Waiting for the other shoe

So it's happened, our house is sold. Our poor foreclosed-upon rental house was sold at auction on Monday (postponed from Friday) -- to the bank that held the loan, which is what my attorney-niece told me would probably happen.

So now we wait for the other shoe to drop, that shoe being our eviction notice. It is possible that the shoe will be some other form of contact, such as a letter from the bank demanding that we start paying it rent. We'd love that shoe! We'd love to go back to paying rent! But it probably won't be that shoe. It will probably be the eviction notice shoe, at which point we will have 90 days until we have to move out. The bank may argue that the 90 days began on the day of sale, which would mean we'd have to be out in mid-January. I don't know. We'll just have to see.

The immediate issue is what to do about the tortoises, who are just about ready to hibernate. We don't want them to go deep down in their burrows and go to sleep, since they will not want to come up again in mid-January when we might move.

Instead, we have banished them from their pens and are letting them roam around the yard all day. This is OK because it's not too hot during the day and not too cold at night. During the day they find shady spots to rest in. At night they burrow down in a pile of pine needles, under a tumbleweed, in a corner of the yard. When it gets really cold at night, we will put them in boxes, probably in the garage.

OUR ALTERNATIVES

As I see it, we have five alternatives, not all of which are under our control. I suppose that means they aren't true alternatives.

1. Move to wherever Rocket Boy gets a new job (not under our control, since as yet Rocket Boy does not have a new job).

2. Move back to Boulder and live off the income from our rental houses while we search for work. It would be vastly cheaper for us to live in our own house than to rent a house anywhere else. There's the health insurance problem though.

3. Stay in this house (not under our control, depends on what the bank and any future owners want to do).

4. Rent another house in Ridgecrest. Desperately annoying to have to sign a new 12-month lease, especially if Rocket Boy suddenly got a job offer elsewhere.

5. Buy a house in Ridgecrest. Prices are so low right now that we could end up with a mortgage payment lower than our rent. Then, whenever Rocket Boy got another job somewhere else, we could rent out the house for more than the mortgage payment. But it would mean yet another house to pay insurance and property taxes on. Plus we'd probably need to sell a house to get enough money for a good down payment, and it would take a while to sell a house, especially since they have tenants living in them.

Waiting, waiting.... waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Busy October

We are deep into October, and the number of local activities available to enjoy is mounting. This past week was quite overwhelming for us, for personal reasons -- maybe I'll blog about that later and maybe I won't. But when the weekend comes, we are always ready to go out and about, partly because it's so difficult to stay home with the boys.

Isn't that sad? Not at all how I had envisioned parenthood. Here they are three and a half, still running roughshod over us. This morning they got into mischief before we dragged ourselves out of bed. When Rocket Boy got up (I have a cold, so was allowed to sleep in a little), he discovered that they had spilled yogurt all over the family room -- on the tinker toys, on the carpet. Why? Why? Why? They really do know better than that.

They just have so much energy, and when you put them together, that energy grows exponentially and they do crazy stupid things.

Anyway, so on the weekends we go out and about.

This weekend we had several activities to choose from. Saturday we decided to go to the Centennial of Naval Aviation Festival at Armitage Airfield at China Lake. This free event would have been a lot of fun, except that it was held in Ridgecrest on a very hot day. No, it wasn't 116, but it was 96. Fortunately, many of the displays and stuff for kids were in or near the gigantic airplane hangar:

But unfortunately, some of the best stuff was outside:

I don't think this picture conveys how hot it was. There was a plane that you could climb into and sit in the cockpit, and Baby A wanted to do that. So we waited in line for, oh, an HOUR, in the sun. I know, it's a dry heat, and there was even a bit of cloud cover (but not over the sun). But after a few hours we were all just a wreck. People were not meant to live in places like this. Yet we do, we do.

Today Rocket Boy and I were both longing for something different, so we went to Tehachapi, which is in the mountains (20 degrees cooler) and has apple orchards. Here we are at Pulford's Appletree Orchard, where we bought a peck of apples (all different varieties), and the little bottle of apple cider that Baby A is holding. It's not Michigan -- I have VERY fond memories of going to apple orchards near Ann Arbor -- but it was still fun.

I'm kind of on an apple kick right now. Fruit is free on Weight Watchers, remember, and an apple a day helps keep the digestive tract healthy. Last night I found a blog all about apples: http://adamapples.blogspot.com. Though he's in Massachusetts and they seem to have somewhat different apples there. Today we bought an apple that he hasn't reviewed yet -- Gold Blush. Looking forward to trying it!

