The Big Move, part 2

Um. So, I kind of decided to move to WordPress. You can see my new blog, designed by my awesome husband, at http://pantalonesdelfuego.wordpress.com. Woo! Plus, all my photos, posts, and comments made the switch as well. Yay! So update your RSS feeds, your blogrolls, and all other assorted stuff, because after 5 full years here at blogger I'm closing up shop.

Extended Massive Organism

One of the tasks we're tackling, living in this house, is the scourge of the violet.

Wild violets grow in this yard like...well, like weeds. Which is what they are. I think there was a little patch of them in one of the beds when we first moved into this house in 1989, and I think my mom has been fighting the spread of the dread violet ever since. And they're not even the pretty kind of violet; they don't even get nice flowers or anything. As you can see, the violets are a formidable enemy. They propagate by sending runners above the ground or below the ground via a connected root system, and they turn up just about everywhere.





The violets are also a bit creepy because every new plant that comes up puts up the new leaves as weird crumpled pod-like things before they unfurl into leaves. I'd already pulled most of the violets in one of the beds before I took the photos, but you can get an idea of what they look like here. (Also, you can get an idea of the amount of insect life in this yard. Each of these beds is full of earthworms, snails, slugs, and sow bugs, not to mention ants, spiders, and all sorts of other things. It's a good thing I'm not wigged out by multiple-legged, wiggly, or single-footed organisms.)




Violets come up in every nook, cranny, crack, and crevice in just about every part of the yard here. They even split the railing of the bed, as you can see in this photo, and because the root systems come up from inside the wood I can't even get a good enough grasp on them to pull them out. I'm convinced that all of these violets are clones of each other and there's some sort of extended root system that exists all over the yard, the sentient creature putting up babies everywhere to see where they might catch hold next.

It's not enough to pull up a violet by the root, because there are so many runners under the ground in addition to the ones above the soil. I'm practically going to have to completely replace the soil in one of the beds in order to get rid of the violets in it, and I have no idea how I'll get rid of the ones that grow between the stepping stones along the pathways. Maybe it will be a losing battle, and the Borg Violet Collective will win this match.




The violets are not the only things attempting to take over the yard. The blackberry brambles, which have likewise tried to take root on our property for over twenty years now, have been sneaking in underneath the back fence from a neighbor's yard. Blackberries are prickly and painful, so you have to wear thick gloves when trying to remove them, and they send out surface and root runners as well. We pulled some out of the back lawn this afternoon, in addition to catching the latest runner on the move, complete with multiple root clumps every few feet.



We had a few days of rain last week, and afterward, mushrooms popped up all over the place.


You know what else pops up after a rain? Sour grass.


It looks like clover, but it isn't clover. I can pull it out by the roots multiple times, and it just. keeps. growing. I've weeded the same bed six times in the last two weeks, and every day there are more sour grass shoots to be yanked. I think this is a losing battle, but for now I'm going to do my best to at least keep the weeds at a few inches tall rather than a foot or more.



(Not pictured: the morning glory that has been making a valiant effort to grow over everything in one part of the yard, including up every tree, fence, along every railing, and across every flower bed, since it was planted back in 1990. At least the morning glory is easy to pull out and pull up, and some times of the year it puts out pretty flowers. I am starting to think that maybe we should just let the violets, the blackberry, the sour grass and the morning glory duke it out for King of the Yard. When the winner meets the mint plant in the front yard, watch out, world!)

Fantasy vs Reality: The Dinner Party

At about five o'clock this afternoon, I got out the ingredients to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. I processed the pumpkin last night, and was excited to bake the first pumpkin pie of the season. I mixed up the crust ingredients, rolled them out, filled a pie pan. I mixed fresh pumpkin with egg, evaporated milk, spices, and brown sugar, and popped my pie in the oven to bake.

Meanwhile, Dan prepped the seafood gumbo and got it to cooking while he mixed biscuits, and baked the biscuits as soon as my pie was out of the oven. Our friends arrived around 6 PM, and we had a leisurely evening of drinks, food, and socializing.


