It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Sisters are here, Will is home, and we will be seeing lots more family tonight.  It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! 

Little Sister Made Omelettes!

Jacks Peak

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we explored some other hiking trails I hadn't been on in many years.  Jacks Peak sits at the top of the Monterey Peninsula and separates Monterey from Carmel, more or less.  It hosts a handful of homes, great views, and hiking trails that are much less steep than our Garrapata hike in Big Sur that same weekend!

Jacks Peak has 11 trails, and we covered about half of them the day we hiked.

Click Here For Larger Map

From the Lower Ridge and Pine trails, you get views of the Monterey Bay, seen here with a nice blanket of fog.  Typical.

Monterey Peninsula and the wharfs.

The Coffeeberry Trail doesn't have as many views, but look at this moss!

The Rhus Trail boasts sea views on the Carmel side.  There's Carmel River Beach, and Point Lobos is in the distance.

Somewhere in there is Mission Ranch!

There was no lack of poison oak signage.  Will's gonna learn some day what it looks like.

 

It was a festive Fall color that weekend.

Jacks Peak is particularly special, because that's where my family lived until I was one year old.  This is the driveway to our old house.  I have no true memories of the place--just a recollection of what our house looked like based on photos from when I was tiny.  But that location sure is a sweet place to live!

I think the highlight of the hike, though, is that I got to visit the site of my very first camping trip, which was in our previous neighbors' side yard (oh, the views!).  I was probably 4 years old, and my Dad took me camping right over that hill below, with the trees.  My Mom and little sister hung out with us until dark, but only I was old enough to camp with Dad overnight; I probably felt so brave.

It was good to be back.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you are enjoying friends, family, and turkey.

And pilgrim hats and pumpkin scones!

Ceiling Saga: Chapter 8

The first time I mentioned our apartment's ceiling leak was back in December, right before our housewarming party.
However, I actually noticed the leaking (and reported it to our landlord) even before Thanksgiving.  That means we're 8 months into the leak issue.



A refresher for you:

- In mid November, I notice dripping from the ceiling during relatively light rain.  Landlord comes a couple weeks later, tears out corner of ceiling to investigate, believes water is coming from a leaky pipe on the roof.
- Pipe is replaced.  It had lots and lots of holes (see right).
- Landlord finally does 1 of 2 steps to repair this hole.  I finish the job myself before party.
- Leaking continues, now believed to be a hole in the roof.
- Months go by, buckets are permanently left under this dripping area, and we relocate all the items from our built-ins so they don't get ruined.  Rain weakens drywall so much that a new hole in the ceiling, similar to this one, opens up on its own.
- More months go by (despite frequent calls on our end).
- In late April (a.k.a. 2 full months ago), landlord tells me he is giving up trying to find the cause of the leak and will fork over the money to have the whole roof replaced.
- May...
- June...
...















As I was getting ready for work one morning, a few things in the backyard caught my eye:

Yep, after 8 months, the landlord caved and hired a roofing company to replace the entire roof.
I came home that afternoon and found some interesting artifacts from the Victorian period:

That's the pipe they've been putting bandaids on for the last 8 months.  It was finally replaced!

The aftermath:

And finally, yesterday I came home to find the hole in the ceiling had been patched (not yet painted though...that will probably end up becoming my job in 2 weeks when I get frustrated with the landlord's slow timeline!)

New drywall and putty drying

 Here's to hoping this story has only 8 months chapters.

THE END (?)

Grilling Season

Does grilling season begin after Memorial Day?  I hope so.  We christened our grill with flank steak and other summery sides recently.

Margaritas

Caprese salads

Flank steak and artichokes

I hear San Francisco has a notoriously foggy summer, but I am hoping we find plenty more lazy, sunny, summer evenings to grill on our balcony.

At least we left the mosquitoes in NC!
 

Outdoor Living

My sister came into town today, and with her, she brought some sunny weather.  Several days of rain have caused the garden area behind our apartment to turn bright green, and we finally had the urge to set up the outdoor furniture.

What better way to break in the table and chairs than with some summery drinks?

My herb garden is looking extra green after the recent rain, as well.  I have already snipped a few springs twice this past week for different recipes...I know I will appreciate having them at arm's reach.

I'll be back to post about the summery cocktails soon.  Right now I gotta soak up sister-time!

The Long Winter Months

At this point last year, I was sick of winter already and ready for spring to arrive.  Probably because we had had a couple months of cold weather already, complete with dead plants in our front planters and winter housework that wasn't the most fun.  I was anxious for any sign or warmth or growth.

Even though our Christmas tree came down today, I don't yet feel sick of the winter season, and I attribute that to the more mild weather and the fact that I don't have to deal with winter home maintenance anymore!

Sunsets like these also make me appreciate winter on the west coast--they tend to be more brilliant when the temperatures are a bit cooler, and the clouds provide extra surfaces to reflect the colors.

These photos are from a New Year's Day hike to Lands End, the same trail we explored a few weeks back.  The bonus this time was that my entire family took the hike together...on New Year's Day, no less.

What a great way to begin 2012!

Ceiling Leak

Now that we are no longer owning, but rather renting our home, I appreciate the fact that if something goes wrong, you just call the landlord and it gets taken care of.

