Young tidy bread-baking polymath PhD student seeks room in SF or PA/MP

I'm an incoming PhD student moving back to the Bay Area from Chicago in August, and hoping to find a place to live by early September.

If you have a room available then, or want to look for an apartment or house together, let me know!

What I'm looking for:
-A room in a partially-furnished or unfurnished unit within a mile or two of Downtown Palo Alto or Downtown Menlo Park or in The Mission, SoMa, or Potrero Hill
-Rent+utilities under $1250/person/month
-Ideally, a place built before the sixties with a garden and a gas stove
-Roommates: I'm not looking for a co-op, but good company is not a bad thing.

Me:
-Male, mid-twenties
-Incoming PhD student in (computational) Linguistics, coming out of a BA/MA at The University of Chicago
-Enthusiastic cook and fairly frequent host
-Cyclist, by in large
-A little disorder is fine by me, but I vacuum/mop/tidy quite often.
-A fan of cats, but too allergic to live with them
-Other interests: Typography, photography, puzzle hunts, Tom Waits
-More: stanford.edu/~sbowman

Most interesting thing I'll have around the house (hopefully barring myself):
-A monochromatic lamp (if it's the only light in the room, you can't distinguish any colors)—There's a (harmless) long story there.