* * * * * * *

At about five o'clock this afternoon, about half an hour after Dan had gotten out of a cold shower, I got out the ingredients to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. We'd already determined after looking at the hot water heater that it wasn't an issue with that, so with a sinking feeling I went out to check on the propane tank, only to find that the dial on the top of the tank read zero. Back inside, after doing a load of dishes in cold water, I began to mix the crust ingredients, only to realize that hey, not only were our hot water and our heat tied to the propane, but the stove and oven were as well. There was no way we were going to have pie, or seafood gumbo, and after a minute of trying to think of what we could make using only the microwave or the toaster oven on such short notice, we gave up.

I called my mom to tell her about the issue, and she suggested calling the energy company. They had a dedicated emergency line for after hours issues, and I spoke to someone who told me she'd have a driver call me back shortly. Meanwhile, Dan mixed up some guacamole so we'd have SOMETHING to feed our guests, and Sara and Ron arrived while I was still trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the gas situation. After speaking further with the driver, I had to call my mom back to relay our options ($150 for a weekend delivery, plus the cost of the gas vs. waiting 'til Monday and only paying $50 because of some new law that requires certain testing done any time the gas runs out.) After we got all that figured out and squared away, we went across the street to the diner and we all ate moderately tasty food.

After dinner, we came back to the house and had some chocolate, listened to Simon's band's album, and watched the cats play with toys. But I spent the entire evening mortified that the promised home-cooked meal and pumpkin pie from scratch became roast beef sandwiches and fish&chips at the diner. On the bright side, the guy from the energy company called again to tell me that because of a paperwork error on their part, they'd waive the $100 part of the $150 fee and we will have hot water, heat, a functional dryer, and a functional stove/oven at again at 9 AM tomorrow.

Robin, Miss Robin the Brave

Princess Robin now lives on the fridge, the kitchen counter, the stereo piece next to Dan's computer, in the hall bathroom (where her litterbox is), and in our bedroom (but only when we are in there, and she won't go in or out by herself, which means every morning at 7:30 AM ON THE DOT she's jumping on our heads, pawing at the blankets, and purring, letting us know it's time for her morning constitutional and her breakfast.) She's spending more and more time exploring and voluntarily walking or running on the floor from one place to another, and has had a slap-bang time exploring the back bedroom, walk-in closet, and bathroom, where she will go if one of us brings her back there.

Yesterday, Loki was napping on the chair in the living room and Dan was at his computer and Robin just up and went on the floor. She spent quite a while there, and by quite a while I mean at least two or three minutes. She sat; she sphinx'd; she kept a close eye on Loki to make sure he wasn't going to eat her, and as soon as she saw him twitch a whisker, she was right back up on the table in a safe spot. That was about twenty seconds after I snapped this photo. But she's getting bolder every day, and maybe by the time we leave she'll be going into rooms on her own and not just leaving them.

Day of the dead

Oddly, one of my favorite things about this little piece of the county is the Olive Hill Cemetery, just outside of Geyserville. Next to (what else?) a vineyard, it's a pretty neat place to learn a bit more about the history of the area, as the oldest and most prominent monuments are for the long-time Italian-Swiss colony families. I went to preschool or elementary school or ballet class with kids who had some of these same names, and their many-generations-removed ancestors are buried on Olive Hill.




The hill is full of ancient oak trees, and when it rains, the moss and lichen growing all over everything adds to the spooky atmosphere. If I had were filming a low-budget horror movie, I know exactly where I'd choose to set up my camera.




Walking through a cemetery, for me, is mostly a reminder of how nothing ever stays the same. Entropy, if nothing else, breaks everything down into component parts, and even marble and granite can be eaten by lichen and crumbled to dust. The oldest graves we saw dated back to the 1870s, and a few that might have been older were no longer readable, their markers worn by rain and earthquakes and sun and dirt and squirrel poop and time.





It's interesting to walk through a cemetery and see how the fashions and styles of even something like a grave marker can change through the decades. I saw monuments made of stone, flat markers made of metal, family tombs and individualized sites, with benches, wind chimes, and other personal elements. Also, different cultural symbols. And a kitty.



