House on Bear Mountain

The dog has been getting kicked out of the bedroom at night lately. He's an old dog, and likes nothing better than sleeping flipped over on his back, on the thick dog bed next to our bed, now that we all live on one floor. He spends most of the day there, when he's not following Giselle around the house--the only thing the dog likes better than his bed is Giselle. I will grant that he has good taste in this.

But the dog also likes to pace, and to fluff that bed endlessly, most of the night. The pacing I understand. When I was a temporary stressed-out insomniac, I paced too. What else is there to do at that hour? But I didn't have those long nails that scrape across the hardwood floors here in the Bear Mountain House (floors that go everywhichway depending on the room you're in), and I wasn't pacing around a space that echoed quite the same way. The pacing bounces back off the high beamed ceiling again and again until it's a layered cacophony of pacing, s…

It's about a half hour down the road--you wind out Bear Creek Road around a few S turns, and then head off onto Summit Road. Summit west of Route 17 is windy and narrow, down to one lane for a lot of its length, and it passes through a vineyard or two and an alpaca farm (where the hay is stored in an old shipping container), low hanging trees and a tree farm that's closed at the moment, but that has a set of train tracks that parallel the road for a minute or two and made the kids wonder.




Then it's down 17 south, to the coast. We took the kids here their first weekend, part of our California Brainwashing work: 'California has more toy stores than Virginia!' 'Wow, this California Mexican food is the best I've ever had!' (It was.) A trip to Powells Candy store in Los Gatos. You get the idea.



The kids were in a dreamy mood--the fuzzy aura of travel, where all the worries are taken care of by someone else, enveloped them, and we let them take money up …

I've been wanting to post a picture of the view here for some time, and now that the stuff has arrived, including the camera and the cables to hook it into the Mac, I can.

Here's Monterey Bay, taken this morning, looking south from the deck of the house. The dark blur in the background is Monterey, the blue in the middle there is the water, and below are the closer mountains. At night, the whole coastline is dotted with lights all the way out to the end.

I remember the movie from my childhood, probably from a Saturday afternoon sprawled on the criss-cross brown & beige carpeted floor in the TV room: Giant Ants! In black and white! They were mutated from atomic testing somewhere in the southwest, and were attacking people. And who could blame them--if I got myself mutated I'd probably bite someone too.

It comes to mind as we prep the house for the market here, because we're having a lot of conversations about "Them." Not the ants, but those mystical future buyers of the house, a nebulous "Them,' with preferences and predilictions that we're trying to imagine and cater too without much evidence based in anything but hearsay. "They" clearly wouldn't like our downstairs bathroom with the rich dark blue paint: so it becomes beige. "They" certainly wouldn't put up with a master bath as cluttered as ours was, not to mention the (ok, I'll admit it--not our best color ch…

The Santa Cruz Mountains are a region of large biological diversity, encompassing cool, moist coastal ecosystems as well as warm, dry chaparral. In valleys and moist ocean-facing slopes some of the southernmost coast redwoods grow, along with Douglas fir, coast live oak, Pacific madrone, wax myrtle, and California bay laurel. There do exist several small and isolated stands of old growth forest, most notably at Big Basin, Henry Cowell Redwoods and Portola Redwoods State Parks. At higher elevations and on sunny south slopes a more drought-resistant chaparral vegetation dominates: manzanita, California scrub oak, chamise, and chaparral pea. Spring wildflowers are also widespread throughout the range.

The area welcomes a tremendous number of species of birds. (see: bird list). California Mule Deer are common, as are gray squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons. Foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions also inhabit the region but are rarely seen. Rattlesnakes are also habitants, mostly in the…

I was down at the apartment we own tonight, taking keys from one set of tenants and passing them on to the next ones, and I was thinking about how strange it is right now: we'll be moving out of the house we own, to go and rent someone elses house, all the while owning another piece of property that *we* rent out to someone else. It feels somehow like a constantly running shell game, where the ball under a shell keeps moving and you never know exactly where it calls its home. Here's a picture of the rental property, featuring the One Dead Bush out front. The bush is gone now, but for awhile it was the only way for me to identify the place from it's neighbors when I drove by it. Strange, too: to own a place you will never know well.

The new tenants seemed nice--two younger guys striking out in an apartment, a UHaul they were struggling to find a place to park (since there's no good place to do it--in the alley, you have to walk the stuf around to the front since the…

And, of course, the chickens!

Some pictures of the raised garden beds, at Giselle's request.

OK, more pictures! These are the views from our actual driveway.

Lastly, for tonight, some pictures of the ocean. I drove Route 1 all the way up to Half Moon Bay, where I hung out with this horse for a bit, before jumping onto Route 92 back over the mountains, and then taking the freeway back to Los Gatos where I had an awesome sandwich at a French Bakery there downtown.

Some other mixed pics here. The Gate of the House On Bear Mountain (sorry for the caps, but it was hard to resist), a crazy store that was somewhere near Felton, and some deep forest pics.

So today I went driving all through the mountains, winding my way up on Black Road through deep redwood forests up to crests near the Bear Mountain House, and then plunged down the other side. The views at places was simply staggering, with a flat sea of clouds lapping up against the mountains, and the roads were crazy and winding. I'd pass in and out of clouds and fog, back into sunlight, and then down deep into the middle of a tall, ancient forest. I worked my way through Boulder Creek, Felton, Ben Lommond, and Bonny Doon, and then sped up the coast along Route 1 to Half Moon Bay. The next few posts will be pictures from the drive. The first few shots here are from the ridge near our new rental house. The town shot is of Felton, some distance deep into the woods. Use Google Maps to get a sense of the layout of all of these.

Some pictures here of Lakeside Elementary School, the school for mountain kids in Los Gatos.