Built in sideboard. “All we brought to California was our bed and the living room furniture.”

Julie and Jason have been together almost ten years, starting from their college days at the University of Massachusetts. They’ve been sharing an address for about seven of those years, and during that time, they have never renewed a lease. They began living together when Julie got a dietician’s internship in Chicago and asked Jason, who was teaching software usage in New York at the time, if he wanted to go west with her. A year later, she found employment in West Palm Beach, Florida, and headed south. She left with a friend; Jason stayed in Chicago. Explains Julie,“We had done the living-in-sin thing for a year and didn’t really think about, ‘Oooh, does this mean that something will come of this if you follow me to another part of the country?’ I think in my heart I hoped that Jason would come,” but she had to go where the job was.

Jason: "Julie gets kind of upset when I tell her that she doesn’t clean. She thinks she does, but really..."

Jason had no interest in going to Florida, but he didn’t know many people in Chicago, and he didn’t want to go back to New York. And he was fond of Julie. So, in August of 1995, he got in his car and followed her. “I guess my thought was that (I was) moving down there because we were going to get married.” In February of ’96, he proposed.

Jason tells me that after two years in Florida — part of the time spent sharing an apartment with Julie’s friend — “We decided we were tired of old people; we just wanted a change.” Jason found work in Atlanta, and the couple moved in with Julie’s mother, who already lived there, for three months before finding an apartment. A year later, they rented a bungalow in the Virginia Highlands section of Atlanta.

Julie: “I always got perfect attendance at Sunday school."

Atlanta had its virtues, but it was once again Julie’s turn to find greener employment pastures. “I took a huge pay cut when we moved to Atlanta,” she attests, “and I only got a per diem job. That was rough.” Jason, meanwhile, had decided that the Chattahootchie River was a poor substitute for the oceans he had always lived near. (“In Chicago, you have Lake Michigan, which is kind of like an ocean, since you can’t see the other side.”) Julie decided a return to the VA system might be in order, and Internet searches found two possible openings, one in Newport, Rhode Island, and one here. “We really wanted to go to Rhode Island,” admits Jason, “to be closer to family. We had been away for so long, and Rhode Island was kind of in between her family and my family. It was far enough away that we weren’t close enough to see them every day, but maybe on the weekends...”

But the job in San Diego came up first, and so, with their heads full of happy vacation memories of the city, they headed west. Years of bouncing from apartment to apartment had left them tired of renting, but they didn’t jump directly into the housing market Instead, they signed another lease at Stonecrest Village off of Aero Drive.

“Stonecrest Village is lovely,” says Julie. “There are $400,000 homes, there’s one complex of townhouses, and there are two apartment complexes. Arcadia was the nicest apartment we’d ever lived in — crown moldings, fancy stove, all that kind of stuff. We had a beautiful view of the canyon, [but] we paid for it dearly.” Once they settled in, they started attending open houses, and the process quickly developed into a Sunday routine. Says Jason, “For the last six months, we seemed to dedicate every weekend to looking for a house.”

“It was get up, get breakfast, and open houses started at either 12:00 or 1:00,” remembers Julie. “Gotta get on it. You did that until 4:00, you went to the grocery store, and you made dinner.”

“[We were] getting a feel for the city,” reports Jason. “We had come [before] for a vacation, but the people we visited live in Escondido. They weren’t really into the city thing — Old Town was what they knew. We were just trying to get a feel for what parts we liked and where we wanted to live.”

Semi-serious scouting can be a tricky business in some areas — I am a veteran of the practice myself, and I can recall being almost literally shooed out of homes whose agent had decided I wasn’t a serious client. The mechanism was all but inexorable: a short pause after the carefully guided tour — mustn’t let the undesirables linger too long in any one place, lest they spray their negative auras — followed by, “Well, thank you for coming...” There were any number of giveaways — my economy car, my workaday shoes, the frayed cuff on my cotton pants. But how I wished to be a dressed-down dot-commer or trust-fund kid! With what evil glee might I have then told my shallow hostess that her poor manners had cost her a million-dollar sale!

