At the end of the school year, Dena and I went and had dinner with our friends from Rosalie HAUS. What’s Rosalie Haus? It’s a co-op house that focuses on urban sustainability. They cook together, grow their own veggies, collect rain water, reuse their grey water, and lots of other cool stuff. You’ve seen pictures of Matt and Margaret in a lot of our posts, they are two residents. Matt works for Houston Tomorrow. I’d really like to get involved and help out with some of their activities, it seems pretty up my alley (maybe). I’m not sure how many people total live at Rosalie but its seemed like there were a ton of bedrooms. Every night someone different cooks and everyone eats together. They have an AMAZING huge kitchen and a gorgeous porch. We first got to know the Rosalie folks through CounterCrawl and Down Together.

Rosalie HAUS = Houston Acces to Urban Sustainability house on Rosalie St. Get it??

Matt showing me the compost pile.

Matt showing us the water tank. Yep, that huge green thing is full of water! I can’t remember if that’s the rain water or the recycled water. MATT IF YOU’RE READING THIS, WHAT IS IT?

The co-op has a rainbow flag flying in the front. I always assumed it was just a queer pride flag, turns out it’s an actual thing. Matt told us a story about how when they were first hanging it up, the neighbors gave them weird looks. One day, all the boys were sitting on the front porch without shirts and the neighbors gave them dirty looks, because, ya know, they assumed some funny business was going on. NOPE just some co-operative living folks enjoying the evening.

Here’s a shot of the garage full of bikes (and some sort of yak or moose head?). Fun fact: if you have to drive far to your job you have to pay a carbon footprint fee. Wow! Matt told us that he used to have a cool bike that belonged to his dad but it was stolen from Poison Girl. Not cool guys!

Matt and I looking like sun children on the patio. I have this problem where I never can tell how tall people are. I either remember them being much much taller or much much shorter. For instance, I used to think Dena was only a little bit shorter than me, like 5′ 8″. Nope, she’s like 5′ 2″, I guess it’s just her big personality. The point of that story was that I thought I was taller than matt but it looks like he beat me. BARELY.

More patio shots. You can’t tell from this photo but we’re on the third floor. It was that perfect hour of the day where the sunlight is perfectly golden.

Dena lookin’ fine in the interior. Check out her narwhal necklace. Fun story: we went to a craft fair in the heights and Dena really wanted to get that necklace was kind of expensive. She decided to keep walking around but if she could still remember how many spots the narwhal had by the end of the afternoon, she would buy it. Well, she could.

Finally, the whole point of why we came: Dinner! Only Matt and one other girl were there for dinner that night, but that was okay. I get really overwhelmed and nervous in big groups so this was the perfect mix of people. We had vegetarian shepherds pie. IT WAS SO GOOD.