OUR HOUSE!! (Part Three)

So this part was delayed a little by a promised trip to Ocean World to (not) pet the sharks. Darcy loves her sea creatures, although we've been living back in Wright Brothers land for the past couple weeks. This round of photos is of the area around the house, which includes a "fairy ring" of redwoods. Michael's already planning a little tree house for Darcy in the middle of it.

Our ring of redwoods! The building behind them is our garage.

Here's a view up the side yard to the house-and-garden area.

The proper front door of the house faces this lawn and garden area, but it doesn't face the driveway, parking, or garage, so like Cima house, it's sort of backwards on the lot.

This is what ends up being the main entrance to the house. Again, like Cima house, it means that you enter through the laundry room. Unlike Cima house, this laundry room is huge and has a built-in desk area along with a ton of cabinets. The cabinets are sort of cream and lime green. Original, of course, but these I actually like.

News Update

Well. Where to start? I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures. Michael has finally broken down and decided that I will never blog again if he doesn't make the pictures easy, so he's installing PhotoShop on the netbook soon. I did use the online photo tool a few times, but it's true that you'd get more pictures if PhotoShop appeared on the desktop.

My job...um, year of service... is great! Today 11 baby goats argued over the right to suck on my fingers and then I got to pet a seven week old adorable ball of fuzz who will grow up to be a great big half-Great Pyrenees livestock-guarding dog. Ok, so I also worked on a brochure about the community gardens, worked on a report for the USDA to wrap-up a big planning grant, sat through an hour and a half conference call, prepared for a Monday to be spent deep in USDA reporting minutiae, and ate freshly-baked bread with freshly-made chevre from those baby goats' mommas' milk. Oh, wait. That last one probably doesn't make you feel sorry for me over my work load, huh?

Seriously, though, I'm enjoying my work a lot so far. I work with good people and I'm working on issues I care about a lot. There's a lot to be done, and I have a to-do list that would be overwhelming if I sat down and really concentrated on everything that needs to be done. Luckily, I'm pretty good at blocking all of that stuff out and concentrating on what I can do for THIS hour in between THAT meeting and THIS conference call.

The first week was somewhat miserable. I started on Tuesday and Darcy was sick. So I stayed home with her until my first event at noon and Michael took the afternoon off with her. When I left, she seemed better than the day before. When I returned at 5 for an hour before an evening meeting, she was a miserable little unresponsive human being and we decided she needed to go to the ER rather than wait for the appointment Michael had made with the doctor the next morning. So I started the meeting waiting to hear from them at the ER. It turned out to be a really bad ear infection and she was home from daycare all week.

Michael took one for the team and stayed home most of the week since I had a full training schedule. He went in a couple early mornings and late afternoons/evenings. It was a tough way to start.

This week has been much better. Darcy has been an absolute star at daycare. She's happy to go in the morning and reluctant to leave in the afternoon. Wednesday, she announced that she wanted a sister when I arrived to pick her up. Thursday, she announced that N and M (the other two kids in her daycare) were her sister and brother. I'm glad she solved that issue for herself, because fictive kin is the only way I foresee her gaining a sibling.

It's actually pretty impressive, once again, how quickly Darcy has adapted to a new situation. She doesn't seem at all unhappy about my working or her going to "school" every day. There are still times when she's unhappy about not being in Cima anymore and it's heartbreaking when she starts listing all the things she misses about Cima while little tears start welling up in her eyes and her lip starts quivering. She listed all the animals she used to get to watch at Cima for Miss L, her daycare provider, the other day, and I thought we were going to get full-on tears there for a while. She held it together.

The impressive thing, to me, is that she is able to articulate very clear preferences about the two places now. We talked about how we wouldn't live in this house forever and that we'd either move to another new place altogether, or if we stayed in Crescent City, that we'd probably try to buy a house that we could paint, etc. She told us she wanted any new house to be "like Cima House". And I thought, really? You want to live in a 25 year old double-wide with doors that blow open, leaky windows, fake wood paneling, no edging on any of the counters, and no neighbors to be seen? But when prompted, Darcy explained that she wants a house without stairs, like Cima House. I think she misses being able to run the full length of the house and have all her toys on one level, but it amazes me that three months after leaving Cima House, she can explain that preference.

