Some New News I Won't be Advertising Elsewhere

Yes, I have secrets this year, which is weird for me.
One is that I'm quitting the senate at the end of this year.  Not just the executive committee, but the whole shebang.  I'm just not re-upping for another three-year term.  I may return to statewide service later, but for now, I need a break.  The only downside to this is that I will have to win a separate election to stay on my home campus's executive committee, on which I love to serve.  I'll cross that bridge later, I suppose; ultimately, it doesn't qualify as enough of a "con" to worry about now.
I'm tired of traveling to LA.
I'm tired of the politics, and as I have zero aspiration to be promoted into a statewide academic affairs job...really, any administrative job, WTF am I doing besides getting drunk a lot and buying books?
I've been missing my family, and want to minimize the number of days away...
Because the other secret is that I'm taking students to Taiwan and Japan for three weeks in April.  Jeff will accompany us for part of the trip, which is extra-special, since he's had to sit on the sidelines while the girls were too young to be without both parents.  I have always loved the idea of Japan, and can do it all-expenses-paid, this way.
(I really want to travel WITH the girls, but they are still too young...we'll get to that later.)
Anyway, and I will go back to teach in Vietnam later in the summer--CHA CHING--because we need the money for our house.

Anyway, AND I will apply for a sabbatical when the deadlines come around this fall.  I am really, ultimately, trying to clear a little space around my head for writing some kind of book.

There are a few other secrets which may surface this year.  My daughters are growing and flourishing, and part of it is because Jeff's willingness to stay at home with them while I'm off on these trips and on my gigantic--but doable--commute.  Our new life is awesome, but it is new, and it has come with some odd stress.  Things that didn't seem so bad last year are suddenly really bad now, and vice-versa.  I guess this is what it means to change inside-out!

The whole family is traveling to Houston over Christmas, too, which is very very exciting to me.  Leaving town for a week will no doubt give us some perspective on the often too-close-for-comfort stuff happening within my immediate family, as well as allow us to see dearly missed people.

On the domestic front, I am rehabilitating plants (mostly succulents stolen from LA) on my kitchen windowsill, which is a really good place to have plants, due to the sink squirter.  I haven't had indoor plants since I lived in Barcelona...for real.  None in Texas, none in any part of California, until now.

Word of the week: monocot.

I'm also thinking a lot about low-rent fun: things I love to do that have little to no fiscal impact:  lie in bed talking to Jeff, reading used books, drinking coffee, walking, listening to music, gardening.  These are things that anyone can do, if one has any free time (which is problematic, I know).

The Eleventh Month

Funny how things change:  sometimes top-down, sometimes inside-out.  The move was a success, though there were several anxious months as we were smashed up against my mother's world.  The barn remodel took a lot longer than we'd thought, so we didn't get in there until a few weeks ago, and even that wasn't totally settled until the other day, when we finally sat back and relaxed in our own space.  Rent is paid for a  year, things are put away, kids transitioned well into their new school, etc.  We're getting used to major supermarkets being 30 miles away.  We keep a full gas can in the shed, and have needed it twice after driving up the hill on an almost empty tank.  Jeff has applied for a few jobs, had a few interviews, but nothing has panned out yet.  He's definitely needed the time off, but as it's occurred to us that we probably can't get a building loan on one income, he's been looking.

We are slowly meeting people, but I've been traveling a lot for work, and our schedule has been very wonky.  Jeff has befriended a carpenter down the road who seems to want to build our house; the carpenter is married to an ex-CSU faculty member whom I'd met years ago and who has mutual friends in the senate.  There is also a woman two doors down who has a little boy who likes to play with S. & L.  The social thing is slowly improving.

I'm getting used to the 88-mile each way drive to work.  It's not a big deal except when I don't leave myself a margin for traffic issues, which don't seem to pop up unless I'm already pushing it.  Everyone thought it was going to be an issue, but it really isn't.

Last week, a 100-foot trench was dug in our property, and we got an informal ok on the seismic/geologic conditions...we can't build exactly where we wanted, but we can build close by.  I've been reacquainting myself with a 3D building program so I can sketch out the terrain: big time-sink, but fun, and we are still thinking about the barn house.  The next step will be the septic percolation test and then water and power.  