Finally, there's nothing like finding the headstone of someone one's own age to make one feel mortal. This was the saddest marker in the whole graveyard. "Beloved grandson" was 5 weeks old. "Beloved son" was younger than me, and died only a few months after his newborn son.

A one sentence review, after viewing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Why did we need another Forrest Gump in which Brad Pitt reprised his character from Meet Joe Black?

Should I take this job or not?

I'm thinking of doing this again, but I'm not sure of a theme or anything. Right now I'm pretty focused on trying to find a job, so maybe my dilemma du jour will entertain.

Here's the thing.

A friend has offered me a short-term, part-time job at his company doing stuff I'm about 10 years and a degree overqualified to do, for $15/hour. He thinks it will be about 20 hours a week but could be more hours. The company is located in Berkeley, which is about 90 miles and at least a 2 hour morning/evening commute each way. They are also expanding, though honestly they don't really do anything I'm interested in professionally.

Here is my pros/cons list. Please read and tell me what you think I should do in this situation.

Pros:
* It's a job. It's money coming in, though granted, not a whole lot of money
* I've been told that I can consolidate it into two weekdays and so I can just stay at a friend's house or my sister's house for the in-between night, saving myself 2 commutes. Or I could drive down on a Monday evening, work Tues/Wed, and drive back up Wed evening.
* There's a possibility of somehow finagling it into a full-time job for the company
* My friend is going out of his way to help me find work

Cons
* It's 90 miles and 2 hours each way. Even with an overnight stay or two during the week, that's still 180 miles or nearly half a tank of gas plus bridge toll and wear/tear on the car a week.
* An overnight stay or two means I'm away from home, Dan, and kitties for one or two nights a week for a job that's probably a dead end
* That's two fewer days a week I can spend looking for a full-time job that I want to be doing
* If I do get offered a full-time job, especially if soon, that means I'd be kind of screwing my friend over

Our ultimate plan is to move down to the Bay Area as soon as one of us gets a full-time job, but there's no way we could swing a move, let alone rent and everything else on $300/week, so the option of us moving for this job is not on the table.

Bread basket

When I lived in Colorado, and people asked me what part of California I was from, the easiest thing to tell them was "Bay Area" or "San Francisco." If they pushed further, I said I was from "wine country in Northern California" or "Sonoma County." Occasionally, I'd someone who would say, "Oh, Sonoma! It's like Napa!" and I would grit my teeth, nod, and smile. And secretly, I'd seethe.

Wine grapes, just before harvest. These ones were on really old vines next to the Catholic Church in Asti.

Sure, Sonoma County is known as "wine country." It's an area that grows a lot of grapes, has a lot of wineries, produces internationally award-winning wines. But it's SO MUCH MORE than just wine and grapes, and I wish there was a way to get that across in an easy shorthand.

For example, olive trees grow everywhere.

So many years of describing my home turf as "wine country" had me sort of forgetting what all else Sonoma County grows. Wine is such a convenient description, when the reality is far more complex. My years of coming all the way up here only for holiday visits didn't help matters, as I'd not had occasion to be in the area during the fall months in many years. It wasn't until I moved back here and started looking at the northern end of the county with fresh eyes that I remembered the cornucopia available just in my mom's yard.

Innards of ripe green fig, not saarlac pit.

We've had crisp and juicy yellow delicious apples, raked up tiny wrinkled past-their-prime jam plums, and I gave Dan his first-ever fresh-off-the-tree fig. There's also a peach tree, several citrus trees, and a black walnut tree next door, although those walnuts aren't really edible for anyone but the giant teasing gray squirrels that live in the yard. Walking through Healdsburg a few weeks ago while waiting for our alternator to be replaced AGAIN, we saw more apple trees, fig trees, and ancient English walnut trees, which are the kind of walnuts you buy in the baking aisle or the bulk section at the grocery store. The neighbors down the street have a pomegranate tree, as do some friends of mine with whom we visited last week, and, along with a bunch of tomatoes, they gave us one to savor. It was the best pomegranate I'd had in at least a decade.

