Roaming the Almond Grove Neighborhood

I love to spot a house with colors that sing.  Sometimes house colors make me think of colors I could use in a quilt,  plus I love looking at historic architecture.

On Saturday, Lin and I wandered around the Almond Grove neighborhood of Los Gatos, a historic district of about 40 acres.  Most of the houses weren't painted particularly imaginative colors, but I was seduced by all the well-kept Victorians with spanking white, intricate trim.  There are Craftsman and Mission- style houses mixed in.

I love that the roses and the front door don't match.

An Almond Grove theme:  Lots of white gingerbread, a picket fence, and roses

The rose-piled entrance

Loved the paint job and the detail.

Note the intricate and pristine gingerbread

Ditto

 

A jumbled garden and a zany paint job that reminded me of West Berkeley.

 

Awnings and a wraparound porch

Restful.  I was beginning to feel better about my own (beige)  house.

A pending sale on this one.  The asking price was $3.3 million.

Anyone else think this is over-the-top?  Veering off into adorable?  Time for lunch.

I was immediately attracted to how pristine and well-kept the houses were,  but what would be like to conform to those standards?  All the time on the phone with gardeners, painters, and wood-carvers.  Too much for me.  But it's pleasant to visit.

Life in a Drought

Every time I turn on the tap, I'm aware of water going down the drain if I don't have some kind of plastic receptacle to catch it.  For those who don't live in California, this is what living in a drought feels like:  Guilt.

Therefore,  I'm constantly running up and down the stairs and out to the garden with these:

 It takes a full quarter of cold water to get warm water in my bathroom sink.  In the morning, I skip it.

 At least two trips a day to the garden with kitchen water

Is everyone else doing this?  One friend is letting her potted plants die because she's tired of schlepping water.  Someone else I met has a system of catching gray water by using hoses to carry it to a barrel outside the house. 

Jerry's answer to the drought is to shower only once a week at home and the rest of the time at the gym.  That apparently gets him off the hook from catching water in the shower or bathroom sink.  Intermittently, he frets about the state of the succulent garden, and then ignores it and goes back to work.  To be fair, I flush, he doesn't.

I've been wondering about the effect of soapy water on plants, so this morning  I researched the problem online and here's what I found out:

1. The safest use for household "gray water" is to flush toilets.  This is because gray water can contain "food residue and other organic matter" that can attract  rodents or cause illness, and it shouldn't be used it on the edible parts of plants.  Soap is also an issue (see below).

2.  In an "emergency" (we're in one!),  you can use gray water on plants, but there's gray water and then there's gray water.

Clean water collected while you're waiting for hot water can be used safely on plants, no problem.

Gray water with soap is another story.  Plants can be damaged if there's chlorine bleach or boron in the water.  I'm getting around this by not using water that might have traces of Soft Scrub with Bleach.  The washing machine is out of the picture for now, although phosphates in detergent are okay.

3.  Water softeners are another issue.  See link below for more information.

4.  Using wash water on potted plants  isn't a good idea, because they have restricted root zones and get more of a dose of whatever soap/bleach/boron there might be.

Corrections and other tips welcome!

Here's a patch of baby tears I've been nursing along with warm-up water and whatever's left over from cooking vegetables.  Fortunately, this is right outside the kitchen door.

The roots are never supposed to dry out, according to the nursery man. Wunnerful.

No lawn, but look at the rest of it.  We do have drip irrigation, but it's been dialed back.

 There's more information here: http://vric.ucdavis.edu/pdf/fertilization_Householdwastewater.pdf
and here: http://www.graywatergardening.com/Graywater_for_Gardens.html

Stylish Lunch in a Former Kindergarten Room

For a long time, I've known that one of my pool pals, Kate, lived in a converted school in Oakland, more specifically, in what had been the kindergarten room.

This has always sounded intriguing, and a few weeks ago in an untamed moment (oh, how we cut up in the pool, we who range in age from 65 to 87!), I suggested she invite the rest of us to a potluck lunch at her place.

Margaret, Joy, and Anne readying the food

She agreed, assured that she wouldn't have to cook one damned thing, because cooking is not something she likes to do. (Nor mine; I took a bakery cake.)
 
Reader, if you want to get a fantasy going about living in a sophisticated loft-like space, you need to visit Kate.  Her condominium reflects her whims and taste and imagination in a way that's refreshing and seductive. 

The huge main room is full of light,  although my iPhone photos don't show it.

The main room, formerly a classroom, opens on to a terrace

Beautiful light

Looking the length of the room toward the kitchen, with a glimpse of one of two loft areas. Note the hanging woven shade on the left.

Behind shade:  the bedroom

Looking the other direction, toward the fireplace, with a long scroll that shows off the height of the ceilings.The pendant lights are original (1927), and the former blackboards and bulletin boards are painted over and outlined in white.

 

 The fireplace with its collection of blue-and-white pots

Art leaning up against the former blackboards

 

Mirror-lined stairway to the loft

Catwalk (?) in the loft

\

 View down to the great room

Kate's lived here for 18 years, in a spot that feels so apart from urban life, and yet it's only a few blocks to the 580 freeway and Pill Hill.