With that being said, the timing wasn't working in my favor, because at 4:50pm on a Friday several weeks back, I noticed water dripping from the ceiling right near the dining room table.  It was raining, so I attributed it to that, but I knew my chances of getting it fixed a few minutes before "closing time" were slim.

The hole in the ceiling was made after they came to investigate.

The dripping stopped when the rain did too, but it picked back up a few days later when it was sunny outside.  I made another call to the landlord to politely remind him of our leak, though this time I had a feeling we were getting some sewage leaking into the apartment rather than rain.  Sharing with him that lovely detail seemed to get the handyman moving, and the next day 3 gallons of roof cement were applied and this pipe was removed and replaced with one a bit more...solid.  Ahh, old houses.

We still had this pretty wall adornment though:

Well, you know how the saying goes: if you want something done, you'd better do it yourself.  Two weeks later, everything seemed properly repaired and dry.  After a bit more urging, they finally patched the drywall in the ceiling.  But by 3pm on Friday (the day before our housewarming party) with only primer covering the patch-job, I had a feeling our repairman was not going to come back to complete any touch-up painting before our guests arrived.

So I grabbed my paint-brush and left-over paint and put my old home-owning skills to work.  Much better now.

I guess it's nice that I don't have to do home repairs, but my absent-minded landlords don't seem to mind, either, when I take things into my own hands.

Edited to add: our oven and stove just died.  Ironic.  Time for a phone call.

   

Christmas Decorations

In October I documented the impressive and elaborate Halloween decorations around my neighborhood in San Francisco, and I mentioned I was excited to see what the Christmas decorations would be like.  Well, I don't know if I've been jogging on the wrong streets or if the professional light-hanging truck is just so back-logged with work, but the Christmas decorations have been a bit underwhelming so far.  There are certainly some pretty lights around town, but I think I am going to give those light-hanging cranes a few more days to work their magic (and make their big bucks) before I take any photos.

Instead, I have uploaded photos of our own Christmas decorations, specifically our tree this year.  I'm partial to live trees, due in part to my family's tradition growing up of buying a real tree (and bringing our cat, who helped us select the tree), but also a tradition I began after leaving the house, when my college roommate and I bought a live 5-foot tree for our dorm room freshman year.  I don't think it had many decorations aside from lights and candy-cane reindeer*, but I assure you, we were the talk of the dorm, and we had lots of visitors around Christmas to admire the tree.  After our hand-strung garland of real leaves at the onset of Fall the month before, I admit some of our visitors were probably there more to roll their eyes and see what Martha Stewart Olivia and I had gotten ourselves into this time.

Anyway, with only one or two exceptions, I have coerced my roommates over the years, and now my husband, that we need a live tree, and that the sooner after Thanksgiving we select it, the better.
This year we drove outside the city for a bit better selection, and we came home with a 7 foot Douglass fir tree.  I'm not necessarily into changing up the decorations to abide by a theme, so our ornaments are the same as last year's and the year's before, with a few additions.  It makes it fun to decorate each year, when you pull out ornaments and say, "Oh I forgot about this one--it's so cute/pretty/reminds me of ____!"  So we turned on some Christmas music last weekend and oo'ed and ah'ed over ornaments from our first Christmases (our parents have now handed them down to us), from our wedding, from trips we have taken, and crocheted and tatted ornaments from Grandma.  We have a San Francisco street car with 2011 to commemorate our move this year.  There's even a pickle ornament.

In our relatively small apartment, the tree and the two garlands on the back doors really light up the room and give off a pretty glow.  And the reflection of the tree in both windows is so pretty!

So no professionals with their lights-hanging crane for us this year, but I will let you know if those professionally-decorated houses live up to my expectations.


*Another kinda-dorky craft (at least to still be making past the age of 12), but tradition nonetheless!

Home Sweet Home

I wrote about the sale of our old house a couple weeks ago.  Well, this past weekend we had a housewarming party in our new apartment, so I guess we can consider ourselves settled into the new place now.

We're lucky to have a number of high school, college, and grad school friends already here in San Francisco.  So it was just a matter of getting moved in and sending out an evite.

Saturday night brought together lots of friends from different times in our lives, and we had a great time introducing them to each other and catching up with everyone.

Several friends asked for a tour, which seemed funny to me.  As opposed to our old house with two stories and several bedrooms, a den, dining room and office, here in our new apartment, you can pretty much see each corner without moving around too much.  So my first instinct was to tell them, what tour?  Can't you see everything?

After some practice, I figured out how to stretch the tour into a minute-long segment, which seemed to satisfy the curious guests.  Here's a virtual tour:

The bedroom with funky sliding doors

The dining nook next to the deck

The already-shared funky red kitchen.  Funky is the theme.

The deck!  I love this feature.

Living room, fireplace, built-in bookshelves, and the second patio outside those windows

I left most the prep and baking to my friend, Trader Joe, but we did bake our favorite cookie recipe, which seemed to go over well.  The other two things that went over well were:

My birthday present (which I declared had to be installed before any housewarming party could occur!):

Wall-mounted bottle opener

And our State cheese boards.  California is from my sister-in-law when we found out about the job offer and our move.  North Carolina is from my wonderful coworker, as a way to remember my old stomping ground and our friends there.

States on the left/front end of the table

It was a fun evening, and now we are officially settled in!
Home Sweet Home.