(Leaving) California

A week ago, we packed both our cars and drove down Weir Canyon Rd. from our empty house at the top of the hill. Even though California has been our home for over fifty years, there were no tears, at least for me. Id been saying goodbye to people and places for weeks and I haven’t teared up yet. Selling our house, getting rid of stuff we no longer need, then packing and moving the rest has been an incredibly stressful process. The way I am, I tend to get through stressful times by putting emotions on hold and toughing my way through. The way I am, I know that once we are settled into our new house, I will have sit down, put on some sad music, and melt down.

(Coming to) California

Forty-eight years ago, my wife and I loaded our suitcases into our boxy-but-comfortable gray Volvo and set out for California. We told our parents we just wanted to try it for a few years and I think we tried believe it ourselves. Even though we’d visited friends there a few years earlier and loved the place. Even though our best friends had moved to San Diego and we’d get to see them again. Truth: we were just kidding ourselves to make the goodbyes easier.

Monday Smiles – 2/2/2015

I have now been a resident of the State of California for 44 years.  And of Orange County, California for 42.  When we moved here, we told our disappointed parents that we were only going for a few years.  I don’t know if we were just kidding ourselves or lying, whether we knew even then how much we’d like it here.  We certainly had an inkling that we would … we’d visited college friends in Santa Monica and they loved it.  Our best friends had recently moved to San Diego from Rhode Island, where we met them.  We were at that age when friends seemed easy to make, whether through work or putting in yards in a new neighborhood or kids’ activities.  Yes, there were things to get used to.  There was traffic, freeway traffic the likes of which we’d never experienced but we learned the art of planning our outings to avoid rush hour or checking for traffic reports before setting out.  These days our GPS takes care of that for us.  On the day we drove into Southern California, down the San Bernadino Freeway, a blanket of smog was hanging low over the shabbier neighborhoods along the freeway in the San Gabriel Valley and we wondered, What have we done?  But the smog lifted and nicer neighborhoods were only minutes away.   Over the years, the smog has lessened

Home Sweet Home

Living in Southern California is like having a beautiful girlfriend with a great personality who is afflicted with acute halitosis, bromhidrosis, and osmidrosis … she’s great to look at, fun to be around but in some ways, she just stinks.   So let’s get the stinky parts out of the way … it’s crowded, governed by idiot-politicians who’ve driven the state into the ground financially while making it business unfriendly, and the cost of living is high.   We’re prone to a cycle of droughts, fires, and mudslides which keeps our local media in a continual state of the-sky-is-falling.    We also have earthquakes.  Other than that, it’s great.   I mean it.