When I was in Wisconsin (while I was working for TSR, back in the day when there was a TSR) I lived in a couple of strange houses. Lake Geneva isn't a very large town, so if you ever decide to wander out that way it should be pretty easy to find these places.
This is my house on Center Street. Center Street runs north-south smack through the center of town. In fact, if you grab a phone book for the area and turn to the map of Lake Geneva, my house on Center Street is almost the exact center of the map. Anyway, this was once a two-story house, but the owner converted it into a duplex. I lived on the bottom floor, which meant that I had the front porch (access to the upper apartment was in the back of the house via a stairway and small landing), the front door, a living room, a dining room (which was only separated from the living room by two one-foot-wide walls, so it was more like a huge room), kitchen, bedroom (which was originally a den of some kind, as its doors were the slide-into-the-wall kind and it was connected to the living room by a "doorway" that was about 7 feet wide when fully open), bathroom (no shower, just a weird strung-up curtain around the edge of the tub), a small room (originally a sewing room, maybe, but that's where I put my guinea pig Sybil whom I brought with me from California), and the basement (which I never used but had plenty of space). I also had a weird little closet by the kitchen which was originally the stairwell up to the 2nd floor of the house; with the stairs still there and a door on it this "closet" made an excellent place to keep all of my books. Upstairs from me lived my landlord's daughter. I rarely saw her, though one time I had to go upstairs to tell her to shut the hell up because for some inane reason she and her boyfriend decided that 3 a.m. was a good time to practice guitar. Parking was a tiny grass and gravel yard behind the house, and in the summer we got fireflies (which I had never seen before) and year-round we had squirrels and rabbits (in the winter you could see their footprints in the snow).Now, Wisconsin is cold. As in "below zero conventional" cold. As in "yes, wind chill really means something" cold. And with the unheated basement underneath me, that meant that if I heated my apartment so I wouldn't freeze to death in winter while I slept, I would still have to deal with the below-freezing hardwood floor if I got up in the middle of the night. It got so cold that I hard to start sleeping in long johns _and_ sweats (and I'm normally a sleepwear-minimalist) and have slippers ready if I got up. Bloody cold. But getting used to Wisconsin cold made Washington winters tolerable.
Note that in the above description I never mentioned a washer or dryer. I didn't have one, so when I wanted to laundry I had to go to the local laundrymat, one block down and one block over from my place. Inconvenient, especially if it was 10 degrees outside. Which is why my first winter there I ended up buying 24 pairs of socks rather than doing a bunch of laundry ... it meant only one trip to the store instead of two or more sets of three trips (wash, dry, pickup) to the laudrymat. :P
In December of 1996 I moved into a big house with Dave Eckelberry (also of TSR), and this is that place. Two stories, four bedrooms, a garage (ours is the one on the left, the one on the right is our neighbors'), and an acre of land (to the right of the garages), and all for cheap (since property is cheap in Wisconsin, as nobody wants to live there).
The house was also very very strange. Technically this house wasn't in Lake Geneva, it was in Springfield, a tiny unincorporated town (pop. 300) about 3 miles outside of Lake Geneva on highway 12. Springfield is so small that the phoane company didn't even recognize it as a separate town, even though it has its own ZIP code (when establishing phone service there I gave them my address, they told me they had no listing for Springfield there and insisted I was in Lake Geneva). Apparently this house was also once the town's general store or something like it, for our laundry room had a huge formica countertop and a tiny little room that was probably a meat locker or walk-in icebox (we joked and called it "the slave room" because it would be pretty easy to lock someone inside as a punishment, and the interior wasn't pretty). And there were even more rooms to the house; the owner had converted it to a duplex, so Dave and I had about 3/4 of the house and some family had the remaining 1/4, which had a ground floor that was essentially a staircase up and a second floor with bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen. Our neighbors were kinda odd and had some strange friends ... on two occasions the local police showed up at our front door asking if we had seen a certain male who was hiding out from the law and who they believed might be hiding with our neighbors.
