No News Is Good News

I would write here that the boy is fine, he is cold in Colorado and found a job and is happy and healthy but I don’t really know since the sum total of the communication has been through a brief phone call because he was in Costco at the time, and texting about our adopting a new dog because truth be known, we really miss his dog.

So we’re getting one of our own.
My husband is creating a web site already for the dog.
My husband is very happy.

I worry about the new furniture but at least we have yet to replace the carpets.
Good idea on our part.

I pick up the dog tomorrow.  Are we re-feathering the nest?  Possibly.

Filling empty space

Talk about the Feng Shui working as quickly as it can, you know the idea that once you clear out space in your life then new opportunities can flow in?

We cleaned out the house on Saturday the same day our son left. We bought a new bathroom shower curtain, towels for us, dryer balls, new, nice sheets for the now guest room and I set up the creative table – I need a lamp -  to work on projects in the just moved son’s old room. On  that same day I was offered a chance to run a workshop for a writer’s conference – on a Caribbean cruise.  3L, my publisher,  will pay for the cruise and the conference fee and I pay for the flight to get to Florida.  How excellent it that?

I’m excited.

I do feel lighter with our son launched into something different and I like having the house back.  And then, while decorating the Christmas tree (because we decorated for the holidays over the weekend as well)  I found his red truck ornament and I cried.

Apparently not recovered yet.

Moving Day

It is moving day, we are told. The house is in shambles, the detritus is scattered from the far upstairs room all the way down to the far from empty garage.  We suspect we are the new keepers of the drum set as it has only been half packed. We are also the lucky recipients of  one too small wet suit, weight belt,  an open package of baking sugar, the current girl friend’s old clothes, a half dozen tiny critter cages with pink lids, large critter tanks that make us grateful the critters are moving with the child.

That our child is not moving the way WE would move should come as no surprise. But at our ages, we had no idea that a whole week of carefully NOT SAYING ANYTHING and worse NOT HELPING, is exhausting.

Good thing the house will be quiet next week.
We are told.

A Real Empty House

I have not been writing much.  The 50,000 word write for NaNoWriMo took a great deal of energy and focus – and that’s good, don’t get me wrong!  And I “won”  which is an honor and I am basking in the glory of it all as we speak.

However, as soon as I accomplished that goal, my oldest son, who has been sitting on my couch for the last six months, “suddenly” decided to move to Colorado with his girlfriend.  Now I have many friends who, upon turning 18, loaded up their car with everything they owned in the world and promptly drove across the country – east, if they grew up in the west and west if they grew up in the east.

And it didn’t seem all that spectacular or odd. Or dangerous or even difficult. I own an copy of On the Road, really, how hard can this be?
Hard if you are the parent and the child will not plan, organize and execute exactly the way you would, have, done, are doing.

So it’s taken all my energy to not say something – anything.  It takes all my energy to not help.  It takes all my focus to not cry out, but you’re so young!  He is not young.

And adventure is most important.
We will keep everyone informed.

Dinner in a Bag

My husband handed me a flyer for a dinner business that provides meals for busy women to just pick up and serve the family.

The gourmand named business offered a range of dinner options for about $25.00 and I thought, well, dinner for three (it said up to six, but does anyone follow that?), for $25.00 isn’t so bad (recalling that I have a friend who can feed her family of five for $25.00 a week, or something like that). So I called, and ordered up a dinner that sounded exotic, why not?

Now in my head I thought that dinner meant the food was ready, prepared and the only work on my part was to slide the tray of food-like items (discreetly covered in foil) into the oven and turn it on. (I know that part now, the oven has to be turn on for the things in the oven to get hot).

When I arrived to pick up my dinner the lovely owner handed me a large zip lock bag filled with raw ingredients and a recipe tapped to the slippery surface. Raw food? I’m paying extra and driving out of my way, for raw food? And so close to Chili’s?

“It’s really easy.” She encouraged me gesturing with bag filled with something that looked like sauce. Really easy, if I had a dime for every time . . . never mind.

I must have looked suitably shocked, mostly because I avoid contact with raw food as much as possible.

“Just cook it up”. She persisted. For $25.00? For $25.00 I have to find a PAN and SAUTE something? (I believe they were onions) for that I could buy one of those onions at Safeway – for less and you know, do something with it.

I accepted the squishy bag, paid the nice woman, dragged it home and stored it in the squishy raw food section of the refrigerator. I was not happy. The raw food situation haunted my afternoon. I was almost unable to nap.