Something I've been thinking about lately is this:  How does life change when one gets what one wants?  I remember sitting in my in-laws' dining table in Houston in 2004, trying to explain to them why RIGHT NOW was a good time to sell my house, because it would allow us to pay off most of our lot loan, and why RIGHT NOW was a good time to move West...because we would then be closer to the lot.  I'm sure we seemed crazy: that was ten years ago.  Then, when we lived in the cavernous and dangerous storefront in Oakland while Jeff worked his first social work job and I was a lecturer.  Then the seemingly illogical move farther north to Napa, where we hunted down the elusive short sale and had our kids.  Then, selling it and moving into my mom's house last summer.  We are fucking crazy!  We have certainly sucked it up in pursuit of this goal.  But now we are actually within range of achieving it, and it's a weird feeling.  I feel stable in ways I haven't ever felt stable.  And nuts in ways I hadn't predicted.  I still drive up Skyland Road and feel like I'm visiting my own soul.  Just visiting.  

We are certainly eccentric; this I've also realized.  Our lifestyle is not for everyone.  We've been in a fishbowl for the last four months, and everyone's looked in: my mother, her boyfriend, our neighbors.  They think we sleep too much, don't spend enough time on grooming, are not giving our children enough routine.  They are probably right in some ways, but not right enough for us to recast ourselves as Better Parents.  The girls are happy and strong, and I'm proud of them (and us).  I can't wait to unpack it all in our own space.  

Rebalancing

I'm finally able to take a breath, albeit one full of charcoal smoke in the Vietnamese city of Hai Phong, where I'm giving an ethics exam today.  I left for VN the day our house closed escrow, and since then, thanks to the miracle of online banking, have managed to settle all of the debts we've accumulated over the last six months.  Today, we are debt-free for the first time in years.  It feels really good, so good I just want to get right back into debt!

We found a house plan we like...except it's a barn.  I'm hoping that we can still make it work.

Speaking of barns, my mother's is almost framed in, and we're hoping we'll be in there by the end of July.  That will be a great transition for us, as we're already stepping all over each other in my mother's house.

I don't think I've really dealt with being moved and how it's going to affect my job.  The drive is so long, I'm just kind of in denial (Groucho Marx: "Denial is not a river in Egypt!") about it.  If I could come up with something productive to do in the car (like write a novel!), I would feel a lot better.  I will update on this.

The girls seem to be settling into life in the SC mountains just fine.  Jeff is happy.  I am happy.  Let's hope that next year will go as smoothly as possible.

Meanwhile, I will take a bite of my latest banh mi and visit a few more temples before I bust out of here.

Exiting

The house is sold.  We will have enough money to put in our well and water tanks, our electricity, our septic tank, and get the permits we need to build.  Jeff has given notice at work.  Word has gotten around on my campus that we're heading south.  The girls have liquidated their toy collection in exchange for a trampoline. We have radically downsized our possessions, as well.  My mother has begun work on remodeling her barn, so we can move in at the end of June, when I get back from Vietnam.  We have joined a swim and racquet club in Scotts Valley.  A Prius is coming, which will be my commute vehicle.  I have at least three potential carpool friends from work.  Jeff has applied for a few jobs on both sides of the mountain.  The roses are blooming.  The attic eaves have been vacuumed.  A party is in the works.

I have never been so terrified, but I also haven't been this excited in years.  We are both really ready to leave Napa, even though it has been so good to us, and we have made some good friends.  I'm really going to miss my neighbor Mary, who has supported us in so many ways: she watched our kids, cleaned our house, watered our plants when we were on vacation, made us cakes and brought us flowers from her yard, gave us cigarettes, sewed halloween costumed for the girls, fixed their boo boos; in short, was a surrogate grandmother to us (and to Sophie and Lucy).  I loved sitting in her yard with her, just shooting the shit.  I'm really going to miss her.

I'm also going to miss our poor house, which was in such a terrible state when we bought it; it smelled awful, had been so abused.  We moved so many rocks out of the yard!  We tore down the carport and a rotting, rickety, cinder-block-footed spa enclosure in the back yard.  We sanded down and patched the redwood siding.  We slept on a mattress on the floor when the girls were small.  We had no real kitchen for 18 months.  There wasn't a surface in that house that we didn't touch.  Slowly, its beauty reemerged. 

I had cancer in that house.  Our daughters learned to walk in that house.  I earned tenure in that house.  Jeff studied for his license in that house.  We were patient in that house: that's probably what I'll remember the most.

It's time.  Farewell, Napa!   