In other homes, I was accosted by agents who stood a scant few inches away and pressed me for information as they reminded me, “The seller has requested that all visitors sign in”: where was I living now, how much was I looking to spend, how much house did I need, what did I do for a living, how soon was I looking to buy, what sort of school was I interested in for my children? They stood between me and the house I had come to see, walling it off with each successive question mark. It was as if I was somehow wasting their time simply by walking through this house they were supposedly holding open, taking up valuable psychic space. Some of the more bullish agents actually inspired shame — what was I thinking, walking into a house I didn’t intend to buy? I should leave now before I violated anything beyond the living room.

(Of course, not all agents are such bulldogs; I have visited manses in Mission Hills and Kensington where the agent smiled with a kind of modem noblesse oblige and then left me to wander and covet with a simple “Let me know if you have any questions.” Out of some odd sense of gratitude, I always asked something, but I never felt pressure to gawk and git goin’.)

Eventually, I hit upon a line that held the agents at bay — “My parents live in New York; they’re thinking of retiring out here, and I’m just looking around to see what’s available.” Never mind that my parents are firmly middle-class Upstaters, whose lovely home wouldn’t sell for anything like what it would cost to purchase a Kensington two-bedroom bungalow. When the agents heard “New York,” their minds went to Central Park West, and they got very friendly and accommodating. Sometimes, their attempt to win my favor became almost as aggressive as their prior attempts to drive me from the premises, but it was still easier to weather.

Julie and Jason developed their own tactic. Julie: “We used to go into open houses and say, ‘Well, we haven’t really thought out our timeline.’ That was my favorite line. We lived it up for a while; nobody could attack us. We looked informally for probably eight months.” In late July, they got an agent. “We figured that’s when we would have to seriously start looking..." “...or we would have to sign another lease,” laughs Jason.

Upon commencing their search in earnest, they made a curious discovery about their peers. Says Julie, “What’s really frustrating is that people here have such a bad sense of the whole metro area. My boss was, like, ‘Where are you looking for a house?’

‘Well, we’re looking in Kensington, University Heights...’

‘Oh, you mean University City.’

‘No, University! Heights.’ She had no idea. My friend Teresa was, like, ‘Oh, south of the 8? Oh, you never live there. You’re looking for a house there?’ When we first moved here, we found Kensington — the coffee shop before Starbucks was built — and we thought, This is really neat.’ You don’t have [places like that] all over the country, and for these people to be, like, ‘Where’s Kensington?’ is really a shame.”

“Nobody told us about Little Italy,” adds Jason. “We found that on our own.”

But it was Kensington that stayed with Julie, “[it] was Jason's and my first choice,” she sighs. Jason, disapproving a little, jumps in. “Houses for 1.5 million? I don’t know. We almost bought a house — it was actually in...they call it ‘Baja Kensington.’ Actually, it was north of Meade, where Fairmount comes up and meets Meade. There’s an elementary school there, and a road — Felda. There was a house there, a cute house: three bedrooms, built in the ’40s. But there was a fence at the end of the backyard, and right behind the fence was Fairmount It was a little loud. And some of the people that I had talked to who had lived in San Diego for a while said, Well, that’s really City Heights. That’s in the ’hood.’ ”

“ ‘You’re buying a house in the ’hood! Don’t live there!’ ” says Julie, echoing their advice. “Nice. But that was the only house in Kensington that was under $300,000. Everybody had always told me that you buy the most economical house you can afford in the nicest neighborhood. But no one ever added the clause, ‘Except if it abuts the ’hood.’ I liked Kensington a lot; they were beautiful homes, but the prices were just ridiculous. Talmadge was more ’40s homes, kind of nondescript. You know, not a lot of character.”

“And there were parts of Talmadge that butted up against, what is it. Hoover High School?” adds Jason.

“And I was concerned about how you get there,” continues Julie. “I thought, ‘I cannot drive Aldine [a windy, canyon-hugging road] every day. It’ll freak me out. We looked in Normal Heights, and there were times we’d go to open houses, and I’d get this really uneasy feeling, a bad sense. We looked at an Art Deco that was a really cool place...”