When my husband arrived on the scene, I handed over the bag of raw food and fled. He dumped the raw food into various pots and pans and declared, “This is really easy, I just cooked it up.”

And we had a convert. The dinner was delicious and served three. We had to add rice to the dish, so it wasn’t all that inclusive.

However tonight we’re eating at a real restaurant, where the food is cooked and served with a flourish. And the dishes cleaned by another person far out of view of the dining room. I like it better that way.

Wine country before it was wine country

I love to drive through Dry Creek Valley and think of what it must have been like to live there before the traffic and the hype.
My grandmother grew up here in the heart of the wine country well before it became the wine country.

The family was of German ancestry. To that end, Chester VonGraffen was unencumbered with superfluous emotions like affection and love.
Apparently the Von Griffin parents finally produced the desired boy child, but he was sickly (that word covered a multitude of situations at the turn of the last century) and the child died in infancy. His parents never recovered from the loss.  My aunt and grandmother were constantly reminded that it was too bad they lived and the boy died because they were just girls.

Chester VonGraffen, as did many farmers of that day, often increased his share of the land by tossing trash, like old cars, into Dry Creek to diverted the flow of the creek a foot or so around the object – a car in one case – and thus increasing the land mass. The theory was that metal would gradually deteriorate and disappear. No one thought anything of it. People had enough patience to wait out the disintegration of a vehicle into arable land.

My great aunt and grandmother stayed in the valley through the depression and Second World War. My grandmother escaped her parents through marriage and moved down the road.  By default then, my aunt had to care for the cranky German parents until their deaths.  My aunt then took over the farm, organized the hired hands was one of the largest producers of hops (to make beer) in the country during world war two. On her farm, my grandmother raised walnuts, prunes, three girls and a boy.

While my great aunt and grandmother did not waste much time communicating, my great aunt welcomed visits from her only nephew. My dad remembers riding his bike between his parent’s farm on Westside road and his aunt’s place.  The roads between the two farms would have been rather empty of traffic. Trees lined the road opening every hundred yards to long views of the Dry Creek Valley. Today every foot of the valley is planted in vineyards.

My dad and his sisters attended Felta School, which was a one-room schoolhouse, and is now a pre-school. When the creek flooded, they took a boat to get to class, floating with ease over what were fields and roads.  It probably happened once, but still, what a good moment, to sail to school.

The VonGraffen property is now in transition; at one time it was the site for the first winery of Gary Farrell.  The Bramkamp property is the home of Naomi Brilliant of Roshambo winery. Her grandfather bought it from my grandfather right after the war.

Real Estate quote of the Day

The prices of houses seem to have reached a plateau, and there is reasonable expectancy that prices will decline.

Time Magazine, 1947

Real Estate Quote of the Day

Houses cost too much for the mass market. Today’s average price is out of reach for two-thirds of all buyers.

Science Digest, 1948

Everything is on sale!

You know how those high heel red velvet pumps look much better at 20% off? And if they are on clearance, they feel much better too!

That’s the housing market. I’m working with a buyer who can spend about $450,000. That amount used to buy a tract home, now it buys 2,900 square feet and a view. This is the time to find the right home, and find something affordable. If the shoe fits, buy it!

Death Revokes the Offer

From the novel Death Revokes the Offer –
This is what I do when I’m not selling real estate.
The book is available on Amazon
Chapter 1 – Part 27

Since salad is never enough, I was already hungry by the time I got home. I pulled out a carton of Phish Food and thought about the murder. Why? Why would anyone shoot Mr. Smith and then just walk away? Well, they walked away, so they wouldn’t be caught, I know that. But nothing had been taken or even disturbed, Hillary did more disturbing just in her brief search around the house. And what was she looking for?

And why not let the children inherit? Why sell?  I mean Hillary wasn’t all that lovely and nice, but that’s no reason to cheat the kids from a considerable tax break.  Well, okay, maybe that was a good enough reason.

Mr. Smith had no other assets. Had he given it all away?  Had he been blackmailed over those paintings?  Had the blackmailer killed him when he couldn’t pay? No, that sounded like a badly plotted movie and blackmailers don’t kill; I know that from TV, they want the cash flow to continue.

The Ben and Jerry’s finished, I fixed some dinner.
Like you’ve never gone through a whole carton of Phish food in one sitting, or in my case, standing.