Did I mention the house was strange? In addition to being the general store, it also was the town post office. Dave and I didn't actually have a mailbox at our house; we had to go out the front door, walk clockwise around the house to the front door of the post office, and check our (free) post office box for our mail. And we had to do it during their business hours because we had no way of getting in there when they weren't open. Next to the post office was a utility room with our circuit box, and the post office also used this room as storage for their canvas mail bin. We made many trips into this room because our dryer (in the laundry room) would trip the circuit breaker when it finished its cycle and we'd have to go flip the circuit again so we'd have power in the laundry room and main hall. Springfield ran on well water rather than treated municipal water, and the local water smelled faintly of sulfur, so our laundry always smelled a little like brimstone (and I suspect we may have, too, which would partially explain our lack of dates), so about once a month Dave and I would take our laundry to the Lake Geneva laundrymat to wash our clothes with non-sulfurous water.
The red car in the picture is my Geo Metro, which I bought new while living in California (when I bought it I was driving 65 miles each way to and from work, and I needed something with great mileage). Just to the left of the car is our porch/patio. It had a concrete floor, a concrete table, and a separate locking door from the house's front door. It also had no heat or AC, so in the winter it was freezing and in the summer it was sweltering. In the winter Dave and I could go eat at Pizza Hut, bring our leftover pizza home and leave it on the concrete table on the patio and it would nearly freeze overnight, saving us much-needed fridge space.
So we had four bedrooms. Dave and I chose rooms on opposite ends of the second floor, with two empty rooms in between. Each of us also had a futon, which went into the spare bedrooms. The house ended up being perfect for parties because we had plenty of extra room for tired people to crash in (and see below). There were two weird things about the upper floor. One was the step in the middle of the hallway (for no apparent reason they slightly elevated the further part of the hallway, and thus there was a normal-sized step up halfway down the hall. As I lived in the lower end of the hall, I had to train myself not to trip on that damn thing when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night (said bathroom being past the step relative to my bedroom). The other weird thing about upstairs was that Dave's window was directly over the flat roof of the laundry room, and in the summer when it got really hot Dave would put up a tent on the roof and sleep outside on the roof.
My bedroom was huge. The main room of my studio apartment outside of Seattle, WA was almost the same size as this bedroom. Of course, since I spent almost no time in the bedroom (my computer was downstairs, as was Dave's TV and my TV) it didn't really matter.
The kookiest thing about this house was the extra room (not shown in picture). At some point an owner of the house decided it needed an extra room (even though it already had TONS of space) so they bought one of those prefabricated rooms, cut a door in the living room wall, and stuck the prefab room onto the end of the house. This room had its own heater (two gas heaters, actually, and in the winter if we planned on using that room in the evening Dave or I would have to come home at lunch and light the heaters, otherwise the place would be at freezing temperature for over an hour after people arrived). Unlike the carpeted rest of the house, it had hardwood floors. Unlike the finished, drywalled interior of the house, this room had a wood finish and visible rafters, much like a cabin. It had its own door that led outside. It had five windows, one of which was on the same side of the house as the door that led into the house ... in other words, that window looked out on the old exterior wall of the house! It was creepy and very Twilight Zone, and we decided to put a bookcase in front of it so we didn't have to think about it. This extra room had three huge advantages, though. One, it had plenty of space for all of our bookshelves, and Dave and I used it as a library. Two, its size, remoteness, and bookshelves made it an excellent gaming room, especially after we bought an 8 ft. business meeting-room table to use as a gaming table. Most of the playtests for the Star*Drive campaign setting and many of the Alternity playtests took place in that room. Finally, with the table moved out and a stereo moved in with some colored lights, it made an awesome party room. When Dave and I finally had our housewarming party (5 months after we had moved in, Wisconsin winter sucks) that was our dance floor, the hardwood being perfectly suited for that (I do have a picture or two from that party which I'll post at some point in the future). People could sit and talk in the living room, snack in the kitchen and dining room (we moved the gaming table to the dining room to use as a giant snack table), dance in the gaming room, and if they got too hot they could use the gaming room's exterior door to stand outside in the spring evening air and cool off.
