On Friday, April 13th movers came to our condo to move what was left in our condo. How did we get here? Well even today the transformation we are feeling from having your house and everything in it burn down impacts you in unknown ways. So with the Real Estate market strong, the fact that we, for the year we were home never unpacked our San Francisco stuff from Kenwood to San Francisco and that we were only visiting our condo we decided to see if we could sell it.
Let me backtrack for a moment #1) when we bought our condo I felt we over paid and would NEVER be able to sell it for what we bought it for - (I was WRONG). So we made the decision to sell, gave away a lot of the stuff we had there - dining room table and chairs, book cases, outside deck furniture, etc. etc. and as I mentioned about had the movers come on Friday, the 13th. Well by the end of April we had the condo, painted, new carpet put in and had it STAGED....look how beautiful it looked
LIVING ROOM
DINING ROOM
THE 2ND BEDROOM THAT WE SLEPT IN
THE MASTER BEDROOM IN THE BACK
ROOF DECK
So once it was ready it was Open on 2 Sunday's - April 29 and May 5th....and by June 1st it was sold/closed and we had the money in the bank.....crazy!
May 23, 2018
I decided I wanted to try and keep alive some of the plants we had in Kenwood. As you can see with the rain they were fine....I did figure out a way to make it happen but I wanted to show what it looked like on May 23rd
So now I'm the Manager of the PIRATES......my first meeting with the other AA coaches was the "draft". These kids are mostly 7 and 8 years old. I hadn't seen them try out so I choose to draft the kids with names I thought represented PIRATES.....her are a few, Dakota, Weston, Max, Channing, Maddox, Guthrie, Nico, Joey, Joshua, Gio, Jr.....
Below is the Opening Night ceremony called HAT Night, there were 350 kids in all the divisions of Sonoma Little League
I thought it would be fun, so I bought them all PIRATE eye patches for HAT NIGHT!
Maddox, playing with a worm he picked up from the grass.
After our "draft" I had to find a team sponsor for $400. Luck for me the first people I asked supported our team. Our friends Susie and Andrew, who started Tri-Tips Trolley were opening a new restaurant in Kenwood called TIPS ROADSIDE, they graciously sponsored our team!
Us and the Mets after one of our games
So what was our record? I'm guessing that we were probably about 8 and 8 (16 games and about 20 practices). Why guessing....well for kids this age 7 and 8 since they are still learning how to catch and thrown, how to run the bases, what a force out is, how to catch fly balls, basically EVERY SINGLE skill and rule the game is set up as follows. No inning can start after playing 1 hour and 45 minutes...the first 3 innings a manual pitching machine is used, the 4th inning + it's kid pitch. Each inning ends when one of the following occurs: The defensive team actually gets 3 outs OR the offensive team bats around OR the offensive team scores 5 runs.....we just count runs but did NNOT keep score.
A couple of my favorite things I did at practice...brought water balloons, of the kids to practice both soft toss and soft catch....bring the kids size popcorn of "Pirates Booty" to give out after learning a skill....and or course ice cream on our last practice.
Many people have asked us...are you going to rebuild? Let me start by saying that our initial intention was to rebuild. However as we started the process of dealing with the insurance company it was painful on many levels.
We've now settled with insurance and while we received everything we were insure for, given the magnitude of the devastation (5,200 homes burned in Sonoma county alone), the cost of contractors, the cost of labor, the cost of materials, especially now with the added tariffs we can not rebuild with the amount we received. Additionally, Beth has stated that its to emotional and to remote for her to live there again. So what's next.....not 100% sure, bit maybe we will simply sell the land and then figure out what to do next.
OK, this is enough on this subject....now some of the many positive things that have happened because of the fire.
Insurance is paying (for 2 years from the date of the fire) for a rental home. We chose a place a few blocks from Sonoma Plaza. The area is flat, we are close to the Plaza, that has many events. We are also close to food stores, etc. We'll see what happens!
February 22, 2018 - due to the fire we had to cancel a trip we had booked in October 2017 to go back to Valencia to see our friends and visit Morocco (the trip Beth was giving me for my 60th Birthday.)
SO this trip to Roatán, Honduras was our first trip post fire. Our intention was to be vegetables....read, lay on the beach, snorkel, scuba dive, eat, drink and basically do as much of nothing as possible.
Upon our arrival, while waiting for our transfer to the hotel I started with a Salva Vida beer in the Larry and Luey's "Fly High Bar" in the airport!
One of the many things we loved about our Kenwood home was our outdoor shower. Our room in the Grand Roatán Hotel had and outdoor shower!
We were in heaven....a wonderful location, we could snorkel right in front of our hotel which has an excellent beach....see some of the images below
I four scuba dives while in Roatán The Gibson Bight, El Aguila Wreck, Eddie's Trifecta (Jumping Jack-Punchers Paradise-Tabayann's) and El Aquario (below)
What did I see on all the dives? BTW I did all my drive with West End Divers
March 3, 2018
Right after awe returned from Roatán our friends Dory & Jim invited me up to their condo in Bear Valley Ski Resort just after a HUGE snow storm....it was fun skiing again!
March 17th, 2018
Well we moved into our rental home near Sonoma Plaza in December. Some of the benefits of losing everything in our home and renting here are our involvement with the local community.