After the apple orchard, we headed home, but since it was only about 3 pm, we decided to stop in California City, where they were having a Renaissance Festival.

I don't know, I guess I've never been a big fan of this kind of thing. Dressing up in Renaissance costumes, going around saying "Prithee" and "Sirrah" -- it just kind of leaves me cold. Except in California City, where it was in the 90s. Ha ha.

Honestly, I was expecting it to be a really pathetic fair, and it wasn't. It looked very nice. Lots of vendor booths, nonstop "entertainment," food and drink. We arrived about 90 minutes before it ended -- it had started Saturday morning -- so there weren't many spectators left and the whole thing was kind of winding down. But it looked as though it had been a very successful fair, or should I say faire.

I don't know, a Renaissance Festival in the middle of the Mojave Desert -- it just seemed weird to me.

But I was tired. We played on the jungle gym for an hour, watched some belly dancing performed by women whose bellies I would rather not have seen, but oh well, and then left before "Whack a Knight" began, because Baby A said he did not want to see any whacking.

I'm so glad tomorrow is Monday.

RIP Steve Jobs

I've been thinking about Steve Jobs all week, ever since his death was announced. The media coverage has been amazing -- even the Ridgecrest paper printed a big article about him. A day or two after he died I was reading articles and blogs (assembled courtesy of Google News), and people kept theorizing about WHY everyone was so upset about his death, as if it were surprising and puzzling.

At first this annoyed me. If I want to feel sad about someone's, anyone's, death, surely I have that right.

But finally I conceded that it is an interesting question. There probably isn't another CEO on the face of the earth who so many people would be so sad to lose. Most celebrity deaths cause me only a moment's pang. And I don't feel sad about Steve Jobs because he created my favorite toys. I don't own an iPod (though someday I'll break down and buy one), an iPhone, or an iPad (though I'd like to). I did once have a Mac, but no longer.

It is scary, though, to have lost one of the leaders of modern technology. I sometimes worry about where we're going with "all these computers" (I'm quoting the former director of my former workplace) and apparently somewhere in the back of my mind I was counting on Steve Jobs to help lead us safely through these woods. Now it's up to Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the guys who run Google. I'm not reassured.

I have more personal reasons for feeling sad too. I've been able to identify a couple of them.

First reason: Steve Jobs lived in a house in Palo Alto that was walking distance from my mother's house (though in a much nicer neighborhood). His house was important to my family because before he bought it, it was owned by the family who owned the Golden Retriever who -- I think this is right -- sired our Golden Retriever's puppies back in 1971 or so. I hope I've got that right. The dog's name was Jorn, and I *think* he was the father of Penny's puppies. Either that or he was Penny's father. Gad, I hate my sieve-like memory! Anyway, he was a nice male Golden Retriever and he lived in Steve Jobs' house with his family before it was Steve Jobs' house. And for years, every time I walked or drove by that house with my mother or a sister, one of us would comment that it was Jorn's house. Then Steve Jobs bought the house -- when, I don't know, in the 1980s? 1990s? -- and after that, every time I walked or drove by it with my mother or a sister, one of us would comment that it was Steve Jobs' house, but it used to be Jorn's house.

I remember that Steve Jobs bought the house next door to his, tore it down, and planted the lot with fruit trees and cosmos. Ah, the things you can do when you're rich. One article I read referred to his "modest" home in Palo Alto, obviously COMPLETELY missing the point about what it means to live in Palo Alto. Why would you want a colossal brand-new mansion in a fabulously exclusive gated community if you could live in a delightful old house in Palo Alto, enjoy the walkable streets and the excellent schools and libraries -- and knock down the house next door to make your yard bigger?

So anyway, remembering Steve Jobs' house is all about remembering my mother, and all the walks we took together in Palo Alto. Losing him, I somehow lose her just a little bit more.

Second reason: From 1983 to 1988, after graduating from college, I worked as a typesetter in Palo Alto for a young woman (10 years my senior) named Lauren Langford. One story that keeps being told is the one about how Steve Jobs studied calligraphy at Reed and that's why the Macintosh had such beautiful fonts, at a time when other computers were basically doing dot matrix. Well, I remember when the Mac came out and graphic designers started doing type with it. We at Langford Typesetting were HORRIFIED by how ugly Macintosh type was. We had an enormous typesetting machine that printed out gorgeous type. We were snobs and proud of it.

Lauren died young too -- she was 50. She fought her cancer (first breast, then ovarian) almost till the end, but in the end she went peacefully, dying at home surrounded by friends and loved ones. When I read about Steve Jobs dying peacefully at home, I remembered Lauren. That's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? You fight and fight, but at the end you finally just let go.

