I grew up in the country. No house keys (the doors were never locked). No fences. No street lights. No grocery store within miles. No video games (or any videos for that matter). No cable TV. No cell phones. No computers. No TV dinners.

But we did have horse corrals nestled among gently swaying pines and shady oak trees. Trips to the library to fill up laundry baskets with books. Rented film projectors to see Dracula on a sheet taped to the wall. A community lake where I learned to swim. A sailboat in the garage.

We did ask our neighbors for eggs and sugar and advice. We knew the basic history of every family in the neighborhood. Kids walked from house to house to play, parents tracking us down by phone to come home for dinner. And we ate at the table.

Going to the movies was a real treat. Hearing coyotes howling in the night was normal. Snakes were common but still scary. Deer, rabbits, goats and even a stray horse now and then were regulars in the garden.

Community happened every day. Life, death, and other milestones were all celebrated. Every family was a different religion, or no religion at all. Political differences were discussed at birthday gatherings or the annual Women's Association Luau, but with a measure of respect for those involved in the conversation. Nobody even thought to build a fence around their yard.

I love the California State Fair. Year after year I look forward to the hot, greasy, dirty experience. Before leaving the house the morning of the fair, I make sure to don my most comfortable shoes and to tie my hair back in a ponytail (any hint of a part in my hair and my head fries like a lobster). I have gone to the fair with many people over the years, but most consistently its been with my friend Kelli on and off over the course of 25 years. Early on we were drawn to the midway and carnival games. Kelli is GREAT at the carnival games. Usually a very sweet person, Kelli gets this strange gleam in her eye when she focuses on the bottle or darts or whatever it is that she is trying to use to win a "free" stuffed animal and she has a great aim. As teenagers, we were entralled with the myriad of vendors hawking products we have never heard of (do we need a navel cleaner? how did we live without one before now?). As young adults, we became more acutely aware of the special exhibits and what they were trying to teach us (sometimes about the environment, sometimes about another country, always interesting) and the welcome air-conditioning these buildings provided. Now in our thirties, we gravitate towards the wine garden and partake of the excellent wine along with samplings of bread and cheese. One year we tasted more than 15 wines (getting ourselves tipsy in the process because we did more than just taste). We bought our favorite bottle of wine, saying we would share it during some special event during the year. I ended up drinking it with a boyfriend on New Year's (turns out it was a special event for me, but not so special for Kelli).

I have several singular memories of the State Fair. This is where I saw my first concert (Huey Lewis and the News) and where I first heard that Princess Diana was dead (as I got in the car to pick up the rest of my family at the gate).
I also have several memories that are generally the same, but quintessential to the State Fair experience. By far, these include the animals. I can't wait to see the baby pigs , lambs and cows (even though, again, they look remarkably the same from year to year). I love that the State Fair has maintained its farming roots. I love the rodeo and fancy horses. I love the frisbee dogs and the endless rows of Heifers. Ah...the aroma makes me feel safe. I am a kid again...everything is well in the world.

This is Victor and Diego. Together they have the energy of a tornado and a herd of stampeding elephants combined. Victor loves science--as demonstrated by his endless intelligent questions (Tia- how do cell phone towers work? Tia- what is the square root of 162?). Diego loves dogs...is PASSIONATE about dogs (when his cousin got a dog for Christmas last year, Diego called his grandparents and lamented "I didn't know you could ask Santa for a live dog!--he has not forgotten this...when asked by his grandma just two days ago what he was going to ask Santa for Christmas this year, Diego responded "a dog" without missing a beat). Victor is tall and cautious. Diego is thin as a rail and a bit of a brute...Diego is also prone to serious injury. To date, he has been flown by helicopter to a trama center for falling in a campfire pit, flung into the back of an ambulance with blood pouring out of his head after being hit by a clown with a pinata stick (no kidding) and almost trapped in the lift gate of a truck. Victor is a sports whiz. He could tell you, with extreme accuracy, almost all of the NBA players and what team they play on (updated from the recent trades and draft), most of the NFL and even some NHL. Both kids would happily spend days on end at their Grandma and Grandpa's house (grandpa has various names including Papa Bob and Grumpy, Grumpy Grandpa--the last being a name Diego christens him when grandpa finally can't take the extreme audio decibels when the kids are overly excited). Diego loves tomatoes so much that he named his hamster Tomato (one of the most unfortunate lives in the world is Diego's hamster whose innards tend to get squeezed a lot as he is being handled)--Diego will also go to great lengths to get his hands of pickled beets...his father had weird eating habits at his age too...Victor is the entrepenuer...during a recent, rather unsuccessful yard sale, Victor surveyed the situation and promptly trooped into the house, removed an orange juice container from the freezer and brought the orange juice to the edge of the driveway with a sign that read "Juice 25 cents"...his theory? He was going to get this yard sale started because he was so cute no one would be able to resist him...Indeed, Victor, indeed...

