Bad blogger!

I know that my posts have been few and far between of late. This is because my mother is still visiting, and I have very little time to sit at the computer.

There have been only minor developments lately, anyway First, I got another job. (The tutoring company hasn't provided me even one tutoring session yet. I hope their new business takes off soon, for their sake as well as mine, but I had to seek something additional for the time being.) I will be a school crossing guard. Yes, that's right. I will take my place amongst the ranks of little old men and soccer moms making sure the children of my fair city get safely across the street before and after school. It's a little humiliating, but the pay is good and the hours are great.

Darling Wife and I took mother for a visit up to Apple Hill for harvest time this past weekend. DW says she's getting a little tired of going up there every year, but I love apples and I love fall. So I had a nice time, and I'm sure DW won't complain when I bake her an apple cake this week.

There has been no news from the scottie breeder, but I still have high hopes. If she breeds her dog soon, we can still get the little tyke sometime in February. If she doesn't breed soon, I have had some promising leads from another breeder. We'll see.

Our holiday travel plans are beginning to shape up nicely, and we are hoping to go down to Monterey this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes... if I have the time. But I should be back up to writing more regularly in October.

The Other Valley

My mother has been visiting for a little over a week. She's been here before and seen most of the major tourist attractions, so we have been choosing some of the more engaging B-level sites to explore during this visit. Last week that took us up to Lake Tahoe and Reno. We also toured the home of Leland Stanford, one-time governor of California, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, and founder of Stanford University. All of this was fairly familiar to me and interesting to her.

But over the weekend we embarked upon the unknown. We ventured into the Sonoma valley wine country.

Of course, Sonoma is pretty well-known amongst wine drinkers, but it has always been overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, Napa. Darling Wife and I have toured Napa on numerous occasions with just about every houseguest we've had. They all want to go to Napa. And it is a short freeway ride from our house, so of course we indulge them. Certainly Napa is set up for tourism. It has wine snobs, wine trains, wine buses, wine limos, and vineyards that are more like amusement parks than wineries, some of them even charging $20-$30 just to let you through the gates.

Sonoma has its fair share of elaborate wineries too, but it is a little less popular, therefore, less crowded and less flashy. It also has much more than just wineries. It has some pretty cool history. The town itself has a plaza/square packed with buildings from the 1800's, including the last and northernmost mission on the Mission Trail, aka El Camino Real.
These missions, constructed by a joint-venture of the Catholic church and the Spanish government over a period of about 150 years, cover eleven of the southwestern states. They have always fascinated me, but I've never actually been to one until now.

Then we toured the adjacent Spanish fort and the nearby home of General Mariano Vallejo, who once owned most of northern California and was instrumental in the "Bear Flag Incident" that made California a US state.

Finally, we dropped in to visit Jack London and the ruins of his "Wolf House."

There was definitely a "call of the wild" about the place, and I can understand why the location appealed to London. It was also a little eerie, but perhaps that had to do with the approaching night. We had to leave without sifting through the manuscripts in the museum or seeing the small house where he wrote most of his famous works.

Perhaps we will return to this "other" valley on some future excursion to drink in the beauty of the land and its famed liquid and to commune with the spirits of the dead.

We have reached the End

Native Americans believed that California was the end of the world. They believed that the world literally stopped at the California coast. Travelling beyond the land of one's people meant leaving the physical world and entering the spirit realm. Western Europeans and early US citizens had a somewhat similar view. For centuries, they had travelled west, but California was as far as they could go, if you don't count the Hawaiian Islands, which they didn't. It represented the end of exploration and expansion, the final destination, which gave it a larger-than-life status. And even today, California has a mystical quality. Just say the name and visions of palm trees, orange groves, white sandy beaches, lean and tanned bodies, Hollywood glamour, and a wealth of gold dance in one's mind. People imagine that it is paradise. And in truth, much of it is magnificent beyond words. Isolated on the west by the ocean and on the east by the mighty Sierra Nevada mountain range, California is a strange and exotic place.

I never dreamed of living here. I wanted to go to the Pacific Northwest, but after failing to gain admission to my preferred universities, I accepted northern CA as close enough. But once we moved here, I was intoxicated with the place. There is so much to see and do, and everywhere nature's bounty seems to drop freely from the vines and trees. I could easily understand why people told me, "You'll never want to leave."

All of this changed after living here awhile. I came to realize that the bounty is not free. Hardly free. California's great central valley is farmed by means of elaborate irrigation systems and hard-working immigrant labor. Left alone, little if anything would grow here. The valley has what is known as a "mediterranean climate." We get a lot of rain in the winter, almost three solid months of it. And everything floods. Storm drains become overloaded, and fears of New Orleans-like levee breeches dominate the media and people's minds. Then after March, the rain stops like a dammed river, and things begin to die. What was once green and beautiful quickly takes on the golds and browns of dryness and death. The ground becomes rock hard, and the harsh winds rip the moisture from the leaves, hurling them crunchily to the ground, often still emerald in their brittleness.

And the insects! Ants invade our house several times a year. We never know when, where, and in what numbers they will strike. We awake in the morning to find ants in the kitchen cabinets or stumble to the bathroom during the night to find the countertop crawling with tiny black scavengers. Spiders envelope every bush, every home in webs, and these webs catch the dust that the farms and the wind stir up. Everything takes on an air of decay. One cannot even step outside without a coating of Deet or risk getting West Nile Virus.

