason I’ve not bought bread for ages, but when I do buy it I keep it on top of the bread machine. Ironically. I rarely use the bread machine- I need to either give it away or start using it again.

IS YOUR BATHROOM CLEAN?
My bathroom is a filthy filthy nasty mess, and cleaning it is my number 1 priority tomorrow.

WHAT IS YOUR BATHROOM’S THEME?
Apparently it’s soapscum, mold, mildew, cobwebs and general filth. I did paint it blue years ago and hang some kind of cool colorful tropical fish things on the wall, so we’ll say it’s an ocean theme. A very nasty ocean where all the creatures have long since died from filth.

HOW MANY RUGS DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIVING SPACE?
Unfortunately we have carpet upstairs. Old old old carpet that needed replacing when we bought the house 18 years ago. We ripped it out downstairs, in the Basement, because it was so damp down there- now that’s just concrete floors. I do have a plan to paint the floor down there… one day. And to GET NEW CARPET up here. I’d love wood floors but Baker B is neurotic about noise and wood floors are loud.

DO YOU KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS?
We’re on friendly terms with our grown-up neighbors, but we are the most antisocial people on the planet so rarely do more than say hi. We have a young couple on one side and on the other side of them, bizarrely enough, is our local state senator. He’s lived here nearly as long as we have– long before he became a senator. He used to be our garbageman, actually. Now he’s a senator, although I’ll certainly say he’s not a flashy and ostentatious one, as he’s still living in this neighborhood. He did build a new house but it’s pretty ordinary. Unfortunately he is a very very conservative Republican and is pretty much our polar opposite in political viewpoints. We always vote against him but he’s on his third term now. He’s a very likable guy. He’s also singlehandedly ruined the neighborhood by buying up houses and turning them into student rentals. On the plus side, he still lives here too so can kind of keep an eye on them. On the minus side, it’s totally a student neighborhood now which really sucks, since we’re basically surrounded by students. The current crop is fine - very quiet - but they are a revolving door.

IF SO DO YOU GET ALONG WITH THEM?
We do. We just don’t talk politics with the senator.

ARE THERE ANY STRAY CATS AROUND?
There is a gorgeous big black cat who comes around, and nobody seems to know who he belongs to. He’s very friendly and well-fed, and everyone thought he was someone else’s cat. I think he’s kind of the neighborhood cat at this point.

DO YOU HAVE A DVD PLAYER IN YOUR BEDROOM?
No. There’s a short answer for you.

WHICH ROOM WOULD YOU SAY YOU SPEND THE MOST TIME IN?
The one I am in now. The livingroom/diningroom/whatever room. The Main Room. There’s not really anywhere else to go. Other than the bedrooms. Or the Scary Basement.

DO YOU HAVE A POOL OR JACUZZI WHERE YOU LIVE?
Only the one that forms all down the walkway when it pours rain.

DO YOU HAVE A COFFEE MAKER?
Of course I have a coffee maker. Sadly I’ve decided I don’t like it that much - it’s a strange carafe thing that makes the coffee and then it stays warm in the metal carafe instead of having a heating element. It does stay pretty warm, but it’s airtight so you can’t smell it brewing, and I miss that. It’s also a bitch to clean. I think I’ve only had it maybe a year, so can’t justify a new one yet.

WHERE DO YOU KEEP YOUR TOOTHPASTE?
.... where do most people keep their toothpaste??? In the bathroom. The one we actually use.

Okay, I’ve just realized there are 34, 861 more questions and many of them are boring so I am weeding them out now.

DO YOU LIVE CLOSE TO ANY STORES?
Not close enough to walk. There’s an Ingles about a mile away, on the main highway. Well, that’s technically close enough to walk, but you’d be run over in ten seconds on this road. Lots of traffic, no shoulders to get off the road, curves and fast drivers. Ingles is a nice grocery store in Asheville, but unfortunately here it replaced an old Winn Dixie that went out of business, and in order to keep the lower-income Winn Dixie shoppers it’s dimly lit and always seems grubby and cheap.

DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING HANGING FROM THE CEILING?
Like, bats???? That wouldn’t surprise me. We do have a ceiling fan.

DO YOU HAVE A FIREPLACE AND IF SO DO YOU USE IT OFTEN?
This is SO SAD - we do have a fireplace, and I was SO HAPPY to have a fireplace when we bought the house. We used it for a couple of years, then the strange glass doors in front of it shattered. Apparently they weren’t the correct type of glass doors and it was amazing they lasted as long as they did. We bought a wood stove insert from a neighbor, and were excited about that because they heat really well…and we have NEVER USED IT. We bought it YEARS ago, then found the fan was broken and it needed all kinds of stuff to be hooked up to the chimney properly, and we just never did get it done. Now there’s a big tree that’s grown up over the chimney and that would have to be trimmed too before it could be used. PLUS the chimney would have to be cleaned. SIGH.

Okay, that’s enough. That is WAY more than enough.