“Over by the liquor store, Kansas and Meade, I think. There were some shady characters.”

“People were just hanging out, and [I thought], This is like living on Ponce.’ Creative Loafing [Atlanta’s free weekly], in its ‘Best Of’ issue, had Ponce de Leon Avenue as the place to avoid, but it was also the place to take all out-of-town guests.”

Jason takes up the story. “There’s a Krispy Kreme Donuts right on Ponce, and they have that ‘Hot Now’ sign. They say to go when that sign is lit, because that’s when all the crack whores come out, the cops... You have a mix of everybody that comes to this Krispy Kreme.”

“We did that on a Sunday morning,” finishes Julie. “There was a preacher and people with small children watching at the window where the donuts get made. And the crack whore was right there; she had just gotten off of work. It was pretty wild.”

“They all came together as one, eating donuts,” smiles Jason.

As Creative Loafing hinted, such areas are interesting to visit, but not everyone would want to live there. So, Normal Heights was out. As a former resident of that particular neighborhood, I might be tempted to take offense, were it not for the murder whose aftermath I witnessed at the corner of East Mountain View Drive and Adams Avenue, less than a block from my home. I loved a lot of things about Normal Heights. I would not call it a generally dangerous place. But I can sympathize with a stranger’s negative first impression, particularly if they are thinking about investing most or all of their savings into a home there.

Julie continues. “I had been down on North Park for a while, too, because I think we had been looking in the wrong pockets.” She was intrigued by a house on Grim, but it lacked a backyard “And can you imagine living on Grim? Also, this street was cut through, and it seemed very loud.”

“The Quik Stop on the comer — I think there was a murder there.”

“Yeah, a little shady, too close. The Laundromat, the Quik Stop, the Jack In The Box right there. We’re a little bit further away from that [now]. I got kind of down on North Park, and we were, like, ‘We’ll just see what happens.’ ”

What happened, when it happened, happened fast. “We missed one house. It literally went on the market at 11:00 a.m. [one day], and we were supposed to go at 4:00. Our real estate agent called us — gone, too late. I work for the government. I see out-patients, so I have people scheduled all day. I can’t just say, ‘Oh, sorry, gotta go.’ So I’m, like, ‘This is not going to work.’

“Right after that happened — I remember it was a Friday, because I was in Chula Vista — Jason got a page, and then he called me. ‘We have to go! We have to go today!’ ” Julie gambled on a no-show for her appointment (“A lot of people just don’t come — it’s free”), wrangled a 15-minute-early leave from her boss, “and I just blasted out. I was working in Chula Vista, and we were supposed to meet at 4:00, and I made it in 15 minutes. I was, like, ‘Cool; this would be an awesome commute.’ ”

The house, of course, was well out of their price range, but “the agent was, like, ‘Just come and look at it; it’s really nice.’ ” Julie and Jason were enchanted by the built-ins, the cove ceilings, the vintage windows. They brought the flyer to dinner with friends that night, “And they were, like, ‘Oh, my God, you have to make an offer tomorrow! You can’t delay!’ ” After dinner, “We did a drive-by. The house was empty, and we were peeking in the window, and we went in back.”

The madness was upon them, and they made up their minds to make an offer. “We had a tentative appointment with the agent for the next morning at 9:00 a.m. to go in and maybe make an offer. We were just so nervous all night — ‘Oh, my God, what if somebody took it? We’re just going to be so sad! Who cares if it’s too much!’ You say all these stupid things to yourself, [but] in all the time we had looked, I don’t think there was anything as nice as this that wasn’t, like, $400,000.”