Doors Closing, Doors Opening

Moving 87 miles away from one's job, counting on the don't-gotta-be-there-40-hours-a-week nature of academe has a drawback:  if you ever thought about transitioning into academic administration, forget about it.

Say an opportunity comes up to head a new writing center.  Say you are the ideal person for this job.  Say you're a little tired of the 4-4 grind, and would love a bump up in salary.  Say you're getting close to retirement, even, and your pension is calculated by the highest three years of your salary....

Ain't gonna happen when you have a 90-minute commute.  I'm working through this newly closing door.  I may be an academic for life.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining.  I just dislike having fewer options.  It's a byproduct of survival mode, the setting my brain seems to be stuck on.

What I'm trying to do, now, is trying to accept that a new door is opening (or reopening): that of art.  I spend a lot of time avoiding creativity, or channeling it into things like home decor.  Why not write?

Because who wants to hear what a privileged white girl from NorCal has to say?  Aren't we tired of hearing about white people?  I'm tired of hearing echoes of hegemony in everything I read.  I don't think I'm that unique, and I'm certainly lucky.  I'm so lucky I'm starting to get paranoid about safety.  Gross!   Can I write something that anyone could relate to?  Today, I don't think so.  I can't imagine it.      I'm going to work on this.

I need to be a little more friendly towards uncertainty, overall.  Jeff and I have lived our lives in economic lockdown since we moved back to California.  Our moves have been careful and boring.  It's cost me.  Our house is beige inside, with beige trim (speaking of home decor).  It's oppressive.  No more beige.

I'm reading about some privileged white writers and the chances they took.  Some had no choice, due to wars, mental instability, poorly-timed childbirth, whatever.  I have choices; now I have to choose chance.

Update

We're still on schedule to put our house on the market come Feb. 1.  Since I last posted, we have completed the last major renovation on our house, a giant pergola to block out the view of the apartments over the back fence.  Until last week--for the last five years--we could have staged Shakespearean plays for the benefit of our neighbors, who could--and sometimes would--peer down from their bedrooms onto the floodlit back steps of our house.  This was not a selling point; as a matter of fact, it was kind of a deal-killer for us when we bought the house, and one big reason why we got it so cheap.  Unfortunately, it was not an easy or cheap problem to solve, but we have solved it.  I now can look out the back door and not be subjected to this week's NFL game on a wide-screen, coming from an upstairs window.  I could seriously watch a game from my kitchen!

The only thing left to do is paint the attic stairs and dining room floor, the last vestiges of the crazy lady who owned the house before us.  Her dogs started peeing in the corners of the room, and she did nothing to stop them. 

This house was a mess when we bought it, and it looks 400% better now.  Last night we burned the last of the carport that we tore down a few years ago.  

The sweat equity will hopefully pay off.

Other news:  my mother has been informed that we are moving in with her, and the most amazing thing happened!  She started cleaning out her barn, so we can move into it and not be so up in her affairs.  Once the inner walls were knocked down, we saw that we'll have about 600 square feet to work with, which is 600 sq. ft. of our own space, so I'm happy.  All I need is a bed and a table and a bathroom.

We went ahead and had our mountain driveway rocked, which involved tearing out and replacing a damaged culvert (the road would get squishy in the winter--no bueno) and smoothing out a roller-coastery hill that would require a four-wheel-drive to navigate.  The driveway had been a 100-year-old logging road originally, so the work was mostly cosmetic.  At the end of the driveway was an outrageously long mobile home that had not fared well in the 1989 earthquake.  That was crunched up and removed, too.  What a difference!  Behind it we found a wall of ferns!

As Jeff and I marveled, another thing occurred to us.  Now that the MH was gone, the fact that it was surrounded on three sides by VERY TALL, HOUSE-CRUSHING REDWOOD TREES became even more evident.  We had always planned to put our house in that spot, as it has a commanding view of what I call "the meadow."  I imagined being able to look down on my semi-dwarf apple and pear trees as they bloomed their white fluff in the spring...but when I added to this the ever-present anxiety of being flattened...well, we decided to move our building site.

We started imagining every giant tree's deadly radius (about 100 feet), and that pretty much limited us to building at the bottom of the meadow.  This is a place we had never considered, though once we did consider it, the benefits went beyond just not being killed.  The only southern sun we'll hope to get is down there, which makes my dream of having a sun-room possible.  It  might even afford us some solar energy, though I'm not super optimistic about that.  We are, for the record, at the bottom of a north-facing hill, deep in a forest.

