Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I mostly managed to stay off the internet today because I knew what was coming. 

Today was Mason's first day at his new job at the Science Museum. When I picked him up around 2 pm, there were a lot of other parents waiting out front in their cars. This program hired 80 students, I think. Most of what I know about what Mason will be doing is still fairly vague, but it seems like he's enjoying it. Today, apparently, they did a lot of getting to know you exercises and got a tour of the Science Museum (and the special employee tour which included the cheap, slightly broken vending machines.)

Shawn and I went to Menard's to pick up some plastic bins. We're continuing to deal with the fallout of Mason's reorganization of his room. He wanted a desk, which we bought for him some time ago, but moving the desk in meant moving OUT a bunch of books and disassembling (and selling) the top part of his bunk bed. A number of the books that got moved out will go to the little free library. But, there are also a lot of sentimental favorites that will be saved for the next generation of Morehouse-Rounds, and so those are getting put into bins and hauled up to the attic. (Which of course also necessitated a slight re-organization of the attic, because: of course.)

By the end of this we were all tired, cranky, and hangry. We ended up having a spat about dinner, which resulted in a drive through Culver's and a trip to Cafe Latte for gigantic pieces of PIE and CAKE because f*ck everything.

It seemed clear to me that we all had short fuses because we knew what had happened in the Senate.

It's been an awful week.

And we have only just begun to fight.

 Mason got the job!

We've been waiting to say until all of the applicants were notified, but we can happily (pridefully) boast that our baby got a job at the science museum through KAYSC (Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center). He got the offer last Tuesday night, and paperwork has arrived for him to fill out. This Tuesday at 4 pm, Mason gets the whole HR treatment.  Sh*t just got real!

What is cool about this job, from what I can tell, is that he can keep it until he graduates. That would be amazing, if it works out. 

I still don't ENTIRELY understand what his job will be, exactly. This is something he found for himself, filled out the application for completely on his own, and the only thing either Shawn or I did for him was buy him a nice set of "business casual" clothes and drive him to the interview. So, my pride runs very deep on this one. I was fairly self-motivated when I was Mason's age, but I dunno. I THINK MY KID IS EXTRA SPECIAL, DON'T YOU?  ;-)

It's kind of been a whirlwind introduction into adulthood for Mason, this year.  He's learning to drive; he got his own checking account; he's starting AP (advanced placement) and CIS (college in school) classes; and now he's got himself an actual job that pays real money.

If we did any kind of magic to help this job happen, I think it was opening up a teen checking account for him this summer. We made sure to get a direct deposit slip as part of the deal, even though, at the time, we joked that it'd probably be awhile before he needed _that._ 

In other news, Shawn, Lisa, and I did the Summit Hill House Tour yesterday.  

First, of all, it needs to be said that I am a gigantic snoop. I LOVE looking in people's houses. I'm not really one of those people who gets off on judging and criticizing people's interior decorating (or housekeeping) so much as I think it's the writer part of me that really enjoys the peek into how other people live.  This is true across the board: fancy house to modest house, historic house to brand-new  

For instance, I'm not keen on shopping, but Shawn can ALWAYS drag me along to estate sales because they are a chance to go into someone's house and look at all the stuff they've collected over the years.

If you don't know about estate sales, they're kind of amazing. An estate sale is sort of a combination of an open house and a rummage sale, with many of the things for sale laid out in the rooms they came out of. So, like all the bed linens are in the bedroom, the furniture is all still where it was placed originally--only there's a price tag on it all. Sometimes there's even bathrooms that are open with bathroom items for sale in them.  So, you REALLY get a sense of how people lived. And, you usually get to go into every part of the house from the basement to the attic to the garage. Some rooms are blocked off, but pretty much you get to check out every nook and cranny. You're not supposed to open drawers, but that's really about it.  

Snooper's paradise.

The Summit Hill House Tour is like that, only without the stuff for sale.  The houses, too, are actual mansions. Many of the ones we visited were built at a time when people also housed servants--some of them SEVERAL sets of, or entire families of servants. A lot of the houses, too, were built by famous American (and some foreign) architects. So, not only are they fun to snoop, but many had a bit of history to them.

We turned in our tickets and got a map and guidebook that served as our entry to the houses. We were given a swag bag that included booties to wear as we entered each house. There were a dozen addresses open, but we only managed 5 of them. They were fairly spread out and, honestly, after a while, they started to blur together. A lot of people sign up for this, too, and there are long lines (aka queues for my UK friends.)



The first house we visited is known as "The Griggs House." (If you click on the link, you can get a virtual tour, including rooms we weren't allowed to see.)