The next morning, “We were the first to put a bid in, and then two other offers came in. Then Mr. North Park [the selling agent], who is known for pricing his houses too low, upped the selling price by $5000. Forget about outbidding the other bidders; now we had to outbid the new asking price. We submitted our stuff, and they did a multiple counter. So, you just do whatever you can in blind faith and that’s it. We were nervous wrecks. I started thinking, ‘What are we talking about? This is way more than we’re supposed to spend!’ All that was kind of filtering in my head, but at that point, it was just, ‘We have to win! We have to be the ones to win!’ ”

Jason: “They usually tell you, ‘If you really want it, go like a thousand dollars over the asking price — just to say, I want this house.’ So, thinking that’s what everybody does, I said, ‘Okay, let’s go over $1100.’ ”

“And it worked,” says Julie. “We were told the offers were very close, but we had the first offer in, and then we had the first counter-offer in. They admired our persistence.” Thirty days and a few life-threatening scares about financing later, they closed escrow.

That was Friday, October 13. Their lease at Arcadia didn’t expire until the 28th, so they moved in slowly, taking time to paint a few of the off-white rooms. “Part of the reason that we did paint was that [we had been] living in apartments, where you can’t paint,” explains Julie. “It was almost like I wanted to paint just because I could. [But] after painting those rooms — it is so much work! — I keep saying that we need to hold off because the dread is too fresh. Let me forget how awful this is for a while, you know?”

The bathroom is now a pale green, their bedroom, a warm tan, and the office, a deep cranberry. The latter is the sharpest departure from the generally brown impression given by the rest of the house, what with the copious deep-brown woodwork, the golden hardwood floors, the natural linen window treatments that were left at the house, and the copper piping that serves as curtain rods throughout. “I’m definitely intrigued by the copper piping,” comments Julie, screwing up her face ever so slightly. “That just cracks me up. At first we were, like, ‘Oh, cool,’ and then I was, like, ‘What is that? Copper pipes? How strange!’ ”

“Works for me,” shrugs Jason.

“Works for you, huh?” answers Julie, still sounding unsure.

They have not disagreed substantially about decor, nor are they in any hurry to do much remodeling. “My whole thing is, ‘Is it livable?’ ” says Julie. “Can I cook in the kitchen? Can I take a shower every day and not feel, like, ‘Ewww, this is awful'?” Someday, the hall and the guest room will be painted, the plumbing and electrical will be redone. (“The sewer line supposedly gets clogged every couple of months,” says Jason “Maybe that’s why we get so many plumbing advertisements.”) The bathroom will be remodeled, and the kitchen will be gutted and replaced.

A few minor bugs began buzzing early on. Many of the cords in the double-hung windows had snapped, but Jason’s father, a classic old-style handyman, simply took his son to Home Depot for supplies, pulled off the moldings, and repaired them. Or most of them: “We just have to do this one,” says Jason, pointing. “He was, like, ‘Oh, now that we’ve done all these, you can do that one now.’ ”

He laughs uneasily. “I’m not very handy.” Friends and neighbors have offered the use of their tools, including a chainsaw, the thought of which sends a look of consternation across Jason’s face.

The heater, which has an electrical ignition, does not seem to be lighting, and when I visit, SDG&E is still three days away. Though there is blown insulation in the attic, a slight chill — just enough to make Julie concerned for my comfort — hangs in the air.

“We’re on this tea thing now, only because it gets so cold in here,” she explains. “I have these memories of my grandmother’s house. Her upstairs bathroom was over the garage, and the garage was not insulated. It was cold, and you would get up to take a shower...[and ask], ‘Do I really want to take a shower?’ ”

“And that’s how I feel here. That tile floor is like ice, and I stand in the shower, and it’s, like, ‘Okay, get the soap, but don’t hit the side, because it’s so cold!’ ”

The kitchen — large for a house this old — fairly glows with charm. Dark, broad planks make up the floors, but everything else is light and open and airy. A cozy nook has been created by two high-backed benches and a small table, and it is here that the couple take most of their meals, lingering long after dinner is finished with their talk of the day. (The long stays have manifested a need for decent cushions.) The cabinetry is handsome and in remarkable condition; I don’t notice any dings in the painted wood or cracks in the glass fronts.

