While I’m really excited, I’m really anxious as there’s so much to do before we can consider ourselves moved. Right now I’m focusing on the packing and getting certain pieces of furniture donated. Out of the Closet is coming on Wednesday to take our dressers and a couple other things. A friend may be taking our guest bed and another neighbor friend may take a spare small bookcase of ours.

We had a moving company rep come to do a walk through estimate but that didn’t work out so well. We may be renting a truck and doing it ourselves, some or all. I don’t mind if I end up moving stuff with our moving cart. It’s a really good moving cart. I just need help with the really cumbersome things like our larger bookcases. There’s some movers we can hire that load and unload trucks pretty good, so we may go with that. We’ll see what we end up doing. Time is winding down though. Our 30 day notice is in and we’ll be starting the lease on the new place in the next week.

I started this blog to do research on the move, and now that it’s happening, I’m not sure if I should keep this blog and what I’ll end up doing with it. I have a downtown LA blog that will have to go away or change how that works… Does it make sense to try and keep 2 Bay Area blogs updated? What to do with a blog seems like a funny concern.

I really didn’t know if our move would happen or when it would happen. I didn’t know where we would end up.. So that we’re so close to the City and Berkeley is such a fantastic result.

When last we lived in Berkeley, AC Transit was still part of the BART plus monthly transit pass. That’s long passed, and so now one has to consider the cost of transportation.

According to the fare page on AC Transit (effective August 2011) it’s 2.10 for an adult, (or 4.20 for the Transbay) It’s $80 if you want a 31day Clipper pass. That’s seems like a lot of bus riding.. but when you figure it by a $2.10 one way fare.. that’s 38 one-way trips.. Assuming one takes the bus to & from work.. it does pay for itself, I suppose.

Eighty bucks seems like a lot to shell out up front.. and hopefully, we’ll be somewhere where riding my bike more often will be an option, or at least encouraged. =)

I’ve managed to get by in DTLA not having a bus pass of any kind.. walking around DTLA or taking the DASH when necessary, or using the MTA when I need to (they don’t do distance based fares so one can travel to NoHo for the same as one might take the line two stops over to Union Station). Then again, having a bus pass is nice and encourages one to use the bus whenever you need to make some trips that are a little longer than a couple miles. Also one is encouraged to explore their community by bus, checking out new restaurants or shops.

Here in LA we have a pet sitter we really like. She’s excellent with our cats and goes above and beyond so many times. One of the few things that I’m going to find difficult when the day comes, is getting a trusting cat sitter to watch our kitties when we do our annual trip to Florida.

While I can’t vouch for any of these services, I’m going to list them here so that I can check them out later:

Safe Hands Pet Care Operates out of the Berkeley, El Cerrito, Kensington, Albany, Oakland & Piedmont, Montclair, Rockridge, Lake Meritt & Jack London Square area.

In the Company of Dogs (and Cats too) Dog Training and Cat Care “..petsit and provide East Bay cat care in Berkeley, Albany, Kensington, Emeryville, Rockridge, North Oakland and El Cerrito. ”

Here’s a list of reviews off Yelp for Catsitters in Berkeley

**Emily from “Your cat’s Companion” seems to be getting really good reviews, and that’s the sort of person we’d want to watch our kitties.. So I guess it just depends where we end up, when the day comes.

and finally Eastbay Pet Sitters Assoc. a go-to site for pet care providers.

City Carshare
ZipCar

This morning I read an article from Sunset Magazine that talks about something called “GetAround” Getaround.com is a car sharing program where individuals rent their personal car out by the hour.. rates vary and you can’t really see where the cars are available unless you join.. but the FAQ page says it’s mainly SF and just starting in Portland.

I’m thinking GetAround might be an option if we end up outside the immediate San Francisco or Berkeley/Oakland area. Or it could be a secondary option if we joined City CarShare, which doesn’t seem to have cars currently available in the Emeryville area.. Zipcar has cars available in Emeryville and a couple as far south as Balboa Park or Daly City BART stations. It would be nice if the carshare programs had cars available in places like Sunnyvale, Palo Alto or Fremont. It’s possible (I have no way to know for certain) that GetAround might fill that gap. Who knows? I’m hoping I can find out more before the time *hopefully* comes where we would need to make a decision.

One nice thing though is that we got back to the City for one day to visit family for Thanksgiving. Not near enough time to do more than have dinner and head back to the hotel.. We were flying off for one of Sean’s work trips and our annual vacation.

Sunset on Thanksgiving 2011

Depending on where you lived it was small.. or if you, like one of my twitter friends, were centered near it’s epicenter, it gave quite a jolt.

SF Gate had an article this morning on it:

BERKELEY — An earthquake and an aftershock, both on the Hayward Fault near Berkeley, rattled the Bay Area on Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The first quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 4.0, struck at 2:41 p.m. The second, a 3.8, was at 8:16 p.m.

The earlier quake’s epicenter was 2 miles southeast of Berkeley, and the aftershock’s epicenter was 1 mile east of Berkeley. Both quakes were felt throughout the East Bay and San Francisco.

We get plenty of earthquakes down in LA, and a couple have made me nervous. This isn’t anything for me to really consider if/when we move back home, other than making sure where we are isn’t on some sort of soft-fill that will liquify during a large quake.

LA had ‘flexcar’ for a bit before Zipcar bought them out and removed all the cars from downtown. Zipcar is only available at USC and UCLA which makes them worthless (at least for folks living in downtown LA), IMHO.

Currently we use LAX carshare which works great for us.. We have a car right across the street on Main or a short walk to Pershing Square. We use the carshare probably 5-8 times a month. Sean works from home for the most part, so it works out good for doing the weekly shopping run, or the occasional drive down to Anaheim to meet up with friends or attend a special event. It’s really one of the big pluses of living in DTLA. Having availability of a carshare close at hand will be a big plus of anywhere we relocate.

3. A walkable community. Having a walkable downtown is another plus of where we live in the Historic Core of DTLA. This is the closest we can get to the quality of life we had when living in Berkeley. Downtown LA and Berkeley couldn’t be any more different though in the quality of air, walkability, and green living environment. Wherever we relocate needs to have a high walk score.. access to shops, library, cafes.. etc.. A bike friendly neighborhood is a plus.

4. A green community. A city with a great recycling program, or access to a great recycling center. DTLA really lacks a recycling program for all the loft dwellers. Sean and I take the carshare once a month or so to turn in all our recycling. They don’t take everything and often we are still throwing things away that I know some other place would be happy to have. My initial research shows Palo Alto has an amazing program.. which seems to take all the things that we currently have to throw out, or hold on to for an indefinite period. Berkeley, which I remember being pretty good, has gotten a little better, but we’d still be making those monthly trips to the Ecology Center or whatnot.