Monthly Archives: May 2005

If The House Is A-Rockin’

Although I’ve not yet felt the earth move under my feet, apparently there are quakes of varied magnitudes all the time happening close to home. A peek at the recent earthquakes for California and Nevada will show all the activity in the last week, including location, seismic strength, and date/time. I’ve been told that constant minor quake activity is desireable, allowing us to avoid (or prolong the arrival of) The Big One. On Thursday there was a microquake (less than 2.0 on the Richter scale) in Morgan Hill, where my company is located. Yet no one seems overly concerned, and since I slept through two quakes last fall (that even hardened residents noticed), I’ve not paid much heed.

Then I read a fascinating article in San Francisco magazine about how direly unprepared we are for the next big quake. It explored the histories of the disastrous quakes of 1906 and 1989, highlighting the lessons to be taken from these events. He also creates a scenario of what the next Big One might do, and where; I’ve excerpted what caught my attention:

In Santa Clara County, nearly 100,000 people live in more than 30,000 soft-story units; in San Jose, a million residents, visitors, and commuters lie in the temblor’s path. Landslides and toppling trees bury sections of serpentine Highway 17, between San Jose and Santa Cruz. At its tail end, tearing through Morgan Hill and Monterey, the quake shakes sprawling suburbs and oceanfront homes that weren’t there a century ago.

…As the 100th anniversary of the worst disaster in U.S. history approaches—a disaster that affected the spot where you are sitting, your mate is shopping, your favorite restaurant is serving, your children are, hopefully, learning—it is high time to start putting the right questions to the right people: ourselves. In 1906, the quake was triggered by the opposing plates of the San Andreas Fault slipping past each other an average of 13.5 feet. According to measurements taken by United States Geological Survey global-positioning instruments in the High Sierra and the Farallon Islands, the fault’s North American and Pacific Plates have moved 7.5 feet closer in the last 99 years, increasing the pressure on the fault line. That does not mean an earthquake is due tomorrow, but it should grab our attention.

Sobering, indeed. Not one to leave the reader in despair, the author provided a handy list of what to do to prepare, and I read it over. So today my husband and I purchased three cases of water in gallon jugs, a total of 18 gallons, which is supposed to provide us (and the cats) enough water for four-to-six days in the event of service interruption. Here I present the list of advice from the article:

What You Must Do

  1. Go to www.72hours.org, a website developed by the San Francisco Office of Emergency Services, and implement every piece of advice. Lay in a week’s supply of water and canned food, plus a manual can opener, medicine, pet food, flashlights, cash, a transistor radio, and extra batteries. Buy a good fire extinguisher. And don’t sell that old bicycle.
  2. Bolt your home to its foundation, and make sure your water heater is strapped to the wall. If the structure needs diagonal bracing to strengthen it, compare the cost of getting it done with all the costs of not getting it done.
  3. Buy a $3 crescent wrench and learn how to shut off your gas. An earthquake will rupture gas mains, and if the electricity doesn’t go out, a spark could quickly ignite a fire. That’s the main fire danger in the Bay Area today.
  4. Plan a kid pickup. If you commute, you may have difficulty getting home, let alone picking up your children. Make plans now with someone near their school who will get your kids and take care of them until you can make it home.
  5. Stick a transistor radio in your car or briefcase. Telephone lines will be jammed or down, and cell phones may be unusable as well. Transistor radios will be our best means of getting information. Make sure you have extra batteries.
  6. Find a temporary home now. Figure out where you and your family will stay if your home is damaged or unreachable. A friend’s home is better than a shelter.
  7. Don’t be foolish. After reading this, bypass knee-jerk reaction #1: “I am going to sell my house and move.” Ditto for knee-jerk reaction #2: snoozing. Opt for a little-used smart reaction: preparing for the earthquake that will come.

The 72hours.org site has more detailed instructions of what to put into one’s disaster kit and how to create a “go-bag” in the event of an evacuation. It may seem pessimistic and a bit “Chicken Little” to focus on this, but the potential for such an occurrence is high enough to warrant preparation. Once supplies are laid in, I’ll go on with life feeling a bit more secure.

A Secret Cry

There is a secret cry inside every heart, sometimes so deeply hidden that it may not even be audible to the person who hides it. Whether they are complete strangers or someone you think you have known all your life, if you can hear a person’s secret cry then all your defenses and criticisms crumble. You become one with them and you cannot do anything other than love them as yourself.

–Natalie d’Arbeloff, Blaugustine

It’s Grrrrrrreat!

For a couple days I was technology-free, as my husband installed Mac OS X Tiger on my laptop. Now I can play with the nifty features.

During the installation, I’ve whiled away time by meeting friends for drinks after work yesterday, tending my garden, reading, and napping.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows unprofitable, sleep.

–Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969

Bringing Down the House

My sister-in-law sent an article to follow up on this post regarding housing in California; the quote below sums it up for me:

The San Francisco Bay area had the highest gap in the state at $92,930, where potential homebuyers had a median household income of $67,770 but needed qualifying income of $160,700 to purchase a median-priced home at $689,240.

—Majority of Californians make less than half the income needed to buy a home, Yahoo news

California: a country unto itself, where the middle class dream is ludicrous. (Heaven help you if you’re poor here.) Not yet home sweet home to me.