Mottled, neutral tiles cover the counters and back-splash, but it is the proximity of counter to cabinet that offers the first inconvenience. The counters are shallow — about two feet — and the cabinets descend perilously close to the surface, leaving the workspace somewhat cramped. Next, there is the problem of outlets. There are only two in the whole kitchen: one near the sink and one near the stove across the room. The large microwave takes up a precious chunk of counter next to the stovetop by necessity, it’s the only place near a plug where it will fit. The fridge, meanwhile, is stationed in a converted mud-room adjacent to the kitchen and looks as if it could use some company. There is a feeling of unused space surrounding it. There is no dishwasher in the kitchen, nor is there a garbage disposal.

A kitchen is a workplace first and a showroom second; one day, charm will have to be sacrificed to practicality. “I mean, we’d try to make it...” begins Jason.

“Not cheesy-modem,” finishes Julie.

“Maybe Mission-style or prairie-style cabinets. Maybe even keep the hardwoods,” says Jason, sounding hopeful.

“No, not in the kitchen.”

“All right, we disagree, I guess.”

“We’ll see when you have to clean up,” warns Julie. “I am a messy, messy cook.”

“Yes, you are,” agrees Jason. “And I’m the one who has to clean up after you, so I guess... What do you want to put down?”

“Something not white. I am really against white after that horrible experience at the apartment with that white vinyl linoleum.”

Dinner tonight is lasagna, salad, and garlic toast. When I arrive, Julie has the sauce — made the night before — warming on the new stainless-steel stove. “It’s jarred sauce, but I added ground turkey and fresh garlic and onions that I brown first and then let simmer for an hour.”

At least two things about Julie’s cooking can be learned from that one statement. First, the ground turkey in place of the expected ground beef. “I’m a registered dietician; that’s where some of the unorthodox stuff comes from. Things you wouldn’t think to do — other people, if they were going to make a pink sauce would normally have a red sauce and add a little Alfredo, a little heavy cream. I might do something really crazy like melt in some low-fat cream cheese. You still get that creamy texture and the right flavor, but you probably cut a tremendous amount of the fat out.”

(Later, Julie corrects herself when she offers cream with my coffee — “Actually I need to rescind that. I have skim milk or hazelnut-flavored creamer.” I circumvent her attempt to keep me healthy by appropriating the Redi-Whip that had been intended for our gingerbread dessert and topping my coffee with a lovely pile of whipped cream.)

Second, “I am definitely a fan of convenience things. If I can buy jarred Korna sauce and then jazz it up... ” She turns to Jason. “What do you always say? ‘Is this unadulterated? What did you add to this?’ Because I can’t leave well enough alone.” This drive to modify makes the rather more precise art of baking all but impossible for Julie, who instead relies on boxed gingerbread mix (albeit spiked with nutmeg and lemon extract) for tonight’s dessert.

If she was taught by anyone, it was Julia Child on TV. “My mom used to joke that I was the only kid she knew that, on Saturday mornings, would prefer to watch Julia Child cook. Most of [my other education] was just me futzing around in the kitchen. My mom used to work in a bank, so she did Thursdays until 8:00, and you were on your own for dinner. That’s kind of where it started; from fourth grade on — ‘Okay, what can I come up with?’ ”

The problem, for Jason at least, is that she is utterly random in her tinkerings, which oftentimes arc attempts to lighten the matter at hand (I comment that this is an extraordinary defection for a disciple of Julia, and Julie agrees.) “I love to read cookbooks for pleasure but don’t follow them. The likelihood that you’ll get the same thing twice is really [small]. Jason will say, That was really good! Did you write it down?’ ‘No.’ ‘Will you be able to make it again?’ ‘Probably not.’ ”

As she talks, she mixes part-skim ricotta cheese, an egg (“eggs get such a bad rap”), chopped fresh basil, some canned Parmesan, fresh ground pepper, “and a little bit of yucky garlic powder” in a bowl. She then ladles a bit of sauce onto the bottom of the lasagna pan and starts building layers: sauce, pasta, thin slices of light mozzarella cheese, sauce, pasta, ricotta mixture, and so on until the pan is full. She grates some fresh Parmesan for the table and pops the lasagna in the oven. She is still a bit spooked by the digital controls for the stove: there is no “on” setting, only a “Preheat Bake.” And though the readout says the oven is getting hotter, she misses the familiar whoosh of flame that her old gas stove provided.