There are more connections I could make. All the people I know who went to Reed College. All the people I knew who worked at Apple in the old days. Heck, anyone who lived in the Bay Area at any time over the past 35 years can probably connect their lives with Steve Jobs' life.

And at the end of the day, the fact is, he was so young, with a young family. I'm sad for them all. Also very thankful that I get to go on, live another day in Ridgecrest.

Noah's Ark

Fall is a busy time in this area, but this particular weekend there isn't much going on. So we weighed our options and decided it was time to visit the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and see Noah's Ark, an amazing 8000-square-foot "installation."

Before we left, I gave the kids a quick rundown of the Bible story. They might have heard it at daycare, but I was pretty sure they'd need a refresher course. So here I go, and I realize I have no idea how to tell the story. Do I tell it as if it really happened? Kind of the way we tell them about Santa Claus??? Or do I go the straight Biblical route and say "Once upon a time God decided he was mad at all the people except a man named Noah..." oh no, I could just imagine the weird questions that would follow. I decided to leave God out altogether. Instead I said, "Once upon a time there was a big storm and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and made a big flood, but a man named Noah built a big ship called an ark and he let all the animals go on it with him, and they floated on the seas until the rain stopped and then they all got out. And we're going to a museum to see Noah's Ark." I'm sure that made no sense at all.

The Skirball Center is 140 miles south of us. You can't just walk into Noah's Ark -- you buy tickets for a particular time. So we had to figure out when we could get there. Oh, the endless joys of living in Ridgecrest. At 9:00 this morning I looked at the website and decided we could be there by 1:00 (4 hours), so I bought 4 tickets for that time. Then we packed the car and left at about 9:40. Two and a half hour drive, roughly -- we got to the Skirball just after noon.

The Skirball is just down the road from the glorious Getty Museum, and I was expecting it to be similar. I realized after we arrived that that was silly. The Getty is colossal, grander than all other museums. The Skirball is on a more reasonable scale. For example, we were able to park about 20 feet from the elevators. We went up to the main lobby and found the restaurant and food cart. Since we had time before our tour started, we bought sandwiches and ate a nice lunch in the outside courtyard. Boos were very bad: among other things they took off their sandals, walked on the rim of a pond (and got yelled at by a guard), and wouldn't eat the nice lunch. It was not an auspicious beginning.

Then it was time for us to go to Noah's Ark. We were given large stickers to wear that showed our time slot (you can only stay for 2 hours, so the staff needs to know when you went in) and the boos did NOT want to wear the stickers. I had to chase Baby A up and down a staircase to put his on. Rocket Boy tried putting Baby B's sticker on his back, which made him mad. Meanwhile all the other families headed for Noah's Ark were peacefully putting on their stickers, no worries. Sometimes I hate my children. Finally we got the stickers on. Here we are on our way to the gallery, all wearing our stickers.

I had studied the Noah's Ark website extensively beforehand, but still really had no idea of what to expect. One thing I read that kind of bugged me was that the animals in the ark are made of recycled materials -- flyswatters, piano keyboards, boxing gloves, you name it. That sounded too PC to me -- I wanted true-to-life animals.

OK, let's just say right up front that I was wrong, the animals are amazingly wonderful, and the whole Noah's Ark exhibit is simply fabulous. I was so impressed. There are a series of rooms -- the first room is the outside of the ark, the next two rooms are inside the ark, and the last room is a place to do crafts -- we didn't spend any time there. We spent the most time in the first room, where you can turn wheels and pull levers to make thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. Now remember, Baby A is afraid of storms, particularly lightning. This room was so good for him! He spent so much time working it, working out his fears. Here are the boys manipulating the rain machine.

In the second room there are puppets, little rooms to crawl in, and a giant toy Noah's Ark with lots of little animals inside. The boys played with that for a long time.

The third room had a sort of rope ladder thing that kids could climb into and then walk all around up above the adults. This photo shows Baby A walking down out of it and you can barely see Baby B up on the second level with the penguins.

My favorite part of the whole thing was the animals -- those animals made out of recycled and repurposed materials that I thought I wouldn't like. They're incredible! I couldn't stop taking pictures of them. Here's the lion and the lamb, at the door between the third and fourth rooms.

No matter how much of a pain it was for us to get there and back -- and believe me, it was a pain -- the trip back home was AWFUL -- this exhibit was worth seeing. If you happen to find yourself in Los Angeles with a couple of hours to kill, I HIGHLY recommend it, especially if you have a little person or two along. SO FUN.