Right Here In River City!

A mother knows when it gets too quiet in the house something's going on.  I suppose it's just the same here at Rancho Notorious...

Where's Daniel?  Surely he's not still on the road.  We've heard he's back in town, so to speak---so perhaps he's just stuck on recollecting a day that fails to excite him.  Perhaps he's distracted by more current events---weddings, gardens---deer that need their ass kicked.

No, no---it's just that hobby I wrote about in the past---the one under the title V is for Very Interesting, But Stupid.  It's all that handsome Realtor's fault---the one with the delicious little ears.  He kept calling my husband, luring us on with one wanton listing after another.  Finally the combination seemed right, and we fell for the siren call of full frontal riverside living.

Looking south from our dock

I have long questioned the meaning of forever.  It is at best a spiritual term, for everything around us is forever forming new relationships.  At this very moment the minutest of matter is sloughing off and shacking up elsewhere.  Just take a look under my chair. We rewrite history to suit our needs.  Then we look back again---wisely or foolishly, but usually with a strange, visceral fondness---and rewrite history once more.

A house is not quite a marriage, but it does have its ongoing affairs with repairmen.  Even a house designed by yours truly is an island in time, drifting at a different speed from what we call reality.  My eldest aunt can't believe I can leave my "little jewel box" behind, but then she admires the unabashedly thick old growth board and batten cedar siding on the house we're purchasing.  But to tell you the truth we'd need to spend more money to anchor our Rancho Notorious away from the shoals of what we perceive as diminishing returns---and we decided we might as well spend our money elsewhere.

The view from the dining/living room.  The wall beyond the lovely ceiling fan will be removed and replaced with a four foot tall cabinet to further open up the view and make the kitchen less isolated

Nothing's perfect.  We're switching out fire for floods, but since the former is always the more common and destructive threat in California, I'll take plenty of water, thank you.  Being on some half acre of ag land in the heart of River City, we even have the right to pump water directly from the river.  The sloughing of Mother Nature has left behind top soil thirty feet deep, and a deer was last seen in the vicinity some hundred years ago.  It's a gardener's paradise---unless I discover that the tree squirrels are suburbanized delinquents that devour every bud and blossom in sight.  The pecan tree is suspiciously lacking in nuts, but at this point we'll blame the lack of a pollinator.

The house is far less glamorous than the one I reviewed earlier this year, but for what it lacks in the detritus left behind by 'gay hoarders' it makes up for in what I call foreclosure madness: the propensity for superfluous flash and trash over serious repair.  The nearly flat roof leaks and the 1958 aluminum windows are as brazenly ineffective as Jayne Mansfield pouring out of her cocktail dress.  Still, we're getting it for less than half of what it sold for last time---and its 'real' value, once the house and grounds are restored to my whimsical if not entirely good taste, falls somewhere in between.  My artistic mind has devised light fixtures made of vintage ColorFlyte Melmac for the kitchen....

What would June Cleaver do?  Who cares?  Let's paint over the Millennial grays with chocolate brown made gay with bright red windows and soften that relentlessly long eave with climbing Rosa gigantea hybrids!

We're fortunate in that we don't have to immediately sell our Rancho Notorious in order to pull this off.  My husband would not have it any other way.  There are projects to finish at the ranch before it can be put on the market anyway.  We can grin and bear the twin expenses of roof repair and quality windows at this house before winter comes, and then focus on making the ranch as charming as possible for the New Year of Selling.

You can be assured of many more adventures in home rejuvenation in the years to come.