She tells me, “The day we actually moved in, we didn’t eat here.”

“We went to...”

“Please don’t say Jack In The Box.”

“I think we did.”

“Did I change? Did we go someplace nice?”

“Maybe.” Jason begins to stew and considers checking his receipts, but Julie shifts the subject. “The first meal that we had in the house was breakfast. We were doing our move-out from the apartment, and we had no food in the house. Vons was right next to Wal-Mart there [off Aero Drive], and I had this little flashback of how my mom used to cook breakfast for dinner. It was the coolest thing. So I had toast, and I bought potatoes and made hash browns, and we had scrambled eggs. Very unimaginative, but it was very good”

Moving out brought what had been an unacknowledged bit of self-discovery screaming to the surface. “We hate to clean,” admits Julie, though much of the house looks ready to be photographed for a furniture magazine. “We were supposed to clean the apartment, and they had this unbelievable check-out list. Clean the vents, clean the screens — really detailed stuff.”

“Oven, refrigerator, behind the refrigerator...”

“That’s when I had my little meltdown. ‘This is two days before my birthday! I don’t want to do eight hours of cleaning!’ Time is precious to me, and to spend eight hours cleaning is just nuts. I said ‘Okay, fine. We’ll pay the 90 bucks. Let’s go.’ We packed up our stuff and left. They were so overly concerned with painting — $123. Ninety dollars to clean the apartment. Bottom line: we lost our entire security deposit, and they sent us a bill for $35. I am so angry with them. When you think of people who lose their security deposit, you think of people who absolutely trash their apartment. I’ve never not gotten a security deposit back!”

Though neither likes cleaning, Jason has never had a meltdown because of it. “I do most of it,” he says. “In the apartment, I used to vacuum, clean the floor in the kitchen — spend seven hours scrubbing the white linoleum. Julie gets kind of upset when I tell her that she doesn’t clean. She thinks she does, but really..." — he turns to Julie — “you don’t.”

“Sometimes, I’ll be into it more,” protests Julie. “The other day, when I cleaned the bathroom, [I was saying] , ‘Are you making a mental note of this? Do we need to mark this on the calendar, that I cleaned the bathroom?’ ”

Do you make the bed together? “Nobody makes the bed,” replies Jason.

“I’ve been better since we moved here!”

“The bed is never made. I come home and it’s still not made.”

“A few times. I’ve been better because I love our bedding — we’ve got a down comforter and a duvet and all that — and it bothers me to see it all crumpled up.” To Jason: “I have made it; you just don’t notice.”

“No, I don’t, because you don’t do it.”

“I’m going to make it tomorrow.” The banter is cheerful, as if they are play-acting with each other — he the aggrieved, overworked husband; she the unfairly accused wife. Neither seems entirely serious. Julie, to me: “There is a good amount of time historically that the bed does not get made. We’re just going to sleep in it anyway.”

Julie closes the subject of cleaning by saying, “In all fairness, usually in a couple situation, you have one person who’s neat and one person who’s not. Problem is, we’re both slobs; we could both walk over the underwear on the bathroom floor for days and not care.”

“We don’t have time for that,” agrees Jason.

“The dishes are dirty? They’ll be there tomorrow. And we don’t even have kids. I mean, if we’re that relaxed, and we have the time, God forbid what it would be like if we were pressed for time — working full-time with children. Forget it.” Since moving in, they have found themselves toying with the idea of a maid.

Though they have managed to procure a fairly rare three-bedroom Craftsman, they have not toyed with the idea of children. Says Jason, “I think it’s hard; we’re so far away from family. When you want to raise a child, you usually want to have some kind of parental figure there to give the child to when you want to do something. Or just to help raise the child, because we both work..

“I’m really kind of bothered by the whole daycare thing,” agrees Julie. “I just don’t know that I could do that. Especially from a very young age; kids go into daycare at eight weeks or something crazy. If you can find a good place, that’s great, but you also pay dearly.