By special request...heeerreee's Seamus! Seamus is 8 months old and has 4 moms and 1 dad. His breeder moms (Kelly, Pat and Stephanie), the mom that taught him manners (Alison) and the only male influence on his life (Dave) who took pity on his whiny self too many times to count.

Seamus is what my mother would call a PIP...he burst out of his mother's womb with a smirk and immediately became the most annoying littermate in the pack. Seamus hogged all the milk. Seamus forced his way into the warmest places near his mother. Seamus ate the most tasty corners of the cabinets. Seamus always got the best toys. When a mystery illness swept through the litter, Seamus remained unscathed.

Seamus has an adorably cushy face and the sweetest demeanor...and periodically lets out a purely unholy screech that sounds like 4 women being murdered while screaming banshee's circle their heads with a soprano singing a sad aria in the background...especially when you touch his feet. Tibbies are known for having unique quirks, this one happens to be the loudest of any we have encountered. When he lets one loose, the immediate human reaction is to clap our hands over our ears and head toward the ground.

So if you hear unholy screams coming from our house, no worries...we are just trimming Seamus' nails...

This is “My Precious Truck” so dubbed because it is by far the nicest vehicle I have ever owned and it is all mine…or rather mine and the lien holder’s :P What I mean is that this is the first time I have researched, chosen and purchased my own vehicle all by myself. Up until this time, I have had family and friends intimately involved in my car buying experiences, and my vehicles have been largely modest, to say the least, and always a group experience in the decision making department. My first vehicle was literally a rotting metal heap on top of four wheels, purchased for $600 from a co-worker of my dads otherwise known as a 1976 Vega (for which I was very grateful that my parents purchased for me). I believe that everyone should have to drive a heap (and a stick shift) once in their lives, just so that you can always be grateful for anything better that comes along. My heap took $6 in gas for the week and got me through three years of high school, never once leaving me on the side of the road, and acting as an alternative ride more than once for friends who had better looking vehicles that tended to break down more often than “the heap”. In the course of my relationship with this car, the driver side door fell off and had to be welded back on (thus giving me the nickname “daisy duke” in high school because I had to climb in and out of the window in my Catholic school girl skirt) and I lost all ability to use the stereo speakers that were never properly installed, but rather placed gingerly on the back seat where some unlucky friend had to sit on them, typically causing the loose wiring to dislodge on a regular basis until they were frayed beyond repair. For my high school graduation, my parents took mercy on me and bought me a lovingly-used Toyota mini-truck that I cherished for years to come.

From there followed a compact Mercury Topaz from my grandmother when she decided to quit driving and from there a Honda Civic from my best friend. Now this Honda had a history because mere days after my best friend bought the car, my then sixteen-year-old brother plowed into it with the family van, causing thousands of dollars in damage. The car was fixed and my friend drove it for years, adding all the little details that make a car an extension of how cool you are…rims, fin, window-tinting, etc…this car had it all and it was way flashier than I am (teenagers regularly tried to engage me in street races). It was also cursed. I swear, from the minute my brother crumpled that fender, that car hated my family. It was broken into four times…three times for the stereo and once just for a joy ride and it was the third car in a slow-speed 4 car pile-up one day on the way home from work. After that, I put my foot down, got rid of the car and bought another Honda Civic, this time a sensible, completely un-cool, 4-door from another close friend. I prided myself for the longest time that I had this really economical car that I could park anywhere because I didn’t care a whit about it AND I wasn’t contributing to our dependency on foreign oil—causing kids in Honduras to clean their feet with gasoline every night because that was the only way to get the black tar off their feet from all of the American drilling on their native land (I am still having mental issues with this) because I wasn’t like all those irresponsible SUV people (selfish beings!). Then my sensible car started to age, and it came time to start making decisions about what to do…start taking it to the dealer on a regular basis for check-ups (out of the question...you know they just rip you off!) or buy another car.

