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November back in Nor Cal. It was the better of the two homes to find peace and recovery. My primary home back in San Diego always had so much fun going on but there were times when getting away from it was necessary. Not just to recover myself but to be with Brigit and Aaron after her heart attack. Add to it that her cat Mollie (or as I called her, Meowlie) was about a million years old and on her last legs…well, actually dragging her last legs, and we were quite the threesome. That kitty had a scrappy little soul, though, so was going to end up sticking around for months. As much as I wouldn’t have wished the situation, it was nice to not be the only one in rough shape. Me, a kitty on my lap and Brigit all trying to survive physically while poor Aaron was doing his best not to loose it while two of the main women in his life nearly died at the same time and were in the process of trying to recover. He wasn’t worried about Meowlie, though. He was convinced she was the devil. I just thought she was a zombie cat who liked a warm lap.
B booked us up at a local hippy spa in those mountains that we called our beloved home not long after my return. It was super cute with doggos everywhere, though a little less relaxing when the woman giving me a massage talked the whole time. Also when my broke-ass ended up forking out $30 more than expected for both of our tips and a book B wanted with the “I’ll pay you back” that’s more of a “thank you”. I didn’t pay rent when crashing with them so, besides being taken of guard by spending what was supposed to be food money, it certainly wasn’t a big deal. I actually wished I could have done more and was happy to be able to do it at least a little here and there. I missed having money to take care of and treat people with.
Focusing on recovery didn’t take over most of our time. My biggest ah-ha moment for the month was when a big Scooby-Doo mystery was solved about my having been seeing turkeys all over the place and wondering why people were letting them roam freely. Then there started being too many for me to think they belonged to one or two people. Turned out they were wild turkeys! The neighborhood was crawling with them. I never would have expected that in a mountain town and got a kick out of it. The little things, man.
In addition to that ah-ha moment, I was proud to have finally started meeting the goal of taking advantage of being all over the place driving for rideshare and enjoying what the different areas I was taken to had to offer. That included stopping one night for live music at the 7 Mile House in Brisbane and Levi and I going to see an art exhibit in Oakland called No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. An ironic name given that he thought our culture was being made a commercial spectacle of. I was also ecstatic to see one of my favorite bands of the moment, Hirie. A San Diego band! She was such a wee thing that I felt like I could barely see her and didn’t think she was a great performer. Her voice was what it was all about, though, so it was fine enough. Her band did decent to make up for the showmanship anyway and the opener had been just short of spectacular. The whole thing was pretty great minus so many people smoking weed in that venue called The Cat (in Santa Cruz) that I was a little stoned from the cloud in had created. Being a lightweight with the Mary Jane meant that I was kind of hazy by the time Hyrie had taken the stage. Makes me laugh now but I was pretty frustrated in the moment.
Aaron was turning 60 and I was torn about my plan to make my way back to SD right before. I wanted to spend Thanksgiving with the family. Something I’d kind of regret but also be thankful for given the holidays I had missed due to their living with Sean and probably would in the future. Brigit and I came up with a great idea, though. I took pictures of myself all over the property in different action poses. Hanging with Meowlie on the couch, plugging my nose while looking over the toilet, looking over his shoulder in his art shed, shaking my finger at him at his desk to stop working, having one of his cocktails and spying into the house from outside. I had frames delivered to her and she hung them in the right places on his birthday for him to find, video recording him as he did. It was the best and I’m sure the two of us had even more fun with it than he did.
There I was already heading back down south on the 26th, picking up Grandma in Glendale along the way with a sleepover at her house in order to get back to SD in time to meet the fam right by my house at Corvette Diner in Point Loma. My pop’s kind of place and also what had ironically become the same neighborhood where my nieces went to school. After lunch, it was back to my place solo. It didn’t take long for me to get back to the beach, of course, and for a visit at the Brick House the next day. It was wild how smooth the transition of switching between the two homes on opposite sides of the state had become.
Using the excuse of a holiday to wear my yellow sari at Thanksgiving, I had always been looking for a way to rationalize adorning myself in one of the four I had, always wondering how I had ended up buying so many in India when I only wanted one. Typical me. Well, typical me with Alexandra in my ear. It was nice spending the holiday with them, though I had felt frozen and uncomfortable at their place since Sean’s attack the day before I had left for my Costa Rica 40th birthday trip.
The rest of the month was back to the little things like getting glasses to help see at night (which didn’t really help because I didn’t need glasses), tripping out on the snow-covered mountains that I could see from the beach, being frustrated (like I was every year) that I couldn’t see the ocean from that beach because of sand-walls put up in the winter and going to a movie and sushi with Kati. She and her sister being the family that mattered most and the only one always there for me without the occasional disappearance.
