We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun...

We've been chillaxing here in our old stomping ground of San Diego since last Friday.  It's been insanely wonderful, hanging with friends, lounging at the beach, playing in the hotel pool.

The first night we were here, we met friends at our favorite pizza place for dinner, then headed down to walk on the beach and watch the sunset. I had to catch my breath to keep the tears back several times, just walking barefoot in the sand and feeling the cool saltwater air swirl around me. My husband noticed the smile of contentment on my face and said, "You miss it, don't you." It was not a question.

Yeah. That's sort of an understatement. He realized then, he said, while we watched the boys play in the surf, that maybe that was why I fought him so hard not to take this vacation. Sometimes it hurts too much to come back.

 It does hurt to come back, to this place where I feel the happiest as I ever have, at any point in my life. It hurts to know that we are just visiting, returning each night to a hotel only to board an airplane and go back to real life in a few days. It hurts to admit how much I hate not living here.

But I've gotten over that, I guess. I've managed to hit 3 yoga classes, the boys have seen all their old friends. I miss my dog. School starts Monday, reality will be a pretty swift kick in the ass when we return.

But for now, I have one more day to just fill my lungs with salty air, and feel content.

Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink

We have had a great time in the last 24 hours, and we didn't even leave the greater KC area. My entire childhood growing up here you couldn't do that, you at least had to go to Lake of the Ozarks, or God help you, Branson (and He will, there, as it is His country, if you didn't know). Anyway I'm so glad somebody got wise to the fact that kids these days don't so much care about shopping among beautiful fountains on the Country Club Plaza. They want to be entertained, and the bigger, faster or wetter, the better. So good old Wyandotte county, and if you grew up here like me you know that no one ever expected greatness from Wy county, (no offense, David...) built a speedway, a hotel with an indoor waterpark, and a bunch of over the top restaurants. Go figure.
There are cars in this parking lot from allover the greater midwest and beyond, even Texas! And last I checked, Texas had the Shitterbaun. (thats a joke, not how its really spelled). But no, they came to Kansas for spring break vacation. You have no idea how much that blows my mind.

Christmas in Dixie.

So yeah, we're in Alabama. We had a wonderful Christmas at home Tuesday, then a very stressful afternoon with extended family. Then we got in the car at the crack of dawn and drove from Kansas City to Birmingham.
I've never blogged much about my husband's family before, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is to respect his wishes. But suffice to say they are a bunch of crazy southern lunatics, southern blueblood passive aggressives, walking stereotypes straight out of Gone with the Wind. And each time we come here I realize a little bit more than I can only tolerate them in very small doses. Like for about 5 minutes.

Hell comes via the wind.

The fire line of the Witch Fire in San Diego has moved far enough west that ash is falling at the beach.

Here's a map of the fires, the evacuation centers, full and still have room.  Its devastating.  People don't realize that eastern San Diego county is kind of rural, there are huge ranches out there, some fancy and some notsomuch, but all have animals by the hundreds.  And there's not enough places to evacuate large animals, they can't even get to the roads to load them up in trailers and drive them out.

The media keeps bringing up that some of these homes that are torched in Rancho Santa Fe are huge, wealthy landowner type estates.  It doesn't matter what resources you can afford to get your animals and family to safety - you can't land a fancy helicopter in the middle of a field of fire and load up a horse, no matter how much money you have.  Fire doesn't discriminate.  It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, nothing left is still nothing.

World on Fire.

Oh, you guys.  All of my friends in San Diego have been evacuated from their homes, even the ones where I lived, in Solana Beach, which is right on the I-5 and mere minutes from the beach.  They have been evacuated, even though the actual fires are still further out in the mountains, because of the way the wind is blowing.  Ash is falling and it is moving their way.  It is scary.  One friend told me the sky looks is like the color of a chocolate bar, and my other friend said it looks like a warzone.

Our friends who are from Kansas City and whom I went to high school with, they live in Rancho Bernardo, and were evacuated early this morning.  They are holed up at her husbands office with two little boys, two dogs and a hamster, waiting for a hotel room to wait it out.  Reports are that their neighborhood may be burning now.  I can't even believe this is happening.