So, in typical fashion, I played with fate and drove my car with no professional mechanical supervision (with my dad bailing me out once for a hydraulic problem) and researched trucks and other vehicles to the best of my attention span for the subject (which is about 3 minutes a week) until I finally came across this lovely truck and it was love at first sight. .. I have always loved trucks…they fit my 5 foot 10 inch frame so much better than a car (particularly a Honda!). I pay for that love (don’t you always) in money and guilt (I am now no better than that gas-guzzling idiot Lincoln Navigator driving down the street), but right now I don’t care. I am simply basking in the glow (isn’t it just adorable). A friend of mine insists that you should always name your vehicle and then it will protect you (including never breaking down) so I briefly toyed with the idea of calling her “Delta the Doublecab” but then this friend bought a new car with an alignment problem that even the dealer hasn’t figured out how to fix, so I am thinking I’ll just stick to “My Precious Truck”.

This is Claire...she's from New York. When my roommate first brought her home, I fell over her at least 2 dozen times the first week. I thought it was because I was a klutz (I am, but as it turns out, Claire simply has a knack for not adhering to other people's established boundaries). I stepped on her enough to convince my roommate that I had somehow "twisted" her upper arms into deformity (also turns out...that is just how Claire's bones grew). Claire has a neverending list of "special needs"...she whines incessently at any toy that is out of reach (usually way way back behind the 300-pound armoire that requires rigging the swiffer mop into a retrieving device to successfully remove), she cannot stand to be on the opposite side of a gate that reveals any action whatsoever, no matter how mundane and she elicts a high-pitched scream--part bark, part whine, part growl--and careens off the couch with her teeth bared any time another dog walks within any distance (the actual footage appears arbitrary) that she considers unacceptable of the 8-foot long couch that she considers "hers". Lucky for Claire, she is willing to share the couch with me...

I have the capacity to buy more books in one week than I could ever hope to read in a year. That, of course, does not include the literally hundreds of books I already have at home. The problem is, I have never felt guilty buying a book. Not even when I browsed used bookstores as a dirt poor college student knowing that any book buying that day was going to require asking my parents for food money later in the month. I always bought the book. This has caused tremendous hardship over the years. For instance, no one wants to help me move (which I have done several times), I have limited space for any other possessions and the dust that settles cozily inside the spine of the jacketcover makes my lungs seize up on a regular basis when dusting.

But the most difficult of all are all those books just sitting there waiting to be read. This is a picture of my "summer" reading bookshelf. You will soon see why summer is in quotes. The titles on this bookshelf include the following:

100 Years of Solititude-Marquez
You Can't Go Home Again- Thomas Wolfe
A Room of One's Own- Virginia Woolf
The World Is Flat- Thomas Friedman
A collection of short stories by Richard Ford
My Life--Bill Clinton
The Bostonians- Henry James (Washington Square is also on the shelf)
Othello-Shakespeare (I have read it, but my roommate assigned it as summer reading to her students and I couldn't resist reading it again with them)
The Tibetan Book of the Living and the Dead
Reframing Organizations- a book on leadership
Name All the Animals- a memoir of a woman who loses her only sibling when she is still a teen herself
A Thread of Grace- Russell
A book on Amish Society (I was recently in Pennsylvania and became fascinated)
Coast of Dreams- a historical account of Ca by Kevin Starr, the recent librarian for the State of CA...I got to see Mr. Starr speak recently at a leadership conference and was taken by his perspective of Ca lifestyle
Going After Cacciato- Tim O'Brien
The Big Book of Photography

Of course, this shelf does not include the books that I am currently reading (I tend to read 3-4 at a time because you never know what your going to be in the mood to read, and heck, there are so many of them!) The "summer" part of the bookshelf is in quotes because how can I possibly read all of these books during the summer? So the name of this bookshelf migrates with the seasons...soon, it will be the "autumn" bookshelf and I will add some basketball themed titles to the shelves. Hopefully I will have subtracted a few by then as well. The irony is that I can now afford all the books I want, but the job that pays for them also takes time and energy. My solution to that? Buy more books!...and keep reading. So today, I bought what looks like three excellent choices. One is about a Harvard-educated guy that became a cop for the NYPD, another is about a doctor that is changing lives in Haiti and a third is about the odd and traditional world of horse racing...I am making room for them on my shelves right now...

Why is it that when a guy loads four sofas (and an ottoman) on top of a bunch of junk and straps it all down with 2 bungee cords, it is considered an "accident" when they all fall off and hit the cars behind him?

This is Simon...to date he has eaten the following (that I know of) in random order: his own hair, his own poo, a birth control pill (mine), several hair scrunchies (also mine), a book (roommate's), part of a lipstick (mine again) and about 4 pounds of toilet paper...this has resulted in no less than 4 trips to the vet for x-rays all to reveal excess gas in the intestines...I now know the inside of my dog as least as well as the outside.
The diagnosis from the vet? Simon has a sensitive stomach... Lesson Learned?...eating toilet paper causes bad gas...