A New Perspective on Frustration With Inconsistency

However, for me, my frustration regarding my inconsistency or impermanence is an expression of how I suffer when I am unable to control both my situations and my self. I struggle to lock myself down in a fixed state. I imagine what qualities I would possess were I who I want to be and then I try hold that all in place in the hopes that I wonÂ’t have to wonder who I am. If I begin to doubt who I am and what makes me me, I can look to these labels that I attach to myself and feel reassured. I am a Buddhist. I am a vegetarian. I am a vegan. I am sensitive. I am someone who does yoga. I am someone with radical politics. And so on.

Is it any wonder that I am then inconsistent? After all, none of these things make me who I am. I donÂ’t even make me who I am.

—Auspicious Coincidence

Why We Had A Simple Wedding

I’ve been reading about Jennifer Wilbanks, the bride-to-be who ditched her betrothed and made up a story about being kidnapped. I was agog — actually scandalized — when I read that the affair involved fourteen attendants and 500-600 guests. I did not grow up dreaming about “my wedding day.” I think it’s important to honor and celebrate commitment, but a bride need not spend her parents’ retirement to have a wedding. Nor does a couple need to spend what might be their down-payment on a house, or part of their future childrens’ college fund, to mark the occasion. The amount of money some people spend on weddings is unconscionable. Here is a well-articulated perspective from Bonnie Erbe of the Chicago Sun-Times:

Couples who truly love each other are comfortable presenting their commitment to the world through a three-day saga that doesn’t force their families into Chapter 7. When confronted with buffets including abundant portions of pate de fois gras and waterfall bouquets of Epipactis Gigantea, I do not walk around drooling like other guests.

I don my skeptic’s hat and ask first, why the gaudy display? Then I tell myself I would have been much more impressed by a small, meaningful gathering and the announcement of a large donation to a worthy charity by the couple (or by the couple’s family). The latter, to me, would denote confidence by the couple, supported by a healthy side helping of class, style and surety of purpose.

–Bonnie Erbe, Runaway bride’s plight sheds light on lavish weddings

My sentiments exactly!

The Kiss

The photo below, taken after our wedding ceremony, is the one I chose to print as a 5 x 7 inch photo for our mantle. It sits in a handsome pewter frame with a Celtic design around the edge, a gift from my brother and sister-in-law, who were our attendants. I think my brother took this shot — it’s sweet, and captures the essence of the day. My husband is private and camera-shy; I’m only posting this photo because he’s not facing the camera!

a kiss

The Antidote

Despair, said Thomas Merton, is the absolute extreme of self-love.

If we believe in the self, and cling to the self, how can we not despair ? The self faces certain obliteration. It arises from and returns to nothing.

But if we see the conscious self as a construction — a local epiphenomenon in the vast, interconnected web of being — we might attain what he describes as “humility,” the antidote to self-love.

How do we accomplish this ? Meditation lays us bare to ourselves — sensation, thought, intention, all arise in the mind, as does the watcher, just a thought among thoughts.

Once we’ve seen this, how can we return to all those heady boasts and claims ? I am this. I am that. Oh, really ? Tell me more.

And, thus deflated, how can we keep hankering after stuff ? Or hating ?

If you want to call part of this process “God,” I have no quibble with you.

–Paula, author of Affiction

Raising the Roof

Once upon a time I was too poor to even dream of owning a house. Then I met my husband, and together we managed to buy one. And then we moved to California. Now we are too poor to buy a house.

My father sent an article from the Wall Street Journal (3/2/05) which identified the riskiest housing markets in the U.S. Of the ten metropolitan areas on the list, various locations in California occupy six of the slots. Where I live — San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara — has the second-highest risk index. What all does that mean, you ask?

The risk index identifies markets in which housing prices will probably decline significantly due to “continued housing price increases that are making the average home increasingly less affordable to the average buyer.”

On my daily walks I wander past houses for sale, and I pick up the fliers. When I saw the first one, I gasped. The house in the photo below started at $960,000+, and it sold for certainly more than a million. I call it “the million dollar baby.”

million dollar baby

I mean, sure, it’s a nice enough house. But it’s no mansion. And then there’s the house around the corner that just went on the market:

house for sale

Would you pay $860,000 for that house? Oh, it does have three bedrooms (probably very small) and two baths (it’s a “shotgun” house, one long building). But it’s nothing special, in my view, and it’s located on a heavily trafficked street. Then there’s a ramshackle, dilapidated house a few doors down from our house, complete with a wildly overgrown yard, that sold for around $680,000. It’s probably 1000 to 1200 square feet.

When we looked for housing, we practically cried over the prices. We are paying 30% more to occupy 40% less space than our Texas house — and this is just as renters. Despite this, renting is significantly cheaper for us at right now. Current prices being what they are, we have approached the idea of purchasing with caution. This article my father sent confirms my hunch — that prices simply cannot continue to rise, and purchasing in the next two years would be folly. We’re not even committed to staying here long-term.

Something else that the WSJ article pointed out was that San Diego has the nation’s most unaffordable housing based on annual income. To quote: “Based on a per capital income of $36,815 in the area, a 30-year mortgage on the median-priced home — valued at more than $578,000 — would consume about 90% of the average resident’s income.” There’s something wrong with a world in which this is the case.