Life in the Slow Lane

As the last few minutes of 2014 slip by, I offer you a few scattered thoughts for your edification. (Or maybe I am just hoping to diminish the number of unfinished drafts in my blog post file.) 1) Hotels are so worried about saving the planet through water use. Reuse your towels, and all that. But have you ever noticed how many hotel showers have the hot and cold faucets switched? I can assure you, that is not a water saving feature. 2) I hope SOS and I do not turn out to be a prime example of parents who drag miserable kids around on all of our adventures. I'm thinking the fix is all about controlling PR. We'll hang on to the pictures of them smiling and photoshop their grouchies out of the vacation slideshow. Keep the picture of them reveling in the feel of water gliding through their fingers… and not the picture of them crying and misbehaving on the Golden Gate Bridge. 3) I'm not worried about being nickeled and dimed to death. It's those quarters…the endless...

This is Part 5 in my series about living in a small space. If you've missed any, catch  Part 1 ,  Part 2 ,  Part 3 , and Part 4 . Standing in my kitchen, I can hear my neighbor in hers. She's talking about her day, using the microwave, grinding her coffee. In my bathroom, I can hear my upstairs neighbor plunging his toilet, starting his shower. Not all small living is this intimate with neighbors, but for me, it often seems a natural extension. I stand in the open door while the kids retrieve the mail from the box across the hall. The hallway door opens and other neighbors pass between us, greeting us and naturally glancing past me, seeing most of our house. I'm not ashamed, I tell myself, hoping to one day make that true. I'm not the best housekeeper in the world, plus small children add their own special housekeeping style. But there is little I can do to hide it from my neighbor, since the routine of daily living opens up my life for them to see inside. I...

This is Part 4 in my series about living in a small space. If you've missed any, catch Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . About a year ago the kids and I got home unexpectedly early from a weekend visiting my parents and found the door unlocked and an empty house. Really empty. Like furniture moved out and nothing on the floor empty. Fortunately, I quickly realized SOS had taken the kid-free opportunity to have the carpets cleaned, and sure enough, he showed up a short time later chagrined that he hadn't been able to put everything back before I got home. Four-Year-Old Selfie, with Carpet But I was inspired. There was so much room! Just imagine what we could do with so much empty space! Hold a contra dance! Or put together a 5000 piece puzzle! Or maybe, just maybe, make a comfortable, non-cluttered home for a family of four. With welcoming SmilesBabyGirl and the explosion of accompanying girl-baby accessories, I had begun to doubt our condo really could be a comfortab...

This is Part 3 in a series about our small living space. Here is Part 1 and Part 2 . It was one of those moments where any mother would have beamed with pride. We had company over. Not our usual if-you-want-some-water-you-know-where-the-cups-are kind of company, but the kind of company where we actually found our dining table and brought out a wrinkled tablecloth to cover the goop which cannot be removed with mere soap and water. We were doing this company thing for reals. Except we forgot the small detail of sufficient seating. But our guests were graciously making do, and one had found a decent seat on the bottom step of the stairs leading to CutieLittleBoy's bunk bed. Let me sidetrack for a moment. SmilesBabyGirl does an amazing wedge impersonation. For being as robustly chub as she is, she has a unique talent of inserting herself in small spaces and then pushing outward until she is pleasantly comfortable. So our unwarned guest was making as much of a chair as she coul...

This is Part 2 in a series about living in a small place. Read Part 1 if you missed it. I chose to take a cold shower this morning. I took one yesterday, too. I have this to say: Brr. The water heater for our building has been sputtering to a painful death for awhile now, and it finally did so early Sunday morning. Eighteen households without hot water on a day when no one is going to budge an inch to fix the problem. Our HOA elections just might have been decided this weekend. But that was yesterday. Today maintenance was going to fix the problem. They just need to turn off the water for a "few" hours. Gentle Readers, water is critical when there are two sticky-fingered, chalk-eating, dirt-flinging, diaper-stripping, juice-splashing children in the house. It turns out yogurt makes some pretty nice splashes, too. A zebra, of course. Just thinking about it makes me want to go wash my hands and everything else the children have touched. So yes. My option...