Be thinking of them, y'all.  They may not have anything to go home to.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/22/irpt.california.fires/index.html

Beachy keen!

So my phone sort of had an embolism the other day, all that posting of fire hazards and bacchanalian hotels and such, and plus we've been running and jumping and playing with old friends since we got into San Diego, so not much, you know, boredom, to post constantly like before, while in the car.
A few things we've learned.
1. Max is a babe magnet at the beach. Pretty much anywhere actually.
2. I don't know about this poodles like the water thing I keep hearing about, but this poodle don' like dat. It messes up his velvety coat. Priss.
3. Life is always better in thew HOV lane.
4. We are too old not hip enough for Pacific Beach, where we are staying. Oh well.

Sunrise, Sunset.

Hello from Sunny San Diego.  We're holed up in the hotel room this evening, the boys are snuggled up on their bed watching the Heffalump movie, my husband is down in the laundry room switching loads, and I am...well, I'm blogging!  With a glass of wine in hand!  And a sore body and a full tummy!  Welcome to my vacation!

We have been going 90 to nothing since we got here.  Thursday we went to Disneyland with some friends.  Just in case you were wondering, over the Christmas to New Years holiday is probably not the quietest time to go to Disneyland, Oh my God there were so many people there.  We were nine strong, four adults, four kids between 3 and 6, and one teenage babysitter who got a free ticket to come along and help us keep track.  You would think five grownups to four kids would be a pretty sweet ratio, but you would be wrong.  At one point, we lost Drew, for about five of the most terrifying minutes of my life, and probably his.  We had just come off the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride, and were cutting through the que line to get back to the main walkway, ducking under ropes and cutting through the line, all of us thinking he was ahead or behind with the others.  When we got to the other side and stopped and did a headcount, we were only eight people.  I looked back in the direction we had just come from to find a sea of people, all moving in different directions.  My husband and the other dad set off on foot to retrace steps, I immediately climbed up on a light pole with a concrete base and started scanning faces from 15 feet up, hoping he might see me.   The employee who was manning the entrance to the line for the Pirates ride yelled at me to get down, and I yelled right back at him "I am missing a blond 6 year old boy in a light blue t-shirt - leave me the hell alone and start looking!"  People below me gasped and started counting their own kids and craning their necks around to look, and send the message up the line like falling dominos.

After just a few minutes, my cellphone rang, a number from Denver, Colorado which I didn't recognize.

"Hello?  I have a little boy here...?"  He was less than 100 feet away, through 500 people.  He had done what we had told him to do if he got lost: find someone in a uniform or with a name tag and give them my cellphone number, which he has memorized.  This woman, a visitor to the park and not an employee, but a mommy herself, had noticed him standing there looking a little panicked and stopped to talk to him.  She knew something was not right.  And right about the time she was trying to describe to me where she was standing, my husband saw them.

So it worked out fine, but suffice to say Drew was freaked enough that I carried him almost to the entrance of the park, we had decided that was about all the excitement we could handle for one day.

Today we went to the zoo, much calmer, mostly because we have been to the San Diego Zoo so many times we know our way around, so even though it was pretty busy, we felt much more comfortable.  And also I think despite the scary moments, we all, Drew included, feel a little better knowing our emergency plan works.  But the boys are exhausted, daddy is exhausted, I am exhausted.  Tonight we caught a beautiful sunset while driving up highway 101, and ate fish and chips for dinner. I am going to yoga in the morning, I've already caught one class yesterday, plus all the park/zoo walking. 

Tomorrow is new years eve.  We hope to catch an early dinner at our favorite mexican restaurant and crash early.  So exciting, I know. 

[Working Title]

Hi!  Its Sunday again.  And I have really nothing else to say.

Yep.  That's me.  Totally blocked.  Whistling Dixie over here, folks.  Can't even come up with a title, as you can see.  I can however, possibly, put together a kind of outline of a story, or maybe just some bullet-points of what happened to me over the weekend for you, just to give you an idey-ho of what's really going on here.