“My friend from Boston, her mom had two little ones in her house when we were in high school. [My friend’s mom’s] name was Maureen, and the little girl was initially calling her ‘Mauw,’ as in ‘Maureen’ with a Boston twang. But I really thought it was almost more like ‘Mom,’ because she spent more time with Maureen than she spent with her mother. [The mother] had eight weeks off for maternity leave, [and then said,] ‘Here you go; here’s Maureen.’ [She and her husband] were both working professionals, and it was, like, ‘Why did you have kids then? Why did you want to do that? Somebody else is going to raise them.’ I guess in that way I’m very old-fashioned.”

A dog seems a much more likely addition to the family. Julie grew up with a German short-haired pointer/black lab mix that lasted 16 years, and now she has a backyard of her own: spacious for an older home, full of fruit trees and planter boxes left by previous owners.

As we eat, Julie tells me, “We had nice neighborly experiences early on. We moved in three days before Halloween, which is actually my birthday. One of the great joys of my life is giving out candy on Halloween, but when you live in apartments, no one ever comes. The night before, our neighbor came over and said, ‘Um, just as a warning — we get a lot of kids.’ I said, ‘I have six bags; do you think that’s enough?’ ‘Um, well, I guess so.’ From a quarter to six until 8:30, it was almost a constant stream of people. It was unbelievable."

The supplies began to dwindle long before the stream subsided. Jason was dispatched to pick up dinner and backup. “I went to Albertson’s [for candy], and I couldn’t find it anywhere. The only thing I could find was Christmas candy and starlite mints. Toward the end, I [had to] give out the mints.”

While Jason was away, the neighbor checked in on Julie. When she saw the depleted bowl, “she came over with this big bag of M&M’s. I felt terrible; I didn’t want to take it, but she left it anyway.” By the end, all that remained were four starlite mints and the few Kit Kats they had reserved for themselves.

The rooms in the house are utterly uncrowded; large pieces of furniture loom up from the floor like icebergs from a calm sea. The walls are largely bare (notable exception: just inside the front door, an 8 x 10 photo of Julie and Jason on their wedding day). A few pictures of close family and memorable places line the mantel. “HGTV is my favorite network,” offers Julie. “ [They say] you’re supposed to live in a place for a while. So I have this pile of decorative things that I’m just holding on to [until I figure out] where things are going to go. I’m trying not to do too much. I kind of almost feel like we’ve done too much already, and we haven’t given [ourselves] time to live here yet. Not earthy-crunchy, like, ‘Feel the vibes,’ but just to find out what would really be best above the buffet. Would it be good to have a mirror? Should we just leave it alone? Maybe just hang out here for a while and see.”

Turning attention to the furniture: I guess that the lamp on the table nearest the door — glass bulging out around curved iron rods — comes from Pottery Barn.

“Actually, no,” smiles Jason.

“Oooh! Don’t give away my secrets!” howls Julie in mock terror. “Are you going to give away my secrets?”

I take another guess: Target?

“Yeah, that’s from Target,” says Jason, apparently comfortable with giving away this particular secret.

“I bought that a long time ago,” says Julie. “I thought, ‘This is a really cool lamp. I’m just going to buy it, and we’ll see what happens. Maybe someday we’ll have a place for it.’ Lo and behold, here we are.” Much of the remaining living room furniture — coffee table, taupe floral-print couch, chair and ottoman — was purchased as a set from Rooms to Go in Atlanta. The heavy wooden dining room table and chairs came from Cost Plus, the rug beneath, from Crate and Barrel. Pier One supplied the bedroom furniture. The daybed in the guest room is from Ikea; the desk in the office, from Target.

“All we brought to California was our bed and the living room furniture,” recalls Julie, and even that was more than they had brought when they moved south from Chicago. Accounting for the furniture puts them in mind of their early days of acquiring an entire apartment’s furnishings for about $250 from various garage sales and their subsequent leaving of everything that couldn’t be stuffed into a car. (I think I catch something of a wistful gleam in Jason’s eye as he remembers a one-dollar La-Z-Boy recliner.) The furniture starts to look more like anchors than icebergs, dropped in a sunny spot far from home.

