just another day in ramona

When I first decided to take Clint up on his offer to give me an escape from a job I didn't enjoy & the upcoming Midwest winter, I imagined their house in a nice little culdesac somewhere with a little backyard, possibly a pool, & a back patio draped with some sort of flowering vines. Someone who I shared this vision with nearly laughed when I talked about moving out of the boondocks to highly populated SoCal. "They live down a dirt road & you can't see their closest neighbors. They have goats." Ah. And as I nauseously tried to keep down my lunch on the way to their house, experienced aforementioned dirt driveway, & learned about Max, the crazy English neighbor, I thought to myself, "Perfect." And I meant it.
It's a different SoCal than I was expecting, but Ramona, with her hitching post at the brand-new Starbucks, "Keep Ramona Rural!" signs, small town feel (I recognize my cashiers at Stater Bro's & I'm not going to admit how I know the daily turnover at the local Goodwill...) has weaseled her way into my affections.
Even if there are mornings like this one, where a scream from Becca brought the entire Califamily hurtling to the backyard. There, in their sprinkler-tended back yard, was not one, but TWO snakes. You know how I feel about snakes if you started reading this little blog in November when I moved here. Terrified. And horribly fascinated. I am not ashamed to admit I stood on a chair from the concrete a safe 20 feet away while Clint paused his conference call to dispose of the rattlesnake. The other snake was a king snake, which eats rattlesnakes, so he lived to die another day. You can bet I wore my boots the rest of the day and tread carefully.