• Friday, 4:00.  I decide now would be a fabulous time to take the boys with me to the mall, to buy Drew a new winter coat, since the one he has, purchased off the street in China for 15 bucks and you get what you pay for, has a broken zipper and therefore does him no good.  This mall, where the Sears is, with the magic little Land's End store inside, is several miles away through major traffic congestion, including one of the top 20 worst intersections in the entire country (that was a few years ago that I heard that, but I doubt its gotten better since).
• Friday, 4:20.  Well that was a stupid idea.  I should give up and go home. 
• Friday, 4:40.  We've moved about 1/8 of a mile.  The boys are starting to sense my stress, and start fussing because of it.  Its like how animals smell fear and then attack.
• Friday, 5:05.  Am finally broken free of the standstill traffic and on my way home, (I traveled a total of about 2 miles in a giant circle since 4:00) but am still a little buzzed from the stress. 
• While idling at a red light, trying to calmly talk to the boys about how it would really help me to deal with traffic if they could just sit quietly and keep hands and feet to themselves, I look up to realize I'm not pushing down hard enough on the brake and am rolling into the guy in front of me.  My foot is totally paralyzed as my brain sends a panic message, finally it pushes down just as I ram the guy's bumper.  A guy who, while totally nice and very calm, happens to have an infant in the back seat.  This all took place in about .35 seconds, but it felt like a full 10 seconds, it felt like I should have had enough time to stop my car, except that suddenly my legs and feet were filled with concrete.  It felt like a dream. 
• I had enough time to gasp and yell Oh Shit! Just as I hit him.
• Also just as the boys stopped yelling and kicking each other, and so there was no other noise in the car to muffle my words. Even better!  I'm crashing into babies and burning my own children's ears!  Fabulous!

So that was fun.  The man was very nice.  It truly was not a hard hit, it was more of an aggressive nudge.  If I hadn't had a stupid front license plate as is required in California (but not here in Kansas), there would have been not even a scratch on his car, but the bolts holding the license plate on left a lovely little octagon shaped imprint.

That set the tone for my weekend, although nothing else bad happened.  I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow, so I can start another week and put this one behind me.  However, Will came to me right before bedtime to show me the bright red itchy rash on his belly, which looks just like the one Drew had earlier in the week (which, you may remember, was from having Strep throat.) 

So, I have that going for me.

Breakdown.

Hmmm, this post is probably not what you think its going to be.  Because I know you are all expecting me to have a breakdown, at any second, and sometimes I feel like that, too, but today is not that day.

No, this breakdown is regarding cars.  Thankfully, cars which belong to other people.  This morning, at sevengoddamnthirty, our doorbell rings.  Trip and are still in bed at this moment.  Should we have been?  No, but we are tired, and we drank a little more wine than was necessary for a spaghetti dinner last night, because Trip had  a frightfully bad day at work yesterday, way past Craptastic, creeping more toward something like Craptacular, but probably more like Fucktacular, and yes the capital is necessary. 

So I stumble into my robe and to the front door, totally confused, afraid that maybe it is really 8:30, not just 7:30, and Drew's carpool ride is here, and I am answering the door in my robe to a dad who sometimes trusts me with his children, and that might be bad.  But no, it is a woman, whom I've never before seen.  And she is so sorry, but her car has died right in front of my house, and her cellphone is apparently dead, and can she use my phone to call TripleA.  So I get her the phone, and I start some coffee, and other people in my home start rallying, and little boys in their pajamas start running through the house as if waking from 10 hours of sleep is like turning the switch on the bottom of the Energizer Bunny.  First they were off, and comatose, and now suddenly they are on, and they are off and running.  In the kitchen, but its a little early for me to be handling knives anyway, so no worries. 

So this poor woman is a teacher, and she lives in the neighborhood, and after dropping her daughter off at the school up the street she was driving on to work, driving her husband's car which she hardly ever has to do except today he needed her car for some reason (isn't this always the case?) and now its dead as a doornail.  So she calls her school so they can scramble around for a sub, and then her husband, whom I think was very unhelpful and she was a little frustrated.  By now Drew has decided to make friends and starts talking up a storm about his life and he'sfiveandinkindergartenanddoesshe-knowhisteacherbecauseheknowspeoplewhogoto-schoolwithherdaughterandhesgoingtohavea-spidermanbirthdayandmaybetheycan-comeandbringalltheirfriends, too.  All with waffle in his mouth.  You'd think he doesn't get out much.  And then neither my husband or I were surprised that she thanked us very nicely for letting her use the phone but she'll just go wait in the car, thanks, and she backed her way toward the door.