Beth join the Free Spirit Gospel Choir at the Sonoma Community Center, which is about 5 blocks from our rental. As many of you know Beth LOVES to sing, her challenge had been that while she knew many songs, she only knew the first line of those songs....that has changed. The choir leader is an energetic women with quite a background, Cynthia Tarr. Cynthia has an amazing voice listen to this short clip. Plus her husband is Cliff Hugo, was/is the bass guitar player of Supertramp.
ME on the other hand volunteered to help as an assistant coach of a friend of mine's son in Little League. When I contacted the President to offer my assistance, he told me that Trent, was on his team and he didn't need anymore assistant coaches....BUT he had only 4 coaches for 60 kids in AA (ages 7, 8 and 9). He said having 15 young kids per team was too much and if I could MANAGE a team it would really help them, and reduce the teams to 12 kids per team. I told him that I did not have any kids, I did not know any other families in Little League and that I had only been an assistant coach on my niece's (Katherine) girls baseball team in Burlingame, 15 years ago. He said no problem we need you and we will help you get the support and help you need from the parents of the players.......SO I decided to take it on!
It was both tremendously rewarding, while at the same time very time consuming and quite stressful.
More to come about my Little League experience in my next post!
At the last minute, and with an invitation from Ophelia & Peter (Boise, ID), we invited Holly & Peter to cruise to see the Total Solar Eclipse. I drove, or rather hauled ass (Beth would not let me go over 100 MPH) to Ophelia & Peter's house for a 5 hour sleep before we got up to drive to Huntington, Oregon so we could see a 100% total eclipse - the guy who videoed the event was not far from where we where. It was one of the MOST AMAZING things I have ever seen/experienced.....so worth driving 20 hours roundtrip in 2 days for!
October 1, 2017
We supported and donated to a Fundraiser for the Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria. Who would have imagined only a few days later our lives and those of thousands of others would be changed FOREVER!
SUNDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 8th, 2017 - A NIGHT WE WILL NEVER FORGET FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was a nice weekend in Kenwood, CA. We had a guest from London, UK (Martin) staying with us. He is an associate with Andrew Krause in his business. We had Holly & Peter & Andrew over our house to have dinner with Martin this evening. I'm no calling it "THE LAST SUPPER".
Let me backtrack for a moment, this evening our neighbors across the street - Elie and Jeff had us over for drinks, before our dinner, to see their newly renovated kitchen. They had completed it while we were living in Spain and we hadn't seen it yet....it was nice.
Anyway everyone is gone now, Martin is in bed (he was driving to Sacramento on Monday for a conference)....Beth and I smell smoke from a fire, it's about 11:15pm...we turn on the TV and see that there is a fire in Napa called the Atlas fire...So it kinda makes sense that we would smell fire. Now this night the winds were blowing like we had NEVER experienced before, it was wild. In any case while watching the news about 11:30pm our electricity goes out. Again not too big a deal, we take our our flash lights and go to bed.
About 1:00am our niece, Ryanne who lives in Windsor, calls my cell phone. She tells us there is a fire on our street Lawndale Road and they are evacuating everyone. Ryanne's husband is a Police Officer, he had been home got a late night call to come in, so Ryanne knew something big was happening. She looked at Facebook, her hairdresser who lives on Lawndale posted the fire an evacuation news. So she called us!
When we woke up the NUNS FIRE was almost to our house. We had no time ti get anything out except our wallet, keys and ourselves. Ryanne saved our lives, we lost everything!
Steps up to what used to be our front door. At the top you can see our Ganesha statue. Ganesha is known as the remover of obstacles. I didn't think it/he would be remove ALL OF OUR OBSTACLES IN ONE NIGHT
Flower planter boxes and our house used to be behind this
Beth's burned BOLT, which was in the garage
It seem as though the house burnt from the inside out as you can see the pink stucco which fell over everything
The pool house is gone, the lounge chairs burnt, but of course the pool made it!
My most favorite place and what I miss THE MOST of everything we lost....my hot tub!
Here you can see the P.G.& E. transformer and pole that is where our garage used to be!
Skipping ahead the we elected to have the Government (Army Core of Engineers) clean up all the toxic and burnt materials and haul them away, here they are almost finished
Thursday, September 7th, 2018 from London, England
Well, well time flies doesn't it? It's hard to imagine that after blogging often while abroad as soon as I return home nothing, nada.....yet my (our) lives have forever changed dramatically within this past year and a half.
Here's a quick brief overview of our time home:
April 7th - 9th, 2017 - Jackie & Ryan's wedding in Alpine Meadows - Olympic Valley in Squaw Valley, CA
April 10, 2017 - San Francisco Giants - Opening Day 2017, hope is in the air!!!!
April 18th to April 24th, 2017 - Boston, actually Gloucester, MA we visited Beth's Dad Michael and spent quite a bit of time at Good Harbor beach. Awe also visited Plum Island for a "girls" weekend with Beth's Middlebury college girlfriends
June 9th - 12th, 2017 - Political canvassing in Modesto, followed by a trip to Yosimite
Modesto, CA is where the movie American Graffiti was filmed. Every summer they host a series of events including this muscle car show - https://americangraffitifestival.com/nmk/