It's a 1862 Italianate Villa. It's on the National Register of Historic places and used to be owned by the Minnesota Historical Society.  Architect Clarence H. Johnston remolded the "front hall." The thing I remember the most about this house was that the dinning hall had "sea floor marble," which meant that there were fossils embedded in the marble--which, I honestly originally mistook as scuff marks, though if you looked closely you could see where things like horseshoe crabs and fish. The dining room also had paintings that are "attributed to" Flemish painter Jan Frans van Bloemen (I don't know if that means they don't have provenance or what, but they were nice enough if you like that sort of thing.) The other room that was unique as the Drawing Room/Mirror Room which was a room in which the walls were mirrored panels...not like a hall of mirrors hung on the wall, but where the walls were ENTIRELY paneled in mirrors.  The tour guide said that it was quite blinding certain times of year.  Why this was fashionable, I have literally no idea.

We stopped in at the designated bathroom spot, the University Club, and snooped around there, too. This is one of the many buildings I have driven past for the last 20 odd years that Shawn has worked at the Minnesota Historical Society, and I've always been deeply curious about what it looks like on the inside. We were given free reign to explore and so we did. The view out of the windows overlooking the Mississippi River Valley was SPECTACULAR.  They also boast a lending library that looks straight out of Harry Potter.

The next stop was a house known as the "Carl T. Schuneman House" which was actually NOT on Summit Avenue, but still "on the hill" on Grand Hill. This house was actually built after ours, in 1925 in the Tudor Revival style. 



This house was apparently commissioned by the architectural partnership of Allen H. Stem and Roy H. Haslund.  The thing I most remember about this house was how stuffy it was--I mean as in, I broke out a sweat walking around in the place because the air was just not moving. Also, this house had been very "modernized." The current owner was a fan of Downton Abbey and commissioned a replica of the bell board you see on the show for the third floor hallway.  This was the only time I had a disparaging thought about the kinds of people who can afford houses like this, because... sure. I mean, we all want to pretend to have someone to bring us tea to the "small library" but it's a whole other thing when you actually can AFFORD to have someone bring you tea AND have a "small library," you know??

The next house, however, was our favorite. All these houses are named and this one is the "Cyrus B. Thurston-Rudolph Schiffmann House." It is a brick Victorian Queen Anne mansion built in 1881.



Apparently the architect of this house is unknown, but suspected to be the German architect August Gauger. The appeal of this house is hard to explain. The owners kept most of the original features in amazing shape, including these intricate parquet floors on two of the three stories of this house. We were allow nearly everywhere, even up to the third floor artist studio. The spaces were classically Victorian, with lots of funny little hallways opening up into massive rooms. Shawn and I walked out of this one and agreed that it was the one we'd buy when we won the lottery.

The funniest story about this this house is something I overheard on the self-guided tour. I think we were in the library, which has this amazing mahogany paneling and built-in bookcases and one of the women behind us asked the tour guide, "Do you know if he's single?" referring to the current owner.

I had to laugh.

Shawn, Lisa, and I took a break at this point and had a refuel of caffeine at the Himalayan Java coffeehouse on Grand Avenue. It was a weird weather day because it was cold and rainy-ish enough outside that we needed jackets, but all of the houses were just a little too hot--probably due to all the people moving in and out and ancient ventilation systems. So, I ordered a hot honey latte and my companions both had iced Chai, which I was told was very good. (Thumbs up on my latte, too.) We sat for a while outside and tried to decide how much more we wanted to see. I really wanted to try to get into see 599 Summit, which is an 1889 Rowhouse, but is most famous for having been the home of St. Paul native, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But, we drove past that place several times and the lines literally went around the block. So, we picked out a couple of out of the way places to try. 

At this point, however, it started to feel more like a "Parade of Homes" and less like an historic mansion tour, you know? I really quite enjoyed the 1910 Craftsman style house on Oxford street, but not because of anything profoundly impressive about it, but the owners had painted the walls brilliant colors, including a fire-engine red. I walked in and saw the bright color and sighed, "Ah, I like these people already," to which I was greeted with a "Good, because that's me!" Turns out the owners were acting as tour guides and so we talked to all of them about their house and how soul soothing it was to have brilliantly colored walls in the dead of a Minnesota winter. The thing I remember the most about that house besides the walls is that they had a scale model of a steamboat big enough to play in in their basement that had apparently come from the Minnesota Children's museum. It was clear that the family had structured the house to be the most amazing place for their grandchildren. Their carriage house had been turned into a playhouse, even.

We hoofed it up to Osceola Avenue to check out a fairly mundane American Foursquare built in 1908. At this point we were getting out of the "I could never afford a house like this" territory and into "If this were in my neighborhood I could have bought it" space. Which, doesn't mean that the houses weren't neat to snoop around in, but we were also getting physically tired from the constant shift between feeling overheated and walking in the brusque autumn air.  So, when we saw the long line outside of the next house (an 1892 Victorian on Fairmount Avenue) we bailed completely and headed home without even going inside.  

I feel kind of badly that we didn't even make half the houses on the tour, but I have no regrets. It was a tremendously fun way to spend a Sunday.