I mentioned that Springfield was on highway 12. I meant that literally. The highway (one lane each way) cut right through the center of town. Our house was right on the highway. This meant that we had easy freeway access when we wanted to go to Madison or Milwaukee. It also meant that TSR people driving in from Delevan or Milwaukee went right by our house. Which meant that if I was shoveling the snow out of our 30-foot driveway (Dave didn't bother, he had a Jeep with a lot of draft under the frame, while my Metro was low-slung and got stuck easily) people would see me, wave, and sometimes offer me a ride. Strange, and not quite humiliating, but mainly it was very distracting when I was drying to get the bloody drive done!
Dave and I had some odd habits while living in this house. As we were the youngest single guys at TSR, and because Lake Geneva was a void as far as dateable women were concerned, we decided to visit the bar scene in nearby Whitewater, a college town. The funny thing about Whitewater is that most of the students are from nearby towns, so on the weekend they go back to their home town to hang out with their friends. This means that Friday nights in Whitewater are dead. Thursday nights, however, are quite happening, as the students want to hang out with their college friends, so Dave and I (after one false start on a Friday) started going on Thursdays. However, things don't get rolling until about 10pm (we went once at about 8pm and the place was dead for two hours). So our ritual was (1) watch our Thursday TV shows, (2) when ER ended at 10pm (Wisconsin is on Central time and doesn't have its own broadcast zone, so its programs are on the Eastern time zone, so everything starts and ends an hour before it would if you lived on the west or east coast)) we'd hop in a car and drive 20-30 minutes to Whitewater, (3) park outside one of our favorite bars and have a Hornsby's hard cider (to catch up with the other folks who had been drinking since 10pm), then hang out in 2-3 college bars for the next two hours, sober up, and drive home. It was quite fun (I was 25-26 at the time, Dave was 21-22, so these college people are of a reasonably appropriate age for us to hang out with) and we got to hang out with some really hot chicks. Maybe I'm biased, but I think I was a little more memorable to the people we spent time with over those few months, as Dave looked like just another college dude while I was the "exotic" (for Wisconsin) guy with the shaven head. I even had at least one woman step in front of me (as Dave and I were leaving) and ask me my name (which I gave, of course, though I was lame enough to never really follow up on it, plus I met Willow not long after that). Still, the Whitewater trips were fun, and a couple of times we ran into Matt and Lizz (two other young people from TSR) there.
Our Whitewater trips are the reason I once got pulled over for drunk driving (no, I wasn't drunk, just listen to the story). So after one night in Whitewater I was driving us home. Dave was pretty drunk (dizzy-drunk, not sick-drunk) but I had only had one drink about 2 hours before (I knew I was driving so that was all I had) so I was totally sober at that point (back then, and less so now, my fast metabolism allowed me to recover from alcohol pretty quickly, and invariably I was sober about 1 hour after I stopped drinking, mainly because I was never a "let's drink a ton and get smashed" sort of drinker). However, I have a notoriously poor sense of direction and have a hard time driving without landmarks (which of course were not visible at midnight). To get on the highway I had to take the correct fork of a Y-split in the road and I couldn't remember which one so I asked Dave. He pointed at the left one, and then at the last second realized he pointed at the wrong one and pointed me at the rightmost one, so I swerved to take the right fork (no danger here, nobody else on the road and no cross traffic, so calm down, thank you). Five seconds later I see police lights behind me and I'm pulled over. So the female highway patrol officer asks me for my ID (which was still a California ID even though I had been in Wisconsin 18 months at that point, a couple of short mildly funny stories about my CA ID that I'll post later if someone reminds me), which I give her, and does the whole "have you been drinking" rigmarole. I explained the situation (drunk navigator!). She recognized that I was perfectly coherent and not intoxicated, and I assume she believed me, and she asked if I wouldn't mind doing the sobriety test anyway since she had an officer-trainee with her who had never performed one. They were both cute so I agreed, and I spent the next ten minutes walking the line, touching my nose, and reciting the alphabet backwards. Test passed, I hopped back in the car and drove home. The End.