 Helllloooooo, is anyone there? It's been an isolating year for many of us, even as we've spent more time with the members of our own households and gotten to know our immediate neighbors better. For our part, we've been making it through relatively well, though our life on the corner has been changed. Both parents were able to transition to remote work in March 2020, our 4 year-old came home from preschool, and our 1st grader finished his school year on Zoom. With the kitchen remodel and closet/bathroom conversion finishing up in our home, we were incredibly fortunate to shelter in March and April at our parent's cabin in the woods, a few hours away. At that time, we didn't know how the virus was transmitted or much about any of it, but we knew that trying to get the kids out of the house in an urban environment, with a 4-year old that will lick a light pole, was not going to be safe. The work on our bungalow was close to completion, and there was no way we could work/school from the little home during construction. Those 6-8 weeks spent at the cabin, trying to do our work remotely for the first time and simultaneously adjust with our organizations through the shutdown, all while having the children there full-time, are a distant blur in our memory now...so much has changed. Still, we're grateful to have had that space to feel safe during a scary time, to take the children into the forest and breathe, and to come home to a bungalow that had not one, but TWO bathrooms for our family of four, as well as a nicely functioning kitchen. Again, for all of this, we are incredibly grateful. The events of the past year have brought into an intense focus the inequities of our systems and the struggles of those people who often work the hardest. We don't mean to say that we haven't been working hard for the past year. We have been clocking more hours than ever at our jobs and also taking on more with full-time feeding and care of the children, and all the household chores that go along with 4 people being trapped in a bungalow around the clock. Still, we have had opportunities to escape to our parent's cabin for some air, we've had their help with the children almost weekly, and we haven't been required to choose between exposing our family to the risk of Coronavirus or facing the loss of our livelihoods. Also, we've been trapped in a beautiful bungalow in a beautiful neighborhood. So, yes, for our part, we've made it through the first year relatively well. When we came back to Sacramento amidst the new "locked down" environment, we really dove into our research on the neighborhood. After all, there was little else to do. We thought we'd just go methodically down the block and chronicle the early history of each home, then maybe wrap around the corner to the rest of the Bungalow Row Historic District before expanding outward. We had started by unearthing a good bit of information about the people who lived on our corner, but we wanted to know more about the other people on the block. We wrote a little bit about 2501 Q Street, 2505 Q Street, 2511 Q Street, 2515 Q Street, and 2519 Q Street. Once we got about halfway through the block, we realized two things; (1) We weren't really going to figure these people and these homes out by just studying our block. We had to expand our perspective. (2) The whole point of getting into writing about the homes was to document all the cool stuff we're finding. Writing big long blog posts is kind of hard...there must be an easier way to quickly share our cool finds- enter Twitter. Back in social media land, we were quickly tiring of the rhetoric on Facebook and NextDoor. Even though Twitter has plenty of that, we don't have to see it coming from our Uncles and Neighbors, watch family and friends get nasty, or become tempted to get involved in that toxic stew. So, we started tweeting bungalows for fun and as a distraction. You can follow us if you are on the bird site, and get more frequent access to our findings.  Ad, The Sacramento Bee, April 03, 1915 with illustration of the newly built home of F. H. Webster at the top  Today, Webster's home is located at 1069 40th Street, in an area of East Sacramento well-known for Fabulous Homes and Elaborate Holiday Light Displays We discovered that with tweets, you can just find an old ad, go have a look at the building, then basically tweet it out with any minimal information you've uncovered. It doesn't HAVE to be some long intricate story...but it can be, with multiple tweets. So, we just started tweeting photos of bungalows, some old ads, and some snippets of history. It was a fun way to share the things we were learning, and our appreciation of the bungalows, on a more frequent basis. Also, the more we learn about the environment around our bungalow row, the easier, and more interesting, our research about the bungalow residents becomes. We recognize our completely amateur status and sometimes feel silly that we're often "uncovering" stuff that others have uncovered and documented before, but it's a new revelation to us, and people didn't have iPhone 11's to take awesome amateur photos before, or Twitter to share them quickly, so we feel like maybe we're doing some good. We're going to keep tweeting as a way of gathering information into digestible snippets, then we'll see what kinds of stories we can share over here. We're also going to get through the block this year. We've only got 3 more of the North side of Q Street left, so we'll at least get to our corner, hopefully further.  Other than sleuthing out Sacramento's history, we've mostly been keeping busy this past year with work and feeding the children. The new kitchen has gotten a lot of use, as has the 2nd bathroom. We finally "bit the bullet" and had a central Air Conditioning and Heating System installed in June, when we realized that we were going to be sitting around inside our home working all Summer, with no escape to air-conditioned offices or cooled museums during the heat of the day. That turned out to be a really good decision, as we couldn't open the windows to let the whole house fan run at night for most of late Summer and early Fall due to the terrible wildfires. Meanwhile, we were acutely aware that people in our community were sheltered in tents with no hope for a home or a reprieve from the smoke and heat. Anticipating another fire season with the drought that we've been experiencing, and really noticing how serious the housing crisis in California has become, we've also poured a bit of ourselves into our neighborhood issues this past year. We have a renewed commitment to supporting initiatives that house people, and to the goal of ending homelessness on the grid, by the river, everywhere in Sacramento, and in California. We also see that the space in our city is overallocated to cars and under allocated to people, so we're supporting active and public transportation when we can, including in our practices. We rarely fire up the engine of our own automobile, opting instead to bike, skate, scoot, and walk around town as much as possible. Our world has gotten a lot smaller this year, and you know what? We're kind of OK with that. It's enabled us to really look closely at the things we used to "drive by" every day. We do look forward to "rejoining society" soon, but like many others have expressed, we're sure we'll never want to go back to "the way it was." 
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