And all of those wonders, those magnificant landscapes that you hear about, you must drive for hours and hours to reach them, and in between... nothing. Poor farms and empty desert. True, CA is the most populous state, but the people cluster in large cities on the coasts where houses are small and expensive and the seasons never change. In the south, it's always dry and hot, and in the north, neither warm nor cold, but chilly and damp all year round. Or they fashion modest towns in the valley, like the one we live in, where people struggle against nature with sprinklers and immigrant gardeners to create artificial oases where God never intended, ever vigilant against the barrenness and the bugs. And eventually, even those far-flung places of grandness begin to annoy. They are too far to be convenient and too sublime to be lived in. One longs for modest or normal in a land that does not understand the concept.

Yesterday, I did something I have avoided for months. I went out into my garden. Oh, I'd made brief forays into it, but then I'd turned away in disgust. But my mother is coming for a visit, so I had to brave the elements and survey the damage. And what do you think I found? You may recall that I spent much of last year entirely relandscaping our home. I cleared overgrown ivy, observed light patterns, carefully developed a garden plan, installed irrigation hoses, and planted, and planted. There were some deaths in the beginning, but nothing beyond acceptable losses. Even after the heat of July and being away for over a month, we returned to find most of our shrubbery in decent, if not perfect shape. But the months of continued nastiness have eventually taken their toll. Whether from too little or too much watering I do not know, but nearly everything I had planted with care, attention, and much expense last fall, winter, and spring has succumbed. Little remains of my wonderful garden except a few vines (homes for the ubiquitous spiders), dry sticks, and a collapsing privacy fence.

I was very frustrated at first to say the least, but now I am starting to find relief. It is apparent to me that I have travelled outside the land of my people, and this is the end, this California. The wanderlust I have had all of my life is beginning to abate. Contrary to what people said, I do want to leave.

Of course, we'll have to live here for awhile, but I'll just imagine that it is a spirit world where reality does not exist. There is little need or use in expending money or time trying to make a home here. We don't belong here, we mortals. But as in the Native American legends, it is possible to return from the spirit world after a time, and in many ways, it feels good just to realize one's true place. Yes, I will go home. Just not today.

Great Scot!

I have mentioned before that Darling Wife and I would like to have a dog. Specifically, we have wanted a Scottish Terrier puppy for many years. ...or rather, I have.

My parents had one when I was a child, and I adored him. I've wanted one of my own for decades, but my life has been too unsettled to make a good home for a dog. Besides, Scotties are expensive and relatively uncommon. Oh, one frequently sees Scottie merchandise. You know, the necktie or scarf with the Scottie print or the christmas tree ornament depicting a tartan-covered scottie peering into an unwrapped gift box. That stuff is everywhere. And West Highland White Terriers, which many people mistakenly believe are white Scotties, are somewhat common, too. But one seldom sees a real, live Scottish Terrier. In addition, pure-bred Scotties are prone to certain genetic diseases, so one has to be careful to buy from a reputable breeder who is knowledgeable about Scotties and breeds for the best health of the puppies. That means a lot of painstaking research into a breeder's background, etc. before buying.

I know that there are millions of perfectly good dogs in shelters around the country, so I do not need to be lectured about that. I'm not a dog snob. Some day DW and I would like to adopt a rescue pet. But dogs inherit a considerable part of their temperment from their parents; different breeds generally exhibit personality traits specific to their breed. Certainly, nurture can diminish the effects of nature, but it is never 100% sure. Dogs can and often do revert to type. One cannot completely eradicate hundreds of years of instinctual behavior just by how one treats the animal. Rescue dogs are usually mixed breeds, which makes it difficult to know what one is getting. And even if a rescue dog is pure-bred, they often come with psychological or physical baggage from their previous owner or the shelter. This will be our first dog, and we don't have much space. I don't think we can deal with special needs right now. We want to be pretty sure of the dog's health and probable temperment beforehand, and we want a puppy that will develop habits in keeping with our own.

I think Scottish Terriers are perfect for us. They have short legs, so they are smallish, which is perfect for the size of our home.

It's also much easier to get friends to look after a small dog when one goes out of town, which is important because we have no family nearby, and we go back east for weeks at a time once or twice a year. But despite their small stature, Scotties are fairly stocky, so they are hale and hearty, unlike the yappy, rat dogs that are so popular with the Paris Hilton types today. I can't stand those tiny, nervous things with their trembling, delicate natures. Plus, Scotties are not lap dogs that jump up on visitors and must be carried around in obnoxious little bags. They are independent, dignified animals that are fiercely loyal, playful, and friendly companions to those who respect them, but they are usually reserved with strangers, and they will tolerate no coddling.

With all of this in mind, I have been contacting breeders for the last few years, but I've never found just the right situation.... until now. About two weeks ago, I e-mailed a show breeder in a suburb of Reno, NV, about two hours across the Sierra Nevada mountains from where we live. Everything in our e-mail correspondence was very promising, but DW was still not convinced. Despite all of the internet research and all of the things I have told her, she just wasn't sure about Scotties. She's never known one.

The breeder invited us to visit her facility and meet her and her dogs, which we did this past weekend. It was fabulous. We talked for hours, and the breeder's philosophies and practices satisfied me entirely, and her dogs were wonderful! Darling Wife played with them the entire time, and she smiles from ear to ear anytime you mention them. She doesn't understand how I have been so patient for all these years. She is convinced that our home is missing a Scottie and wants one now.

The breeder is expecting her "bitch" to come into season at any time, and she will, with luck, have puppies in late October or early November. Once they are four weeks old, we can visit them as often as we like, and we will be able to bring one home in late January or early February. We will be travelling and have houseguests through January, so this is perfect timing for us. We are terribly excited!