And then.  The towtruck came.  And there was much screaming.  THE TOWTRUCK IS HERE, MOM!  A REAL TOWTRUCK!  AND ITS WHITE!  AND IT HAS THREE RED A's ON IT! AND ITS A TOWTRUCK!

People, its not even 8 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday, and he has already had so much excitement we might as well call it a day and go back to bed.

That sounds good to me.

The waves, DUDE, the waves!

Today in Southern California, a massive storm somewhere out in the pacific caused the surf to hit a high not seen since the 1998 El Nino.  Surfers have been all a-twitter about it for days.  Twenty foot waves!  It could take out the Ocean Beach Pier!  Let's go!  The San Diego Lifeguard Captain, or whoever makes these kind of decisions, closed several of the beach access points and issued a bulletin that only the most experienced surfers should get into the water today.  Go here to read about it from the San Diego Tribune, there's also some pretty amazing pictures.

We have friends here who run the gamut of surfer sterotypes - the reality is, when everybody surfs, the stereotypes don't quite match up.  There's the guy that runs a mutual fund for a financial company downtown, who leaves work every day at 2pm (when the market closes) and hits the waves on his way home, almost every day, regardless of how good the surf might actually be.  He just likes to be in the water, and he's been surfing since he was a kid.  He doesn't like to have to work really hard at it.  He reads the paper or checks up with friends about where the good surf might be, but he usually prefers to go off in a quieter area even if the waves aren't as good, thus to avoid the newbies and jackass show-offs.  Today, with the surf as high as it was, he went out for a little while but found it too big to be fun.

There's the stay-home-dad who drops his kids off at school in the morning, then launches in at the cove right here in our little town.  He usually looks for an easy surf, he learned to surf as an adult.  He likes to take the technical approach, checking the internet constantly for updates to weather systems and approaching patterns that might change the height of the waves in one direction or the other.  He didn't go out today, it was way to big for him to handle. 

And then there's the former lifeguard, also a stay-home-dad.  He's weathered tan and fairly shaggy, who can look out his bedroom window at the whitecaps and tell you what's happening with the waves.  No reading the paper, no checking on the internet.  He gives off an aura of being like a surfer-dude shamen.  And he only goes out when its big.  Today, he stayed out all morning.  This is as good as it gets for him.

I took the kids down to La Jolla Cove to watch the big waves crash and the few surfers who were in the water try to get up on their boards.  It looked very futile to me.  But the waves really were enormous.  One lifeguard guy walked by and said they'd pulled only about 6 people out of the water at that spot all day, but apparently at other spots along the coast there had been lots of rescues.  The lifeguards were circling the surfers on waverunners, basically just hanging out, waiting for someone to be in trouble.  This guy said they only pull them out if they've lost their board and it looks like they are really struggling, then they tow them in and go back for the board later, usually by then its been smashed into bits against the rocks anyway (Hello?!?)

At one point I looked out over the rocks and saw what I first thought was a dog paddling along, then I realized it was a seal.  One lone seal brave enough to paddle around in these tsunami like waves, amongst a bunch of crazy people. 

PS - Did you notice 2 of the 3 guys are stay-home-dads?  As in, the mommy brings home the bacon?  AND, both of them have housekeepers (once a week) and gardeners (what we midwesterners call a yard service - also once a week).  I'm really not sure if there's just more of a propensity for that here in SoCal, or if we just happen to know the only two.  But I can tell you this:  Trip would really like to figure out how to get himself a gig like that.   

PPS - And now I give you, pictures!  The boys snuggling!  The Christmas tree, about to be overwhelmed by presents!  The stockings hung with care, or rather, laid out on the back of the wingback chair!  Because, take note, the mantle?  To my fireplace?  Is granite.  Nowhere to screw in a tiny little teacup hook in order to hang stockings.  Yes, I suppose I could get some of these stocking holder thingies, but then, I'm trying to avoid any head injuries and trips to the emergency room this holiday, Mkay?