Both have felt the distance. “This has been really hard for me,” confesses Julie, “because it used to be that I would talk on the phone [with family] after dinner. That would be the time to call. Well, [now] you can’t call after dinner, and it’s distressing to me. You get done at 7:00, and it’s too late to call anyone on the East Coast It’s really frustrating.”

On a more somber note, Jason recently had to go home on a moment’s notice to attend his grandfather’s funeral. And in January, Julie had to find a same-day flight when she got the news of her grandmother’s stroke. “It was almost to me like God was saying, ‘Ah-ah-ah. Don’t get too settled in your new life — far, really far away.’ It was just totally out of the blue; I had never had to fly home [right away] before. I didn’t realize how far away California was until I had to do that”

As the near-endless list of settling-in duties has grown shorter, Julie and Jason have begun to return to their old Sunday habits — exploring, taking drives, visiting festivals. “We might go to church,” says Jason. “Yeah, we’ve been kind of neglectful,” adds Julie, looking a touch sheepish. “We’re definitely not an every-Sunday kind of couple; it’s like, if we get there once or maybe twice a month... Jason never grew up with any kind of religion in his family.”

“My father was Jewish, and my mother was Protestant — Lutheran, I think — but not practicing. I was raised Lutheran, I guess — baptized”

“Here’s this man that I met who had never gone to Sunday school and didn’t know the Lord’s prayer,” marvels Julie. “I always got perfect attendance at Sunday school. Every June I got a plant — ‘Perfect attendance; good job.’ ” Though not a weekly churchgoer, she considers herself something of a traditionalist. “There are certain things that I need to have. You have to say the Lord’s prayer — obviously, I’m Protestant. It’s good if you can do the Apostle’s Creed. We are not into the wear-your-jeans modern thing. We went to a church in Clairemont Mesa, and it was awful.”

"They had the guitars, the drum set, and the words going on a big video screen...”

“And the guy with the Madonna headset [microphone] on. I’m going, ‘Oh, man, we are in the wrong place.’ ” She was attracted to the community church in Kensington — one more reason to long for the unattainable.

That takes care of Sunday through dinnertime, “but I hate — and this often happens Sunday nights — we’ll get really frazzled. We’ve done something Sunday day, and now it’s 5:00, and we’ve got to go grocery shopping, and you don’t get home until 6:00, and then I get really stressed, because I’ve got to start my week, I have to iron my lab coat, and we get this Sunday-night anxiety thing going. Sometimes he’ll get real quiet, and I’m, like, ‘Oh, you’re stressing.’ It’s bad; it’s really bad.”

These are the hours that are supposed to be devoted to the Sunday paper, purchased with the groceries that evening. The paper has long been a tradition; in Chicago, “We went to the park a lot,” reminisces Jason. “They had these great little neighborhood parks.” Julie remembers that they found one that offered a view of the Chicago skyline, “and we would go and have a little picnic. I’d be studying, and he’d read the Sunday paper.”

But the tradition is teetering. Says Julie, “My grandmother would be so upset by the fact that our Sunday paper lingers until Wednesday or Thursday. She would just be appalled. Gram’s day is not complete until she has read the Boston Globe cover to cover. I always wondered, ‘What does she do with all that information?’ She reads everything — sports — she doesn’t care about these things, but she reads it. You’d think she’d do better at Jeopardy! After she had her stroke, it was a good sign when we asked her if she wanted us to bring the paper and she was, like, ‘Okay.’ 'Yaaay! We have Gram back!'"

Instead of the paper, there is stressing and laundry — Jason’s department. “Sometimes it gets started on Saturday and finished on Sunday... Monday… Tuesday,” teases Julie. “What’s my favorite line: ‘What’s the status of the laundry?’ ”

“I’m the domestic goddess,” grumbles Jason. “I don’t fold it, and it sits in there...”

"But you know, it might be a whole new ballgame now that the washer and dryer are in the garage. This is going to be interesting. No more going out. Our washer and dryer were off the patio [at Arcadia], so you could go out in your pajamas and get something out of the dryer. But I don’t know — would you go back there?”

“Sure, right.”