But now I'm just rambling 'cause I'm really tired. We had Friday night pizza night with our neighbors tonight and my fellow Crescent City VISTA joined us. We got home not much before 9 and thanks to brownies for dessert, Darcy didn't go to sleep until amost ten. I'm tired. But I've blogged.

Some Catch-Up, With Singing In The Background

Ok, so the singing isn't audible to you, but I'm being serenaded by "It's A Small World" at the top of Darcy's lungs as she tries to keep herself awake instead of taking a nap. It's mostly cute, but she's really LOUD!

So here are some belated pictures of our move and few week in Crescent City. Despite all our warnings about our narrow, sandy, rutted dirt road, the moving company sent pretty much the biggest truck they could (and not because we had so much stuff, either; we filled less than a third of the truck). The driver was a champion, getting the truck over the cattle crossing at the top of our road and backing it down to our gate, but there it stopped.

To get our stuff onto the truck, they loaded it onto a pick up truck and drove it around the house and the backed down our "driveway" to the waiting semi. It was an interesting experience. The driver was telling tall tales about it to the local movers who unpacked the truck at this end. "Oh, you haven't seen anything...you should have seen where they moved from..."

Our couch, going for a precarious ride on top of boxes.

About half-way through the process, we conceded (as we had thought earlier) that Darcy wasn't going to make it for a whole day of moving. Because we were driving both cars to Crescent City, we could and did leave around nap time to check into the hotel in Barstow for the night. She was supposed to nap, but that didn't happen, so as we approached Barstow, I decided that we just couldn't leave without finally visiting the Calico Early Man Site. For those of you who haven't read textbooks about American archaeology, the Calico site is somewhat infamous for getting incredible attention on an international level on very skimpy evidence. In the late 1960s (I think), Louis Leakey was convinced that stone "tools" found at the site were 200,000 years old. He visited the site and was officially the director of excavation until his death. Almost nobody else believes it, but the guide at the one-room visitor center still claims it, as does their brochure, which states that the site was probably occupied by late Homo erectus or Neanderthals, take your pick.

Apparently, they manage to keep excavations going. I think it's mostly donations at this point, coming from true believers. The guide was perhaps the worst I've ever encountered at a Visitor Center. It was as if I tripped a switch as I crossed the threshold and turned on a tape recorder. It didn't matter what answers I gave to his rhetorical questions. It didn't matter when I moved to a new display case. It didn't even matter when Darcy walked back out the door and I stepped into the doorway to keep her in sight. He just kept talking, giving a spiel he's clearly given hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Darcy, with "Camp Leakey" in the background.

It made for a very interesting start to our trip. Of course, it also gave Darcy just enough time to become exhausted, so that she fell asleep less than five minutes before we reached the hotel. So I read a book in the car for over an hour in the parking lot before checking in and watched storm clouds roll in that had pummeled the coast a day earlier, but that never quite managed to rain there.

Retrospective, Part III

No Darcy, but a great sunset as viewed to the east of Cima House.

Darcy in the snow at Cima.

A trip to the Quiet Canyon wouldn't be complete without a stop at the Echo Place.

My laundry line! I'm going to miss it so much! Darcy loves to play in the blowing laundry.

Oh, those weird, alien Joshua tree flowers. This year, found only at Cima House!!

Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.

Water? Who Needs Water?

Apparently, we don't. And we're not on the need-to-know list for getting information about the status of our water supply, which is much more frustrating than just not having water. And that's saying something, because not having water for the past 36 hours and finding out that we won't have it until Monday at the earliest? That's pretty frustrating.

So. We. Are. Moving. To. Baker. Tomorrow. Again.

In case you were wondering, Baker hasn't gotten any better since my last post about the ridiculous temperatures. In Cima, tomorrow's high is supposed to be a glorious and delicious 81. In Baker, it is supposed to be 103.

Which would you prefer?

Sunset After The Rainstorm, In Chronological Order

I took a walk while Michael was putting Darcy to bed and captured the sunset while I assessed the rain damage further up the road. It's really too bad the power lines cut straight through our view to the west. The pictures aren't improved by their presence.

