Haley Performs
Arnon, my sister Sia, and my niece Haley:
The usual suspects gathered the other night for a sushi gorge. We had about 140 pieces of sushi plus salad, miso soup, wakame, gyoza, agedashi tofu, beef teriyaki, chicken teriyaki and of course sake ... for five people.
Gluttony is great!
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Our neighbors, Rob and Jackie, held a Labor Day BBQ on their front lawn. It was the first frontyard BBQ I've ever been to and I was amused to see the confused looks on the faces of those who drove by.
Everyone brought a dish to share but Bodette's home-made flan was hands-down the best thing there. I must also compliment Jason on his selection of Roche Muscat Canelli, a tasty dessert wine.
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Early in the afternoon, my dad took Coonskye to the pet emergency room where the veterinarian determined that Coonskye would probably die in the next hour or two. So they did the merciful thing and put him to sleep right away.
I can't believe Coonskye is gone. I'm heartbroken.
I absolutely love these pink flowers with brown stems. They are formally known as Amaryllis Belladonna, but commonly referred to as Naked Ladies because of their leafless stems.
As beautiful as the flowers are, it's the bare, brown stems that appeal to me the most. So dramatic. So minimalist.
In Mendocino, just about every house has Naked Ladies in their yard and even the cemeteries are covered in them. Once in a while, I'll see a few of these beauties along the coast near San Francisco, and I recently saw three in Santa Clara, but otherwise they're mainly found along the Northern California coast.
I wish I could plant a million of these in my backyard.
Although we traveled through Greece and Turkey a few months ago, I believe that for Arnon the highlight of 2008, thus far, was our trip in January to Point Conception Lighthouse. It's located in Jalama Bay near Lompoc, California and let me tell you, getting there was a bitch.
It started raining a couple hours into our drive down to Southern California and didn't let up until we got home. By the time we got to the hotel in Lompoc, the storm had caused a power outage, but fortunately we had electricity the next morning.
The hour or so we spent driving to Jalama Bay the next morning was the worst. Most of the drive was on the winding, two-lane coastal highway, but there were several single-lane segments where traffic lights at the northern and southern ends controlled traffic in one direction at a time. Unfortunately, the lights were controlled by small solar panels and were useless in the storm. We took our chances and nothing happened. In fact, I don't remember seeing another car even in the two-lane sections. Then again, who in their right mind would be out there at the edge of civilization during a storm?
Once in Jalama Bay, we were to meet up with a guy from the Coast Guard who would escort us through Cojo Ranch, a private ranch that surrounds the lighthouse. I thought it would just be the three of us plus a few other Coast Guard personnel, but our group was comprised of four retired army/navy people, a guy doing research for Cal Poly-SLO, and us.
Feeling a little out of place, I asked the head Coast Guard guy why he let us come and he said that Arnon had bugged him with so many emails and phone calls over several months that he felt this was the only way to get him off his back. Clearly, annoying behavior pays off.
You can't tell from the photos, but it rained heavily the whole time we were on the lighthouse grounds. Stupidly, I wore a wool coat that day so I was soaked.
The lighthouse was alright, but the rocky bluff the lighthouse sits on is breathtaking. For some unknown reason, a lot of birds fly there to die and their skeletons can be found everywhere. Thus, the native Americans who used to live there considered the land to be sacred. It's nice to know that the environment there will be preserved because of the presence of the lighthouse. Otherwise, it would be part of the large project underway to build coastal condos on Cojo Ranch.
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A couple months ago, our next-door neighbor was moving out of the house she shared with her grandparents and asked if Arnon and I would help her move a few pieces of furniture into the moving van. We happily agreed but regretted it the moment we stepped into her house.
Allah be alarmed, what a freaking nightmare! The grandparents had lived in the house for nearly six decades and from the looks of things, they had never thrown out a single item.
Every room was crowded with excess furniture, and each piece of furniture was piled high with all sorts of junk. In the tiny living room there were three couches and a queen-sized bed, half a dozen lamps, four tables and a recliner. There was a fourth couch but it had already been moved out.
There were giant (and by giant I mean taller than five feet) oxygen tanks (all empty) in just about every room, Jehovah's Witness reading material scattered all over the place, cat food and dog hair on every surface, black mold on grouted areas, and of course the usual layers of dust and cobwebs.
The kitchen was carpeted and we discovered large patches of black mold growing on it when we moved the fridge. But that was nothing compared to the mold inside the fridge. I was asked to move the food in the fridge (much of it long spoiled) into the fridge inside the garage, which was even grosser than the one inside the house.
As for the smell, let me just describe it as a combination of old-people-odor (four old people to be exact), mold, cat pee, wet dog, dirty laundry and dust. The grandmother told me that the last time the house was vacuumed was over twenty years ago! Quel horror!
I've mentioned before that I used to be a serious pack rat, but even at my worst I didn't have as much junk as my neighbors do in just one corner of a room.
Ronell, another neighbor who came to help, asked me why these people, who are clearly religious, spent so much time and energy accumulating and storing material goods as though they would live on this earth forever when they should have been focusing on more spiritual matters. I didn't have an answer then and I don't have one now.
One positive thing that came out of this experience was that Arnon and I realized how easy it is to become lazy and sentimental and end up with a house full of useless crap, so we vowed not to become like our neighbors. Unfortunately, in the two months since we made that vow, we've let a lot of junk come into our home and they're sitting in piles all over the place.
So much for our lofty declarations that we would be vigilant in our fight against stuffitis.
