Life On The Central Coast

It rained for the first time in months today. Hopefully the start of something good. California has been in a drought for YEARS and if we don't get some rain this year, there will be water rationing. It began as a few showery drops, light, fresh washing off the months of accumulated dirt and grime on windows, cars, tree leaves and roads. Pretty soon the gutters were full and flowing the gravity pulling the water down towards the ocean and low lying patches of ground. Puddles formed ever larger, dotted with the circular patterns of falling droplets like holes in Swiss cheese. Children in raincoats and boots find these irresistible! And then, while driving the backroads, you come up and over a hill and out before you is the MOST beautiful site....rows and rows of wine grapes soaking up all the wet goodness, adding to the juicy sweetness of the grapes that will be pressed into wine. And life is good. I can't wait to buy a bottle of wine from Edna Valley Winery and sa...

Vampires, Blood Suckers, Creepy Crawlies, Parasites..... No, these aren't your family or friends but they may be unwelcome visitors to your home. What you see next MAY leave you feeling like things are crawling on you. AAAaaarrrrgggh! There you have it.... the dirty rotten, stinkin', FLEA!! And it's making our lives MISERABLE right now. It all began a few weeks back when we noticed our upstairs cat acting strangely. He meowed and raced through our bedroom from carpeted areas to linoleum floors. He sat up high on furniture. It only took us a couple of days to realize it was a flea problem and treat him with Frontline. Ah, problem solved you say? I wish! Our dogs are on a Frontline program but Randal the cat wasn't, so we thought the Frontline would be a quick fix. Not so. That day we began the regimen of vacuuming every night and morning and spraying with a well known brand of flea spray. And the cat now has a flea collar on top of the Frontline. We've been doing t...

Living at the coast makes for pretty cool summers. As temperatures rise in Central California, many plan vacations in our area. For those of us who live here, especially along the beach area, it means fog and lots of it. We wake up to it, go to sleep with it and if we are lucky, it peels back during the warmest times of the day, 11:00 am to about 2:00 pm, each day. What does it look like when it peels back.... kinda like this. This is a picture taken from Avila Beach, one of the warmest and consistently sunny beaches in our area. All those white clouds out there, yeah, that's the fog bank. As I turn to face southeast towards Grover Beach, you can see we are BURIED in the fog today. It hasn't peeled back for the whole day. This is looking towards Hwy. 101 and yes, more fog. Right near there are a couple of swimming pools, Sycamore Hot Springs , and Avila Hot Springs . Do you see the key word in there? Hot? If our pools weren't hot, we'd freeze in the summertime. Oh, ther...

We went down to the beach today for a quick drive. Originally we were going to sit and bask in the sunshine, but it was way too cold. Made a video instead.

Beach weather.... for those of us living on the Central Coast the weather is mostly mild. My sister calls and asks me the temperatures and I say, "About 65 degrees". That's the average around here. It sometimes gets a bit warmer and we have had it below 32 degrees but rarely . 65 is probably the average temperature. But this week, Holy Cow! We had the heat for a couple of days and thought we were going to die. Now for all of you that live in hot places, you will probably scoff and say, "You call THAT high!?" But for us, IT'S HIGH! We spend summers here in sweatshirts and layering clothes is a regular practice. We don't have air conditioners and a simple fan just doesn't do the trick! Monday's temperature was over 100 degrees! I did a screen capture at 4 PM and that was AFTER the peak heat of the day. Tuesday was a bit cooler but still in the 90's. Then finally today, the fog appeared and our temperatures were back to "normal". See ...