Places I've Lived

Here are the houses I've lived over the years, thanks to Google Street View:

1986(?)-1991: West Lafayette, Indiana (look straight to the end of the parking lot)

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This was Married Student Housing at Purdue University. I think it's called "Purdue Village" now, but it still looks the same. It looks amazingly familiar, actually. Here's my kindergarten school bus stop (my preschool is in the background), the Purdue University Airport where we used to go watch the planes (and the American Airlines ticket counter agent gave me a wings pin), and the park that I think we used to call Squirrel Park, whether or not it was actually called that.

1991-1995: Powell, Wyoming


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When we lived there, it didn't look quite so much like it was going to get up and walk away, and the neighbors had a big spruce tree, I think. Plus the porch was blue.

This was a nice neighborhood to grow up in. I could walk to school or the grocery store by myself, without being worried about traffic or gangs or drug dealers or rug dealers or sexual predators or actual predators. I compensated by making up things to worry about, like germs and deadly poisonous herbicides and pesticides and symptoms.

August-October 1995: St John, Maine (about 10 miles from Fort Kent)


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The "Stinky House!" There were bats in the garage (now gone, apparently) and fish and frogs in the backyard, the house smelled like urine, and the tap water was mud. We didn't stay here very long. But it was an adventure!

1995-1998?: Plaisted, Maine (also about 10 miles from Fort Kent)


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This was a pretty normal house, actually. The huge driveway got smaller and smaller over the course of the winter (we shoveled it by hand); when the snow melted we found that the newspaper people had put the "mailbox" for the newspaper right in the middle of the pavement. The mailbox was still there on street view a few months ago, but they seem to have moved it now. We had a moose in our backyard once, and a bear another time, and I would run to the back window every night to watch through the trees as the train went by.

Then our landlord sold the house to some people who moved in, and we moved to...

1998?-1999: Fort Kent, Maine


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Amazingly, somewhere with no street view! But I think I got the right house. This one was built by an electrician. It had every kind of light switch known to man, and the basement was oddly split up into lots of little half-finished rooms.

1999-2003: Lakeland, Florida


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And then somehow we were in Central Florida, where it was very hot and humid and flat. And I went to high school, and met lots of really great people, and somehow I actually liked it. But I didn't like Florida itself very much, and I never thought I would miss it. I thought it was rather monotonous, with its flatness and pine flatwoods and unidentifiable trees and strip malls and gated communities and Disney World plastic fakeness. And it's taken me until now to actually miss the mangroves and the alligators and the bathtub-warm Gulf beaches.

2003-2007: Caltech

This is a whole 'nother story...another day, perhaps.

2007-2008: Pasadena, California


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This was my first apartment. It was next to a construction site and had ants, leaky plumbing, and jalousie windows with no insulating value whatsoever, but I miss it anyway. There are better pictures over on Picasa.

And finally, or at least penultimately:

2008-2009: Pasadena, CA


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