The Aftermath Of The Rain

This picture doesn't really have anything to do with the rain and its aftermath. I just really like this picture of Michael and Darcy on the rocks. We were trying, without success, to meet with some folks for Michael to climb with, and he was scouting for their car.

But this is the aftermath of the rain. This is our washed-out road. Our driveway joins the road on the right hand side of the photograph. Luckily, Kate came by the next day to test our water and very kindly dragged the road and driveway for us. We got more rain that afternoon, but nothing that caused further damage to the road.

During our post-flood walk, Michael and Darcy took advantage of the newly-formed curb for a short rest.

The rain and flood caused some gorgeous patterns in the sand. Our road has a layer of black sand that pops up in a few places; the storm uncovered quite a few patches. We think it's just a very iron-rich sediment of some kind.

And, again, this has nothing to do with the rain. Darcy wanted to go play outside after dinner tonight, but didn't want clothes. Michael took his guitar out and Darcy ran around and around, checking in with "Orville" every few minutes. Just thought I should show the scintillating social scene that is Cima, CA.

The Creatures Of Cima

We see a lot of critters around Cima House, ranging from tiny red ants to coyotes to (finally!) deer. I take pictures of some of them. Not the ants, so much, but I thought I'd share a few pictures that were lying around. Our resident herd of cows was showing off their not-so-brightness in this first picture. They are standing around a spot that had been a small water hole. They were frequent visitors to the water, which is smart. However, this picture was taken two days after maintenance fixed the leaking pipe that had created the water hole and there was no more water. The cows were there for fifteen or twenty minutes anyway. Not so smart.

Here are some quail and a cottontail rabbit enjoying the damp (and therefore somewhat cool) earth left by the outlet from our swamp cooler. We've had up to three cottontails, a jackrabbit, and two families of quail there at a time, jockeying for position.

This spider was on our bedroom ceiling as we were getting ready for bed one night. I took it's picture while Michael retrieved the spider-removal-kit. It lives, I assume, somewhere on the outside of Cima House now. A much better place for it. For scale, the strip going along the left hand side of the picture is the frame supporting the ceiling tiles. It was big. Very, very big.

This is not really a creature or at Cima House, but it's cute. We tried to meet up with some folks a couple weeks ago so Michael could go climbing. We didn't manage to find them, as there were some wires crossed about just where we were all supposed to meet, but we drove down a lot of dirt roads trying. I spotted this sweet bird's nest lodged in a cholla alongside the road and made Michael stop so I could take a picture. The construction was pretty impressive.

Rain Comes To Cima House

Up until yesterday, I'd been feeling slighted by the rain in these parts. I'd watch the storms come through the valley or we'd hear that Cima Dome was getting pummeled, but it would never come here, to Cima House. Then yesterday, we got home from Las Vegas having traveled over roads with sand and gravel washed over them in many places. I had high hopes. They weren't in vain. Our dirt road into Cima House had clearly been a river while we'd been gone.

I was mostly satisfied, but I wanted to see our road when it was a river, not after the water was gone. I'm greedy like that.

So when we started hearing loud thunder and I saw this lovely storm sweeping through the valley, I started hoping that maybe, just maybe, we'd get to see the river.

And so we did! Here's the stream heading down our driveway and out the gate. I went out in boots, under an umbrella to get these shots. My clothes are still very damp.

Our road, looking north from our property. Our driveway enters at the exposed apron.

And our road, looking south from our gate.

I took quite a bit of video, which I'll try to splice together into something presentable and get up in the next few days. I just have to remember how to do it; I haven't made a multi-video film since the one of the belugas in King Salmon.

105 Reasons I'm Glad We Don't Live In Baker Anymore

We went away for a few days for my birthday and got home last night. Late. When we drove through Baker at 10:30 pm, it was 105F.

Enough said, I think.

Think Of It As A Test-Pattern Screen

We are back from our wonderful vacation on North Carolina's Outer Banks and pictures will be forthcoming! Half the pictures are on Michael's work computer currently with him at, you know, work. The other half are sitting waiting for me to lay hands on the card reader so I can get them onto our computer.

