Judith & Christine, at the end of 2008
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Inspired by Samuel Pepy’s practice in his journal, here’s a record of our household at the end of 2008.
Christine and I live in the same second floor unit in a pleasant complex in Mountain View, our deck filled with plants and bird feeders. We have two cats, Mr M and Greycie Loo, and we still miss the cats who accompanied us through the first seventeen years of our marriage, GreyBrother and GreyBeard. Mr M is a hearty grey middle aged cat, territorial with a fierceness from his time as a Philadelphia stray. Greycie Loo is a two year old who is still skittish from her time wild at Moffett Field. We have a home office, where Christine works when she’s not visiting with clients , taking classes, or tutoring digital mapping (GIS) students. I work there as well, several days a week.
When folks give directions in this part of the bay area they often say “north” to mean up the peninsula towards San Francisco, about forty miles away on the freeway convenient to our home. On that same freeway I can commute quickly to my workplace in San Mateo, twenty miles “north” of Mountain View. I’m in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for many meetings with my team and colleagues, video conferences to my colleagues in Dublin, Ohio.
North would actually take one into the wetlands of the bay, and the creek I walk as a streamkeeper is in a north-flowing man-made channel between our home and the bay. South from our home is walking distance to the main street of Mountain View, filled with restaurants and bookstores. Foothill College straddles the San Andreas fault further to the south in the foothills of the Santa Cruz range, which is between us and the Pacific. Christine attends classes there as well as helping teach in the lab sections of some digital mapping (GIS) classes.
We are closer to San Jose, sprawling across the end of the bay to the east, than San Francisco, to the north-west. We strongly identify as living in Silicon Valley, close to the headquarters of the internet driven companies like Google and Yahoo. We live near the Computer History museum and near Moffett Field, previously a US Navy air station for the USS Macon, a rigid airship that acted as a flying aircraft carrier. We’re reminded of that now by sightings of the Zeppelin now using the field to provide air tours over the Bay.
Towns here are not clearly separated, residential, shopping, office, and light manufacturing districts all run together, with little indication of where towns begin and end when driving along major roads. One of the towns Mountain View is quite close to is Palo Alto. I’m a member of the Friends Meeting (Quakers) there, and the meetinghouse is just five miles from our home. Christine attends Meeting with me on the first Sunday of the month. The second Sunday has an afternoon Meeting for Business as well as morning Worship. The third Sunday is the morning meeting of the Library Committee on which i serve. On alternating Monday nights we may attend a book discussion group; sometimes Christine’s commitments at Foothill keep her from joining us.
