Caught Red Chipped

Caught finishing off the salsa.

Our tomato plants have been going crazy and we got some peppers in our veggie box last week so, as he often does, Steve made salsa. He claims to have used "the usual" recipe, but this last batch is truly the best salsa I have ever had. Anywhere. At any time. Steve is crediting the extremely sweet tomatoes that one of our plants has been producing. It is truly epic stuff.

Compliments Always Work

When I went up to campus to have lunch with Steve today, he introduced me to their visiting researcher from Pakistan who told me that Steve is a wonderful and humble man and is lucky to have such a beautiful wife. He is now, officially, my new favorite person.

Paint It Black

This is a bit of a rant, and a long one at that. Do not feel obligated to read it. There will be no quiz.

As I suspect is the case with many people, without really giving it a whole lot of thought, I tend to pick music to match my mood. Sometimes what I’m selecting on the iPod is my first clue that something’s bothering me. I feel that I’m fairly introspective overall, but tending toward an even temper without much expression, a vague irritability is often all I sense when I’m in a foul mood.

This evening, after selecting Blink-182’s “Dammit,” Bad Religion’s “Sorrow,” The Rolling Stone’s “Paint It Black,” Rage Against the Machine’s “No Shelter” and Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt,” I was beginning to think something was up. Taking a break from organizing my desk (I am an accountant, after all, this is what we generally do for fun), I sat and stared at the wall for awhile. Finding limited enlightenment in the drywall, I wandered downstairs to check my e-mail. Empty, as per usual. I checked my Facebook, read a few updates from my dozen or so friends. Yes, for all my high and mighty talk about avoiding social networking, I joined this week… so if you’re on and want to friend me, feel free, it’s under “Lisa Pool” since I think “Lisa Loveridge” sounds funny. Anyway…

This isn’t meant to be a complaint about not getting any e-mail or my limited number of Facebook friends, or an indictment of Steve’s ability to entertain me (since he has always been and continues to be wonderful). For the 9 years that Steve and I have lived primarily in Santa Cruz, I’ve really felt pretty contented (socially speaking that is… housing has been another story, but luckily that’s good now). But after graduating, having our one local friend who I very much enjoyed talking with move away and leaving my horrid big-4 accounting job, my regular social interaction evaporated. Apparently about 4 years of consistent social depravation is about all I can handle.

To anyone who’s thinking “well, go out and make some friends,” apparently you don’t know me very well. While I may be plenty chatty once I’m comfortable with you, I’m paralyzingly shy with people I don’t know well. I can’t think of a single friend I’ve made in my life of my own initiative. I’ve had some wonderful friends, but they all either initiated the social contact themselves, or were brought into my life by mutual friends.

I suspect this social “cabin fever” was what brought me to sign up for Facebook, being I suspect one of the last people on Earth to do so. It brought me to overcome my strong reluctance to initiate social contact and call up some old friends. I was delighted to spend time with some of them the last time I was in Southern California.

Thinking back on my high school days, I miss the social contact tremendously. I had a small group of friends and didn’t pursue relationships with many people (which in retrospect I regret… many of the kids I went to school with were fascinating people) but I was happy with that level of socializing. I always had something to do on the weekends and often had long conversations with various friends on the phone.

You can’t go back. Essentially falling off the grid to the people I knew by moving to Northern California, I put distance between myself and almost all my friends and friendly acquaintances. I found that I was uninterested in my college peers. I saw one guy in a Dimmu Borgir (a death metal band) shirt and combat boots in one of my classes and thought “I bet I could get along with him.” But, of course, I didn’t introduce myself. There was a small group of nerds in my dorm, but they all knew each other and didn’t take kindly to me swooping in and winning all three of their original Star Wars trivia contests. And the other kids either seemed to be party types or stiff eggheads. Being neither, I made no friends in college. Steve faired better at meeting people, but only one was a “keeper” and he’s the friend I referred to earlier that moved away several years ago.

I met some great girls at KPMG’s orientation in Chicago. The four of us bonded over mutual contempt for the curriculum and had a grand old time. I was lucky enough to work on a few projects with some of them during my miserable six months at the company.

But for the past 4 years, I’ve worked a job that, while wonderful in many ways, provides essentially no social interaction. I am the only employee and while my boss is a nice guy, I think he comes to work primarily to get some peace and quiet since he has a hectic family life. And outside of tax season, I’m not actually at work much anyway. I have a million little projects and things to do at home, so I keep busy, but I can go an entire day without saying a word to anyone. Steve does his best to chat with me when he gets home, but he needs his down time from work and I understand and respect that.

