The love child The brownies and The bounty hunter Mr Rogers sang a song and asked, Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood? Our move to Pacific Grove meant a new neighborhood with new people. We’d already survived a Menopausal Neighbor, a Nosey Neighbor, A Hoarder Neighbor, a Pyromaniac Neighbor and a house full of demon teenagers…..what else was there? We were about to find out. Our side of the street was one big beautiful Victorian after another. On…
Living next door to a house full of unsupervised teenagers became unbearable. I began scouring the local paper for rentals in Pacific Grove, a little Hamlet of a town we’d been in love with for many years. One ad jumped out at me but sounded WAY too good to be true; 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 2 story 6 year old Victorian, walk to Ocean and town, $1500 a month, NO PETS. I read it again and then one more time…
For the first 14 months of our Monterey move, The Norman Bates Motel was in our backyard and…..the Neighbors From Hell lived next door, smack on the other side of our driveway. It started out OK; a mom, a dad and it looked like 3 teenaged girls. We were busy moving in when the woman across the street stopped by…..but NOT to welcome us to the neighborhood only to tell us that the woman next door had recently bought a…
Thirteen years ago today, February 2nd 2004, my daughter was born again. Not the born again that happens in religion, the born again that legally turned her into my daughter..…an adoption. Early on a week-day morning, standing in front of a judge in a Monterey court-room we held tight to each other and in a magic moment she became my daughter and I became her mom. Before the judge began the legal part, he looked up at the two of…
Movin’ to Monterey….. When you love the Pacific Ocean as we do and you realize you can live there simply by transferring within your company and just switching the territory you cover…you do it. Changes were being made at my husband’s place of employment and there was going to be an opening in the San Francisco Bay territory. We talked about it for maybe 20 seconds and then jumped on it. We had a house to sell before we could…
There’s no way to find out about your neighbors until after you’ve moved in, and then it’s just a little bit too late…you’re in. So, you smile and assure yourself that it’s all gonna be fine. But sometimes, it’s just NOT! One of our many moves over the years wedged us between Dirty Harry who was a Hoarder, Bert ‘n Ernie a most unlikely pair, and a crazy lady across the street who was a fire-starter. All on our little…
Neighbors are kinda like relatives…you don’t get to pick ‘em. And sometimes just like relatives, you kinda wish that you didn’t have to see them or deal with them either. Over the years, we’ve lived next door to an assortment of very strange neighbors. (Certainly they could never have felt that same way about us!)…………………. There was a mean looking older couple who lived next door to us near Folsom Lake. Seemed they were angry at life. They never said…
There was a horrible watercolor that hung in our bathroom for years. If we’d had a basement, maybe I could have hung it down there; we DID have a garage but, well I really couldn’t do that. I didn’t buy it, my husband did and well how do I hang something in the garage that he just bought? So, I found a place for it…the small bathroom in the entry…with the door always shut. The hanging piece-of-work was purchased one…
Friday, January 1, 2010 It’s a new day, a new year, a new decade. Time to erase the blackboard, change the channel, turn the page. New Year’s resolutions? Nope. Not me. Not this year. This year I’m workin’ on last years promises to myself. This year I’m transforming from dork to geek. This year, I WILL figure out how to put phone numbers in my home phone so I can push one button instead of a bunch of numbers that…
THE BACK SEAT It began many, many years ago in the back seat of a Chevrolet Suburban……….. NOT what you’re thinking! It was my girlfriend and me back there and our husbands up front. We liked it that way. It was a big vehicle and we were kinda far back. Far enough with music playing from the radio and two men conversing and laughing up front that they couldn’t hear any of the whispers going on in the back. We…