In the meantime, here's a wildlife picture from our yard. I noticed a rabbit outside the kitchen window a couple weeks ago and it seemed very wary of something near the cars, so I craned my neck and -- sure enough! -- the rabbit was watching our resident gopher snake glide under the car a few feet away. Now, you might think that the PREDATOR would chase the PREY, but no, this rabbit followed the snake away from the house and under the car and then over to our propane tank to watch it cross the driveway to the other Cima house. Ah, nature! Full of surprises at every turn.

Let's Go Fly A Kite!

The winds of Cima House have been mighty this year and yesterday was no exception. Thomas the Kite took off with virtually no effort to instant thrills. Of course, last night, we got the flip side of the wind, with the house shaking and loud bangs from something loose outside. But for the kite flying (and the drying of two loads of laundry), the morning winds were most welcome.

Darcy loved holding onto the string while Thomas was flying high.

Unfortunately, she wasn't all that attentive to actually holding on.

But Michael always managed to rescue the runaway kite, so Darcy had more opportunities to fly Thomas. She definitely enjoyed the experience and luckily, we have a pretty tree-free section of yard and reliable winds.

Ok, So Sometimes, There Is News In Cima

But why can't it be good?

We officially no longer have a post office. Which, in reality, means there really isn't a Cima anymore either. The postmistress was also the store keep. No post office, no postmistress, no postmistress, no store keep, no store.

They've already installed an outdoor bank of mail boxes, like you'd see at a strip mall or apartment complex. That will be our new "post office". I'm crushed. You can't really visit at a bunch of mail boxes on a pole right next to the road. It's just not the same.

Teutonia Peak

Rocks. To climb.

Rocks. To sit under and snack.

Yes, if there are rocks, Darcy and Michael will climb them. Always. We took a morning hike on the Teutonia Peak trail a couple weeks ago. Part of the motivation was a recent mountain lion sighting about half-way up the peak. It's a rocky, wonderful habitat for mountain lions and it's exciting that one has been seen up there. Not by us, of course. We saw some wildflowers and some cacti thinking about producing some flowers. We had a good time scrambling around rocks and hiking.

And when we got home, we were back with our own carpet of teeny tiny flowers. They really are visible in the picture. Or, they were before I uploaded it to Blogger. You can get a bigger picture by clicking on it and then you're looking for itty bitty purple blooms. They're everywhere, but not actually native. They were introduced a few hundred years ago by those dang traveling Europeans.

And, just in case you missed the wonderful news today -- the EPA has suspended almost all mountain-top mining permits while they study the damage the practice does to the surroudning environment and watersheds!! Our new president might not be doing everything absolutely right, but he's doing some good, good things. Also suspended today? The Bush rules allowing concealed guns in national parks.

Dark As A Dungeon

We recently went to hike around one of the many abandoned mine sites in Mojave National Preserve. I believe this one is Evening Star Mine. There are multiple mine shafts, a few old buildings, and a lot of Joshua trees. And a big rock that smacked the bottom of our car.

Michael and Darcy explored some of the infrastructure while I took pictures. I did not see it happen, but Michael carried Darcy up the first flight of stairs and said they were pretty solid, all things considered. I'm glad I didn't see it.

I know nothing about mining, really, but I assume this was a chute for loading up -- buckets? barrels? carts? -- of ore.

This mine shaft was particularly deep. Michael was demonstrating this fact to Darcy by dropping rocks down the shaft to hear when they hit. We had a difference of opinion about whether we could see the bottom, or if we were just seeing a debris pile being held by fallen beams. Either way, this is deep.

I can't really imagine going to work every day by climbing down ladders into the ground. I know that they were no doubt more stable when they were in use, but even so, it would be a depressing start to a work day.

Michael recently started reading a book about the history of Cima that he really brought home for me, but I've been ignoring it in favor of fiction for a few weeks. It turns out that we don't really live in Cima. We live in a "residential suburb" of Cima called Hockersville. Four families had homesteaded four quandrants that meet at the corner of "our" property where there is a sort of intersection of two dirt roads. They all built their houses on the corners so they would form a small community and the Hockers (two brothers) owned two of the four quadrants, so they were honored with the name. All but our quadrant were still owned by descendents when the book was written and at least two still are, we think.