I never thought we’d be in Santa Cruz as long as we have been. In a lot of ways, our life is idyllic. Our commutes are both 10 minutes at most. We can walk anywhere we want to go in town: the beach, downtown, the grocery store and our favorite restaurants. The weather is fantastic here. Wonderful rainy winters that I love and mild, pleasant summers. It is truly beautiful here. We live in a stand-alone house with a pretty large backyard that has, by some amazing stroke of luck, affordable rent. We’re finally debt free after years of working toward that goal. So I feel a bit ridiculous complaining about anything right now.

What is the point of this? I’m not entirely sure. I suppose to share my state of mind. That’s part of what all this newfangled social media is all about, after all. I do feel a little bit better after writing this. Maybe I’ll see if I can find something a little lighter to listen to and try to keep from losing my mind for another day.

Further Domestication

Steve is good about keeping the kitchen stocked with fruit and generally does a fairly good job of working through it in a timely manner. But the giant box of cherries he got was beginning to go bad, so we needed a way to use them up quick. Feeling ambitious, he decided on pie.

I pitted the cherries:

Steve prepared the dough and filled the pie:


Finished product:

It turned out really well for the first pie we've ever made. We ran out of white sugar partway through, so it was half white sugar and half brown sugar. Tasted good, though.

Tahoe Mini-Reunion

In the Loveridge clan, somewhere in the ballpark of 30 people is a pretty small family gathering. It only included Steve’s parents, siblings and their families. I anticipated it would be infinitely more enjoyable for me than the larger reunions, which are filled with extended family that I don’t know. Now this is not to say it wasn’t enjoyable, but it was still pretty hectic.

Always sympathetic to my antisocial tendencies, Steve’s parents put us up with them in their timeshare while the rest of the family stayed in a really beautiful rental house. The accommodations were very nice, although I admit to being somewhat taken aback by how “built-up” Tahoe is. I’d never been there before. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was kind of crazy where we were near the Nevada border.

I won’t rehash the day-by-day, but I’ll post some of the more interesting bits.

We took a boat tour, but the most fascinating boats were in the marina.

Invasive plant skimmer (I took a million pictures of this thing… I thought it was fascinating… I’m such a dork):


What do you suppose this boat is for?

(we found out later that it is for launching and retrieving hot air balloons on the lake)

Beautiful storm on our driving tour around the perimeter of the lake:


Those people look familiar…

A sailing school gets towed out (ah, I remember the girl scout sabot days in Long Beach):

Alas, poor fence section:

I’m glad to see the park service has a sense of humor. Weather rock:


Part of the Rubicon Trail goes over this bridge (mid-picture, a little to the right). Also, you can see the old wooden “lighthouse” high in the treeline on the left.



On the way home, Mono Lake (love the reflection of the hills showing in the lake… it was spectacular in person):

Demetri at Large

Moving his toy bag around (he grabs the handle in his mouth and drags it to wherever he wants it... I never put it in the right place, it would seem).

His second favorite activity: resting.

His favorite activity: sleeping.


At 9 years old, he doesn't have the kind of energy he once did, but you wouldn't know it at meal time. As you can tell from the pictures, his least favorite activity is being groomed. His fur is always in a state of chaos, but since it doesn't seem to bother him, I've been cutting him some slack in his old age.

Redesigned Bulb Bed

We didn't have a whole lot of gardening experience when we created our bulb bed in the backyard. It looked beautiful when in bloom, but was too deep to be practical for weeding. So, once the flowers had fully wilted, we took to reshaping the bed.

Digging up the bulbs (we boxed them up to replant in a couple months):



All dug up:


Reshaped with new plantings:



I tend to like a neat, orderly look to a garden, without plantings crowded together and competing for attention. Luckily, Steve is on board with this vision.

We also got a few new plants for another section of the bed which is in total shade and has killed the few plants we tried before. Hopefully these will do better:

Out, Gophers!

Steve has had quite the ongoing battle with gophers in our yard. We suspect they mostly live in the community garden over the back fence, but their tunnels frequently extend into our yard.

Steve has had great success with trapping them. I don't approve, but I suppose the snap traps are the most humane way to kill them if you in fact insist on killing them. I have pointed out the irony of all the money and time we spend caring for the small fuzzy creatures inside the house while he's killing the ones in the yard. Anyway...

To prevent further consumption of roots, Steve has installed hardware cloth around some of our larger (and more expensive) plants.



He also installed smaller individual cages around our new plantings, shown in my next post.