Pom!

Working on a photo project recently, Dan and I have come across quite a few typical examples of Sonoma County's bounty. Just one winery had pomegranate, persimmon, walnut, and, below, artichokes.

Persimmon, not quite ripe.

An artichoke...

is really just

a great big

THISTLE

I suppose it's a combination of the mild climate, with warm summers and cool, wet winters that don't really get snow, that makes this area ideal for growing food crops. When I was little, much of the land that is now given to grape vines was fruit trees or nut trees, but I guess grapes are more lucrative and so that's what everyone plants instead. I'm just glad that there are still yards and small farms and pockets of non-grape things here and there.

I made this

A reconnection with an old friend.

A move to a different state.

A bucket of flowers delivered to our house.

4 bouquets, 3 boutonnieres, 3 arrangements.

One happy bride. One happy me.

Memory Lane

One of the things that we discovered when we arrived here in the 'dale is that my mom left a bunch of my stuff in the house, things she'd been keeping for me since I moved out to go to college. I spent a few hours looking through old yearbooks and old schoolwork and old literary magazines (complete with poem by Sara entitled My Hands!), through the basket of letters I received during the summer after my freshman year in college, and reading through all of the old school newspapers I'd saved for some bizarre reason. I found a VHS tape of my High School Video Yearbook that may be some time before I get to watch, since I don't know if I know anyone with a functional VHS player. And I found this stuff.



"Carlitos" was an exercise I had to do in one of my Spanish classes, though why it has someone else's name on it (on the top of the page, above the photo), I have no idea. In case you can't see what I wrote in each of the bubbles, I'll provide both the Spanish and the English translation.

Panel 2: "¿Por favor, tengo quiero usar el baño?" (Please, I have to want to use the bathroom?) (It should have been, "Por favor, ¿puedo usar el baño?", or Please, can I use the bathroom?)
Panel 3: "¡Pero es muy importante! ¡Necesito ir al baño AHORA!" (But it's very important! I have to go to the bathroom NOW!)
Panel 4: "¡Ay Caramba! Es demasiado tarde." (Oh noes! It's too late.)





Me at a dance with High School Boyfriend at his school. Perhaps Valentine's Day? I'm wearing a dress of my mom's circa 1970, a silver peace sign necklace I got at the Renaissance Faire, and awesome white low-heeled pumps! It's a photo of a photo, so not exactly the most accurate representation, but you get the idea.



From top left: Handmade doll with embroidered face, yarn hair, etc. I named Rose; Snoopy doll I got for having my birthday party at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, the ice rink owned/operated by Charles Schultz and family; stuffed lamb sans one eye; small stuffed raccoon; baby doll that used to have a matching bonnet. I forget her name.



I could write an entire blog post on this alone, but I'll try to make a long story short. When I was first babysitting, I pretty much saved all of the money I made and used it to pay for camp in the summer. Eventually, I had made enough that I had a bit left over, and I decided to buy my very first pair of shoes myself. I was probably 13 or 14 years old, and up until that point, my parents had bought all of my clothes/shoes for me. I'd wanted a pair of Birkenstocks for a long time, and I finally had enough money to buy them for myself. So I did.

As you can see, I wore these shoes all the time. I wore them with socks when it was cold and without when it was warm, and I love love loved them, as they were the most comfortable shoes ever (and to me, paying $80 for a pair of shoes felt totally obscene, so I was determined to get my money's worth out of them). When I bought them, they were a pretty slate blue, but as the years went by they faded to a dull grayish color. I didn't care, though; I still wore them all the time. I wore down the soles and wore out the toe and the heel, and eventually they started looking pretty ratty, but I couldn't imagine giving them up.

The summer after high school graduation, my family went on our very first ever (and, it would turn out, only) family camping vacation. Our first stop was a campground someplace in the Western Sierras, and when we had the tent set up my sisters and I went for a walk down to the river, a tributary that would feed the American. Wearing my Birks, I climbed out onto a big rock to sit only to catch my right shoe on something. It fell off my foot and into the fast-moving snow melt runoff river.