Door to the terrace

It's all about pots and a huge oak tree overhead

The exterior of those windows

And the lunch:

 Anne, Margaret, Val, and Kate

Kate, Joy, and Betty

 

Rose in a snifter

I was so taken with this place that I suggested Kate rent it out for weekends--starting with each of us, of course.

Impersonating a Cruise Passenger

Yah, that's us.  Jerry took one look at this picture and said, "That's not us.  We weren't standing in front of the boat."

"It's photo-shopped!" I said.

He took another look.

"The ship is way out of scale."

Life with a (literal) scientist.

So, we're back from our trip to Costa Rica and Panama,  have been for two weeks, during which I dealt with taxes (federal and property, awful), renewing my driver's license, and celebrating my 65th birthday--if you haven't done this, let me tell you it is traumatic.  Also, filling out my retirement papers.

Back to the photo.  We were stopped just after we boarded, mid-sprint to the laundry room with a week's worth of dirty clothes, cranky and tired.  I won't say our smiles were photo-shopped, but they were definitely on command.  Later, we saw the photo and bought it for $25, which Jerry thought was nuts.

But our entire approach to cruises is nuts.  This was our third cruise, and once again, we shied away from being social and ate only with each other, often in our stateroom.  During the days at sea, when other passengers threw themselves on chaises in the full-blast tropical sun, we were in our room working on projects.  We didn't gamble or play bridge or bid at an art auction or go to workshops on how to avoid wrinkles (no full-blast tropical sun?).

 The afternoon tea cart.  We did participate in that.

I cannot lie: the food was good

For us,  the ship was a way to get from Point A (Calderas, Costa Rica, after a week of independent travel) to Point B (Miami) and go through the Panama Canal (I recommend), while having really nice meals served to us.

Otherwise, it was boring, and it felt like high school, except it's rich Texas ladies, not mean girls, who checked me out from head to toe. Dubiously.  (Yes, this happened, and I am way too old for it.)  

Of course, there were lots of other people, perfectly nice, but every time I dipped into conversation with a random person, I felt I was from another world.

First question in any shipboard conversation:  "Where are you from?"


Twice my answer stopped the conversation cold.  One of the Texas ladies looked at her shoes, at a loss for words.

So, we came home and cancelled our trip to Europe in August, half of which involved a Baltic cruise.  There were other reasons for cancelling it, financial ones, but the strain of impersonating a cruise passenger figured into it.

Lots of reading and napping

By the time we got to New Orleans, I was delirious to see people in a museum café dressed in an off-hand, interesting way.  No resort clothes!   I spied a New York Times on a table and rushed to read it, even though it was three days old.










 It was a good trip, though, with some truly memorable moments:

 

Hiking in Costa Rica

Touring the Biomuseo in Panama City, designed by Frank Gehry

Transiting the Panama Canal

All fun!  More on those.

But the strain of impersonating a cruise passenger--meaning, delighted to be hanging out in a sea-bound resort, complacent about the luxury, wanting to small-talk with strangers--it's too much for this old Berkeley bag.

Will I ever learn?

Outta Here! Just a little more hand-wringing...

We're outta here on Thursday--bound for Costa Rica and the Panama Canal, with stops in Panama City, Puerto Limon (CR),  New Orleans, Key West, and Miami.  A land trip for the first week and then a cruise.


I'm packing, meaning  trying to talk myself out of taking so many clothes. Sometimes I've done primitive sketches in my travel notebooks (often involves Crayolas) of the clothes I've taken on a trip, and that's been  helpful.  What did I wear all the time?  What was dumb to take? (Lots.)

 Note the number of black tops.  It gets boring.

For me, there are three major categories to cope with pre-trip:

1. Paper.  This includes torn-out pages of guidebooks, maps, vouchers, receipts, etc.  That all goes into a big manila envelope. As we work our way through the stack during the trip, I toss as much paper as I can bear to (you never know!)

Then there is a minutely-detailed itinerary, which I carry in my handbag.  The one for this trip is 2-1/2 pages.  Hotel addresses, phone numbers, room rates, flight numbers,  reservation numbers, shore excursions, you name it.

 The envelopes for this trip

Envelope for a past trip:  they get pretty beat-up

2.  Electronics.  Batteries, chargers, cords.  I'm taking a minicomputer, Walkman, cell phone, and camera.  I keep chargers and cords in this thing, which is really meant for jewelry, of which I take almost none:

I used to throw them all in a Ziploc bag, where they got tangled up.

4. Clothes.  See above.  First step is to wash a bunch of stuff, then try it on and see if the waist fits.  If not, no-go.

I'm going to be posting about our trip on Travelpod.com    If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably get an e-mail reminder with a link to the latest post.   Or e-mail me, and I'll put you on the list.  Or go to www.travelpod.com and type in "LRandal."  Or don't bother (really, you have my permission to skip the whole thing!).

Au revoir!