We Dwell in Forever, & The Devil's Carnival (Again!)

Moving sucks, but it's also kind of awesome. Or should that be, moving is awesome, but it also kind of sucks?
As luck would have it, about a week ago I scored an amazing, 675 square foot loft for Stephen and myself. We've named it We Dwell in Forever, after Cobweb, Swift and Terzian's home in Wraeththu, but for short we just call it Forever, or The Keep. The Keep is in an old industrial building (it used to be the Mutual Creamery, or some such thing) with a FUCKING TOWER.
Yeah. We have a tower. We sure as hell can't access it, but that's okay. I just like knowing that it's there.

I'm really excited, and not just because of the tower. Forever is Stephen's and my first place together with no roommates. It's a loft, so it's got GIANT windows, and our view at night is really cool -you can see out into the Oakland hills, with little tiny lights all over.
Our landlord doesn't care what we do to it, as long as we can undo it whenever we decide to move, so we painted over the ugly white primer on the walls and made it beautiful, with a different theme for each room: the living room is a Victorian parlor with black and white striped walls (Bernard and Danielle get so so so many best friend points for painting that shit), our bedroom was inspired by an old school Goth club (we painted the walls such a deep purple that they look black at night, left a lot of the cracks visible through the paint, and are pretty much just strewing creepy stuff left right and center), the kitchen is an apothecary, and the bathroom has a green faery theme -two of the walls are bright absinthe green, and Bernard painted a gorgeous, sly minx of a green faery perched right by our mirror.

We're pretty happy with our little batcave came out. It's still a bit of a wreck, since we're having to unpack new furniture that ships to us right as we're trying to clean out the mess of boxes from unpacking all of our other stuff, but eventually it will be decent for having people over. Midnight tea parties!!

The only downside? (apart from once more having to pay rent...I'm not too excited about that, but the rent is practically dirt cheap). The reason our rent is dirt cheap is because we're right smack in East Oakland.  The nicest way I can think of putting this is, I sort of feel like we're living in Gotham City, or on the set of The Crow.
Yeeeeeahhh...but even that isn't too bad, the building itself seems very safe and we're about 5 minutes away from Alameda so we just go there to do all of our shopping and stuff like that.
I'll miss walking around, but we're close enough to drive pretty much anywhere else in Oakland or Berkeley and walk about to our hearts' content.
And we're so much closer to San Francisco!

We went to Balboa Theater last night, to catch the encore tour of The Devil's Carnival and it seemed to take practically no time at all to get there, compared to the trek it used to be. It was completely amazing -I was so happy to see it again, and the best part was that FUCKING TERRANCE ZDUNICH REMEMBERED ME FROM SACRAMENTO. And he called me lovely, and kissed my hand.
I pretty much walked on air for the rest of the night after that.

Now I need to get back to more unpacking, and wedding planning: in between apprenticing at the hair salon, moving, and basically running an off-Broadway production (also known as planning a whole wedding from the ground up, including writing a ceremony because we haven't found a Wiccan ceremony that we like enough to use) I've been a busy vampire bride lately.
Maybe I'll reward myself a little later with an absinthe for my efforts...