"Do you think it bad," SOS confided, "that one of the main motivations for wanting to invite people over to our house is to hear them say 'Woah, you guys do live in a tiny place.' Is that a problem?" Ah yes, dear husband. I know what you mean. I've been thinking similarly. It could be pride. True. But I also feel as if we are on some sort of crusade to re-educate. When I say my house is small, I am not suffering from a false sense of modesty. Believe me. A studio, 473 square feet. The only interior door is the one on the bathroom. Until a furniture purchase a few months ago covered a built-in, floor to ceiling mirror, it was possible to stand at the entrance and see the entire square footage, minus the bathroom. The HOA documents call our unit "Bachelor's Studio." The official website for the condominium complex doesn't even acknowledge the existence of these smaller units. The previous owner (and perhaps several more before him) wa...

The summer before I turned 15, I went on a mission trip to Bolivia... by way of Europe. A friend had invited me to go with her, and as she lived in the Netherlands, it made perfect sense for me to travel to the Eastern Hemisphere before traveling to the Southern Hemisphere. Well, "perfect sense" maybe not, but that is what I did. As you might imagine, packing for a trip involving two entirely different continents can be a challenge. What made the challenge more unusual, however, is that the mission agency we were to travel with provided their own duffel bags for our use. As my departure date approached, I became more and more anxious that I had not yet seen the bag I was required to use. I understood that mailing a bag from Europe to California was somewhat cost prohibitive, but surely, it would be waiting for me at my hosts' house when I arrived. It wasn't. There had been some miscommunication. My friend had her bag, but mine was still on its way. Every day I e...

You know what they say: One man's trash is a national treasure. Or something like that. Glass Beach is a treasure. A National Park. And since the National Park system celebrates 150 years this year, I am only stating the obvious when I say that it hasn't always been an official, nationally recognized treasure. But most National Parks do not start out as the city dump. In somewhat recent history, the trash was all relocated to a less picturesque location… all except for the broken glass which has been polished and wave tossed over the years. Thus its name. To add to the irony, since this beach is now part of the National Park system, the glass is protected. Don't you even dare think about taking a piece of glass home with you. David and I had a long debate over whether the newly abandoned beer bottle counted as part of the protected glass. Well, no. It wasn't a long debate. It's hard to have a long debate in surroundings such as these. Hm. T...

Trains vs. Trees. Tell me quickly: which one is longer? We were oh so tempted to catch the touristy Skunk Train in Fort Bragg and take it on its scenic route. We were even willing to sacrifice four hours of our precious drive-while-both-kids-sleep time to take the oldest one on a train. Whee! But then we saw the cost and we realized we could go a lot farther on a train for that price, thankyouverymuch. And then we saw the train. Yep. That's it. SOS took the kids down to the railroad crossing while I took pictures from our balcony overlooking Highway 1. CutieLittleBoy, so excited to get to see a train, was not impressed. He kept asking to go see a long train. And yes, we are glad we were not skunked by the Skunk Train. (We've been told this is one of the downsides of traveling out of peak tourist season. They use a cooler looking train at other times.) And then we drove the Avenue of the Giants. The Coastal Redwoods are the tallest trees in the world. ...

Fern Canyon is about an hour north of Eureka. That is, it would be an hour out of Eureka if the roads were not flooded, potholed, and occupied by the stray elk and/or tourist. What with unruly tourists blocking the road with their car to idly wade in the middle of the creek (which coincidentally is also the middle of the road), you'd better plan for at least an hour and a half of drive time. But once you get there, it is like stepping onto the abandoned set for Jurassic Park. Oh, that's because it is the abandoned set for Jurassic Park . Funny thing about that. We'd been warned that we were coming too early in the year to see the canyon at it's peak, but oh. my. goodness. So beautiful. Also, very wet. Like dew lingering on plants in the mid afternoon wet. Like tromping through the creek wet. Like waterfalls oozing from the canyon walls wet. Like CutieLittleBoy falling in the creek wet. This was another one of those adventures where I won...

Besides taking our requisite photo along the California/Mexico border, our planned San Diego activity is staying at the iconic Hotel del Coronado. Or, as people in the know say, “Hotel Del”. Between my knowledge of Spanish and my involuntary editing twitch, I’ve been twitching a lot. Hotel Del is a luxury hotel dating from 1880s. More than a century later, accommodations are still highly sought after, with prices to match. Which is why, our budget being what it is, our stay lasts all of 45 minutes… just long enough for our drinks to be served.  (We intended to order something more substantial at their restaurant, but with 45 minute wait times for simple drinks, we give up after the sunset and find an emptier spot down the street. We also intended to treat the kids’ Aunt Angie for her birthday, but she ends up treating us at a place so fancy they line their trashcans waste receptacles with linen rather than plastic bags. Thanks, Auntie Angie!)   ...