Three houses are still there (although I think the one on our property was a replacement for one that burned, but I can't remember who told me that) and there's a roof that may be the remnant of the fourth, so I might try to put together a photographic essay about modern day Hockersville.

We're Home

That's pretty much the whole story. We have water. We have power. We have fish alive and well. It's good to be home.

Day Six In Baker

The insanity of Christmas carols at the Gordon celebration.

I got clever and called our house in Cima this morning. I got the answering machine: power is, indeed, restored. With any luck, it came on in time to save the fish. We haven't heard anything about our water, so I'm guessing the part did not arrive yesterday. Now that it's the weekend, I suspect we are sojourning in Baker at least until Monday, more likely Tuesday. Huzzah!

Playdough Is Much More Fun Than ...

... a house without water or electricity! Today, my aunt and uncle were visiting us. We had lunch in Baker and then toured one of the volcanic landscapes in the park. Darcy, Michael, and Nick descended all the way into the lava tube. Ellen and I watched from, let us say, the vestibule. We stopped at Kelso, of course, and then tried to tour Cima House on our way to dinner in Nipton.

No lights. No power. No filter and heater running in the fish tank. No heat in the house. Nothing. Ah, the joys of a house without power or water. After dinner, we parted ways with Nick and Ellen, who headed back to their hotel in Las Vegas, and we drove back to Baker. We got word almost immediately that it wasn't a power problem that had anything to do with the water work, so we called the electric company. According to their recorded message, our power went off at 1 and was turned back on at 8. We're keeping our fingers crossed that it's really true. We don't want two dead fish and a freezer full of defrosted food when we get our water back.

Of course, we haven't had an update on our water situation today. Michael's colleague who let us know about the power hadn't heard that the fix the other day didn't work, so he couldn't help us on that account. With any luck, we'll hear something tomorrow!

The Advantages Of Life In The Middle Of Nowhere

Anyone who has actually talked to me about life in Cima knows the downfalls: no stores, no services, no kids for Darcy to play with, and the recurring issues with our water supply. And, of course, we're currently in the midst of a water supply issue which has us living in Baker again temporarily (with any luck, very temporarily).

But every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and here is ours: people living "near" each other in the middle of nowhere help each other out. Here's today's lesson.

While we are having a water crisis, our post office is having multiple crises of its own. Following the crazy snow, our M-T-W relief postmistress quit. Can't blame her. She's 83 and was snowed in for three days, not even in her own house. Last Wednesday was her last day and so our Th-F-S relief postmistress is doing the whole week for the time being.

Except that she isn't.

Her boss (not exactly sure what position she holds or where she's located) came to inspect the building and (not surprisingly, given that the toilet isn't working, among other deficiencies) told our postmistress not to come to work until further notice. As in, until the owner has brought the building up to snuff.

Today is bookmobile day. It comes every two weeks for about a half hour. Darcy loves it. I had thought about driving down to Cima and meeting it there, picking up some stuff from the house, etc., but then decided that was silly because the bookmobile comes to Baker right after Cima. But I had told our postmistress I'd be there, so I kept trying the post office number to see if I could catch her while she was there for the bookmobile. I did and she told me that I had packages she wanted me to get today given that she doesn't know the next time the post office would be open.

And here comes the advantage: my postmistress lives far from me, but we've gotten to be friends because I take Darcy down there most days to visit. It's not a busy post office. My bookmobile librarian lives very, very far from me, but we're friendly because Darcy and I rarely miss a bookmobile visit and she only gets three or four people per stop.

So my postmistress gave my packages to my librarian and they were delivered to me when we met the bookmobile in Baker. Heartwarming, isn't it?

Of course, there's still the not-so-small issue of how we're going to get our mail until the post office status is resolved. I'm hoping I can walk over to the Baker PO this afternoon and ask if they'll deliver our mail to Kelso Depot, the visitor center where Michael works. They offered and followed through on that when our post office was closed for the snow before Christmas, so I'll just hope they can do it again.