Clarisse's Stuff: July 2009

Well, we have one more trip to the desert and that should complete our move. The "vacation house" will have the minimum necessitites in furnishings for when we go "visit", but I can't believe that we filled up a 24' moving van, a pickup truck and my car and still have another pickup load to go! What was that I was saying about being a pack rat? Yup, it's true, and we got rid of everything we could bare to part with too. E.J.'s just as bad as I am. He's been moving around bricks from the old Banana Ranch in Angels Camp since 1984 LOL!!! I don't know what's worse, that he has them, or that he knows what they went to after all these years. "E.J.! What are these rocks for? Why are we moving rocks?" "They're from Banana Ranch!" Oh Brother!!! His little bit of must keep Gold Rush memorabilia/history is from the infamous bordello building outside of town LOL!!!

When we got here, the girl dogs where in season so Augie was tied up out front, where he decided to vent his frustration by doing a little landscape demoliton.

This area was all planted and those now empty containers used to hold cuttings that E.J. had started. He also took out a 4 foot fence section. Lucky for him, E.J. was taking it out anyway, but still..... Bad Dog!!!

This was a beautiful long stem, nearly thornless, red rose bush. Augie decided it was time to prune it down to the base I guess. Bad Bad Dog! And we won't even go into the Geraniums, well, what used to be Geraniums. Good thing they will snap back.

Now that the girls are out of season they are all out back in a very large, fenced in yard, with lawn, dirt, trees and the service porch door is open so they can pretend they are in the house :) The only thing missing for Augie is his little kids wading pool, we'll have to see that he gets a new one on payday. He is a water dog after all, and even though the Delta is just a short walk from the back fence and across the road, he's not allowed to go by himself and Dad is too tired at the end of the day to make it an every day trek. We all know that I ain't gonna do it either, so it's back to a little wading pool to get him by between Delta swims :) After all, we don't need him ripping out lemon and peach trees. Hmmm.... maybe we should tether him to those plum trees we are going to take out LOL!!!

I couldn't give up my kittens, I found a good home for Sadie, the first born on Saturday, had a taker for Luna, the little girl born on Monday, but I wasn't convinced that it was a good match for her so I decided to keep her, and Sunshine, the little boy born on Sunday, was a keeper for me too. So I have 4 cats now, confined to living in 2 bedrooms (we cut a little cat hole inside the adjoining closets between our bedroom and my Knitting/Cat room so they can go back and forth between them in secret during the day) but I let them out to carouse around the house at night after Ed is in bed :) He doesn't like cats so I'm making sure he doesn't have to deal with them. See? I can make sacrifices and be a nice person too sometimes :)

'I could make that jump, there would only be a small avalanche of stuff, I could live with that!'

'Let mee oowt!'

'Those kids just need to get with the program and relax.'

Combining the 2 households is an ongoing challenge, but we are beginning to make some progress. It's so overwhelming to see all these boxes piled up in the rooms and trying to figure out where to start. It's been especially hard for Ed. He's used to having 2 bedrooms that he used as closets/garages so there is lots of stuff to be organized and gone through. I'm really proud of him though, today he actually threw out a whole large garbage bag full of receipts and mail and stuff that dated back to 1985! 3 packrats in one combined home, I'm going the rail and bracket shelving route for all the closets and half my knitting room walls, E.J.'s talking about a 12x12 new storage building built out back where we are taking out some prune trees. Good idea, turns out our first choice home is a money pit and requiring all kinds of expensive rebuilding, so we got lucky on that one, but we are still managing to find all kinds of ways to sink money into this place too. I think all homes are money pits! It's either fix and repair or change and add on :)

The real joy of moving back to California is that the bulk of my grandchildren live here too. They are only 2 hours away, up in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. My Mother and 2 sisters and their families are only an hour and a half away too. It would be nice if they were closer but I also have Aunts and Uncles right here in the East Bay too. My mother in-law and her husband are up in the Sierra's closer to my daughter too, so it all works out quite nicely :) Now, if I could get my son out of Florida..... and Alex out of Canada.... but this will have to do for now. We keep hoping to get Alex for the summer again, but there are complications with the new passport laws and his citizenship, maybe we can get it all ironed out for next summer.

What's even more perfect is that even though my daughter and I have a somewhat volatile relationship, it's really great right now and I'm going to enjoy every last single minute of it!! We were able to join them for the Fireworks show at Don Pedro Reservoir and it was a very lovely evening. Not too hot at all and the display was wonderful. They have some new to me fireworks that are the big chrysanthemums and then the tips of the chrysanthemum burst into to tiny chrysanthemums. Very very beautiful, I wish I'd have been able to get a shot, but I need to get a larger memory card. I ran out of space on the camera, but more importantly, I did get these shots :)

Grandpa and Selene (aka Squish becuase she's soft and squishy :)