When we were looking at houses 15 years ago we drove down to Gilroy to see a new development called San Vicente. It was Easter Sunday and the sales office was closed. We came back the next Saturday and walked through the models. We decided that we liked the middle of the three sizes, and it was at a price we could manage. Just past the models there was an unfinished house of that size. We went in and spent some time wandering through the house. It felt right. We went back to the sales office and put down a deposit.
One of the very first decisions we made was that Terry got the walk-in closet and I got the loft for my office and study. To this day my loft is a comfortable, safe space where I enjoy spending time. It is where I am as I type these words.
I still take the time to be thankful and grateful for the gift.
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It’s hard to believe that it was fifteen years ago this week that we moved into our house.
We had been renting in Mountain View, it was the height of the dot-com boom, and our landlord wanted to raise our rent by (note: “by” not “to”) $650 a month. He did us a big favor and made us get serious. Gilroy offered us a new house that was both nice and affordable.
The neighborhood has changed since 1997. Across the street from us two houses are still occupied by the families that bought them originally, though one has been split by divorce. A lot of the other homes have seen turnover. What was once in large part a Silicon Valley bedroom community is no longer that. There are more working class residents, and more multi-family or multi-generation homes, as has become common due to the economy and the housing market. Two doors down, the original buyer had moved back a while ago after being away for some time, running what amounts to a boarding house with a variety of unsavory characters, having sadly been forced into that predicament by her husband’s chronic alcoholism.
In general, though, it is still a good neighborhood and we like being here. While in an ideal world we would prefer to be up on the Peninsula around Mountain View or Palo Alto, the chances of that are not great. And we really do love our house. We have our landscaped back yard, we re-did our bathroom counters some time back, and of course there is our kitchen remodel of five years ago, which we still look at with appreciation and considerable enjoyment.
But 15 years, it really is hard to believe.
It is hard to believe that Tasha is eight years old today.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that we brought Tasha home from the shelter on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 2005. We immediately took her to our vet, who said that she was about a year and a half old. We decided to declare her birthday to be May 1st, in honor of my grandmother, whose birthday was 
on that day.
Tasha is still going strong. She still has amazing energy and can still make some incredible leaps when excited. She has to have her two walks a day and her routine is important to her. She is still as affectionate as ever and is a central part of our lives.
We’re delighted that she had developed some great social skills, thanks to the good folks at Dog House Inn, and she’s happy to go there for daycare and boarding.
She is our girl and we really do lover her.
I’ve written about how much I like The Bridge on XM radio. It’s seventies soft rock: the music of James Taylor, Carly Simon, Simon & Garfunkel, CSN (and sometimes Y), etc. To the same degree that I like it, Terry hates it. “Fingernails on a chalkboard,” she once called it.
In my car I make sure to change the station when Terry is along. But Terry has programmed it into the radio in her car. I try not to abuse the consideration too much.
But, really, I see that as a sign of a relationship built on mutual love and consideration. A pretty good place to be, I’d say.
Thanksgiving weekend we were sleeping in. Terry got up to give Tasha her “crunch”— her dry food, which she gets later in the morning after her canned food — and came back to bed. Shortly thereafter Tasha came back into the bedroom and thudded onto the bed. She looked over at me and then headed for the foot of the bed. I said, “What, no kisses?!” Tasha came back over to me and licked my face then did the same to Terry. She then settled down at the foot of the bed.
Don’t tell me our pets don’t understand language!
I hope you will indulge me my annual doting on our child, but I have to take note of the fact that it was six years ago today, All Saints’ Day, that we brought Tasha home from the shelter. We had picked her out and paid our money about a week earlier, but had to wait for the weekly spay and neuter day before we could bring her home.
The vet said that she was about a year and a half, so we designated her birthday as May 1, in memory of my Grandma Monaghan. That would make her about seven and a half today. While we’re fortunate that she long ago abandoned her puppy habits, such as going through trash cans or shredding rolls of toilet paper or paperback books when she was of the opinion we had been gone too long, she still has the same high level of energy that she had when we brought her home.
She is integral to our family and a central part of our lives. We’re so fortunate to have her.
My brother loves to give me a hard time. He’s the younger one, and I think it’s just genetic.
When we were down visiting him, my sister-in-law and my dad, I pulled out my not-so-smart almost Android phone to take a quick look at Facebook updates and he immediately began to harass me. He said that he had promised that he would not give be a bad time this trip (my sister-in-law agreed that he had so pledged), but my action put an end to that promise. He then gave me a verbal hand slap every time I reached for my phone after that.
My brother is not a technophobe, but he rarely uses email outside of work and his cell phone is strictly for voice communication. He said that his belief was why use email or text messaging when you could talk. Which would be fine, except that he often does not return my phone calls, and when he does he tends to leave a voicemail on my cell phone, even though I keep trying to explain that my cell phone isn’t on unless I am out and about. If I’m home, it’s off.
But that’s my brother. I suspect that if I had never pulled out my cell phone he would have found another reason to abandon his pledge not to give me a hard time. But I really can’t blame him. It’s got to be genetic.
Most, in fact I would guess all, couples who have been together for any length of time have words and phrases that contain a very specific meaning. Terry and I have our share.
One of those is “shoes.”
It began some time ago when my gaze lingered a little too long on a very fit young woman in shorts and a skimpy top who was jogging down the street. In an attempt to recover I told Terry, “Oh, uh, I was just admiring the fact that she had some real high-quality running shoes.” To which Terry responded something to the effect of, “Yeah, right.”
But the term “shoes” stuck. As in “Were there a lot of shoes at the gym?” Or, “There should be a lot of shoes at the art and wine festival.”
The thing is, of course, that Terry gets the benefit when we get home.
Tasha has always been a demonstrative dog. She will greet us enthusiastically when we return home, even if we've only been out to lunch. Though that's not always the case. One weekday late morning I got back from four days away at a conference in Texas. Terry was out somewhere and Tasha was asleep in my recliner. She didn't move, but just looked up at me as if to say, "Tasha's nap cannot be disturbed," then put her head down and went back to sleep. But that's the exception.
This past week Terry was at a sales conference outside Boston. Her return flight got into San Francisco at about 10:40 p.m. Friday night, and it was after midnight when she walked in the kitchen door. Tasha greeted her enthusiastically. I woke up when Terry turned on the upstairs hall light. A moment later Tasha leaped up onto the bed with a thud, and then dashed over to me and gave me a big, wet lick of her tongue on my face to tell me, "Mommy's home!"
That's our Tasha.