I was so sad. I felt like I'd lost my best friend, something that had been with me for so much of my teenage years, something that had cost me EIGHTY DOLLARS and I just couldn't bring myself to through the unlost shoe away.

Something tells me that it has been long enough now. This is not moving with us to our next domicile.




I DID write an entire blog post about this one. Here's the sole Piers Anthony newsletter I ever received, where I responded to the pen pal request for a certain Kent B Golden of Hamden, CT. Who knew that 16 years later I'd be attending his wedding?

Justifiable Homicide

*

One of the stipulations for getting to live in this big (mostly) empty house is that Dan and I agreed to help my mom out with some of the major projects that need to be accomplished to make the house sale- or rentable. Since we had no furniture, internet, or television for the first week+ we were here, we spent most of our time working on the first big project, which was to paint my sister's old bedroom. Somehow, back in the early '00s, my mom took leave of her senses and let my sister paint her bedroom red with black trim. The worst part is that the large built-in book case/desk units in the room were also black, which meant a lot of small fiddly painting, and because the room was mostly red and black, we knew that it wasn't a matter of just a simple coat of paint.




Before...

We knew it was a big job, so we decided to consult an expert. A friend of mine worked for an independent paint store for many years, and knows more about paint and the paint business than anyone else I've ever met. I sent her an email describing the situation and asking for recommendations and advice, and she wrote me a novel in response that outlined all of our options and choices, with helpful commentary. The first thing we had to do when we got here was to check how many layers of paint were on the walls, since I knew there were at least three and maybe as many as 7 or 8, depending on how many times it had been painted since the last time it was stripped. (The house is pretty old, with at least 3 owners prior to my mom, so it was possible that we'd have lots and lots of old paint to deal with.) My friend had given me a plethora of options for paint stripping, so we were prepared to have the room closed off for many days while waiting for a stripper to do its job. When we did a bit of chipping away, however, we discovered some faux wood paneling on some of the walls covered with three layers of paint, so we knew stripping wouldn't be necessary.


Giant ball of used tape!

The second thing we did was to go to the Ace Hardware in town, where my mom said was a list of all of the various paint colors she'd used in the house in the past 20-odd years she's been here. We decided to use the same color on the walls in the bedroom as in the hallway and living room ("Powdery mist", aka a light tan color) and all the trim in the same color ("linen") as the trim in the whole rest of the house. My friend had told me that if we didn't need to strip the paint, we would for sure need stain-blocking primer to help cover the black and red, and Ace was kind enough to tint it for us to match the color we'd eventually paint.

So once we'd bought the tape our friend recommended ("The green stuff is cheaper and if your project is going to last a week or less, don't bother buying the blue stuff") and taped everything off and put down plastic, we began by priming all the red walls and all the black trim. And then we started on the first black built-in. Only a few minutes into our project, it was clear that Laurel was going to have to die for her sins. Painting every surface of every cubbyhole in that built-in was absolute torture - we had to do it all by hand, sharing the same bucket of primer, Dan doing the above bits (and only getting a little bit on my head), me doing the below bits (and cursing at the tedium).



2 coats of primer on walls, one coat of primer on built-in



Trim primer'd, walls/built-ins painted


It was toward the end of the first coat of primer on the first built-in that we began to plot our revenge. And then we started on the second built-in, which has a desk and an underside that I had to lay on my back to reach, while primer dripped on my face, and the murderous fantasies began.


Walls painted, trim primer'd

We ended up doing two coats of primer on everything, to ensure we wouldn't have to use a ton of (more expensive) paint, and then we did two coats of paint. So we painted each and every one of those built-ins over and over and over and by the last time, we had all kinds of elaborate torture situations dreamed up, and decided that my mom and the friend who helped her paint deserved horrible, horrible death as well. Finally, after working on it for several hours a day together, we finished the last touch-ups on the trim five days later.








After!

*Dan wrote the above poem using the fridge poetry. It really says everything that needs to be said about the sucketry of the paint project.