Jeff and I took some stakes down there and tried to lay out a 2500 sq. ft. house for kicks.  I don't want a house that big, but whatever.  We will have to remove some smaller trees, including the only two oaks we have, but unfortunately the oaks aren't doing well (oaks in general aren't doing well in California, these days), so I'm willing to cut them down.

If we do build in that spot, the front of the house will be surrounded by California buckeye trees, which I love, even though they smell like sperm (really!) when they bloom.  The septic tank will be downstream from the spring, and the ground is level, so engineering shouldn't be too much of an issue.  There is a beautiful uphill view of two (safely distant) groves of redwood trees.  Yay!

To be continued....      

 

Tilting!

As in, leaning towards...or doing something crazy a la Quixote.  We have a new big secret.  Which isn't really new, but it is big, and will be secret for the next six months.  But I'm going to tell you.

We're going to try to move to Santa Cruz by the end of this school year.

I should have built up to it more, I know, and there is a lot you don't know because I haven't blogged much. In the last year, Jeff and I went through the motions of putting on our big-boy pants by deciding to stay in Napa for the long haul...like until the girls finished grade school.  We were just so exhausted by the cancer, the twins, the job situations, that when our house started becoming a home, we thought maybe we should just quit while we were ahead.  Good loan, good house (mostly), good school, (my) good job, happy kids.  Everything great, right?

Except that all the work on our place in SC was going to crap.  Why we moved from Texas in the first place was fading.  Our dreams of waking up in the forest every morning, of welcoming friends into our sanctuary, of peace and many hot baths...was going down the drain!  I guess I didn't realize how much I was mourning...and so was Jeff.  Jeff's job, in the meantime, was getting more and more miserable, with no real alternative in our small town.  He's looking for a good reason to eject.

It's a big job.  Road, well, power, geological surveys, architects, contractors, drains, etc.  Lots of time and $$$.  I didn't think I had it in me.  I think I was letting my fear defeat me.  And driving my kids to school in the beautiful vineyards, with fucking hot air balloons like some 70's cliche in the distance, wasn't helping.  Now, if we were still suffering in Oakland, it would be a different story.  We are in one of the nicest small towns in Northern California, for my money...but it's not Santa Cruz.

Never mind that the mountains are long overdue for a major fire, and that everything we built could fry.  Never mind that I have a somewhat contentious relationship with my dear mother, whom I love, but who often gives me heartburn.  Never mind that the SC mountains seem to be the haven of the libertarian right these days.

Another factor that's been bugging me is that the public school system in Napa, after fifth grade, absolutely sucks balls.  We were looking at private schools, which cost unspeakable amounts of money per year.  Fries my little Scottish heart to think of that.

Meanwhile, the schools in the mountains are awesome, forever.  All the way up to college.  And they're free.

And our house in Napa is done, and we will make some good money on it (I think), which will get us started on the infrastructure.  And interest rates are so low, we can get a decent construction loan.

And we can live at my mom's house (don't tell her--she doesn't know this yet) while we build.  Yeah, that's a little, difficult detail that this 44 year old doesn't like AT ALL.  However, it would be temporary, and the girls would get to hang with grandma a lot (they don't see her too much), and etc.  I can suck it up.

It's going to be very hard, and my commute will be--87 miles each way.  But dammit, I'm tenured, and I've paid my dues, and I teach a lot online if I want to, so there.  Hence the secret.

I'm telling you because you are my dear friends, and part of the reason for this decision is so we can share this beautiful place with you and your family, for the rest of our lives.

I have no regrets about anything I've done in my life.  I'm proud of that fact.  I think, though, that not doing this would create a regret.  This is the last big hard thing I will push for, will suffer for, will put my marriage and my kids through.  I've had time to think, I've gone 180 degrees the other way, and it's come up wanting.  I'm not a Napa country club type, which was where we were heading.  My penchant for polarfleece and doghair was getting in the way.  I want to chop wood and rake, learn how to take apart the engine on the VW, make apple cider, play the piano, save the redwoods, write some tennis commentary and maybe a memoir.  I want my daughters to run through the big stumpy old growth with large dogs, and dig up artifacts.  I would like to become the area historian, and push for a swim and racquet community center on Summit Road.

Anyway, I'm excited and scared.  We're crazy, but we're going to try and go for it!