I leave tonight (Saturday, 6 Feb) at 7:45p from Santa
Barbara Airport (thank you Salem for not making me fly from Burbank,
nearly 90 miles away). I will be gone until Thursday, 10 Feb 2005. Camille will be
flying down tomorrow and staying with us until Monday, 14 Feb. She will be with Toby
while I am gone. My parents generously let us borrow their travel trailer for Camille
to stay in while she is here. This beats the air mattress on the floor of the office,
I can tell you. I can’t believe that VS Live is starting on Super
Bowl Sunday. Not that I am that interested in the Super Bowl, but it is just surprising.
Monthly Archives: February 2005
Many pieces of good news
Last night, we had a ‘meeting’ with our neighbors to discuss the property line and the fence and all that is involved with now
knowing where our property line actually is. It went surprisingly well. They decided
not to put in a temporary fence (the idea was chain link), but are going to go with
a 6 foot solid block wall. They want complete control of it, so they are going to
put it inside their property line. They are going to stucco their side and the top,
and leave the other side for us to deal with. Fine with me. That is such an answer
to prayer. We thought they were going to insist that the hedge on their side come
down (which is their right, it is on their property) and then put up a chain link fence leaving our front yard very exposed. So I offered to help pull down the hedge at the end of February.
Another thing that came up at our meeting was that there was a third marker in the ground. I only knew about 2, but this third marker was near the corner of our house. The other 2 were at the ends of the lot, away from the building. This morning, when I looked at this new marker, it looked farther away from my house than 5.5 feet. When I measured from the house, it was 6 feet, 2 inches from my house. An extra 8 inches? If so, this would allow us to revert back to our original plan of constructing a shell around the existing house. When my dad came over later in the day, we ran string between the permanent, offical markers and saw that at the front of the proposed addition (about 15 feet back from the front of the existing house) there is 6 feet, 3 inches from the existing house to the official property line, and at the back of the existing house, there is 6 feet, 4 inches. This gives us 15 inches at the front, and 16 inches at the back to go out. Enough room to build the exterior wall without demolishing the existing wall. Praise God.
Finally, the reason my mom and dad came over was to deliver the 5th wheel travel trailer for Camille to stay in while she visits. They brought my uncle Mark who has a Class A driver’s license and is very good in the manuevering of the trailer. He got the trailer in place without any problems, although it did take a long time. Our back alley, Cedar Place, is not very wide, and he had to do some slick driving to back the trailer into the area behind our garage. We had to trim back the orange tree a bit to get the trailer to fit. Toby didn’t shed any tears. I think Camille will really enjoy having her own place to sleep when she needs it.
Praise God for his many blessings and answers to prayers.
Such a beauty!
Weezy at almost 9 months 
Coastal View Responses
A couple of weeks ago, I responded to a letter to the editor (LTE) in our local paper, the Coastal
View News. My expanded commentary can be found here.
In the first issue following my letter, David
Chamlee wrote a response to Bud Fink’s ‘Slippery Slope’ memo (“Bigoted, racist
and offensive”, the last LTE on the page). In
this week’s Coastal View, Bud Fink responds (“Dont play the racist card with me”) and James E. Finch also comments (“God bless freedom of speech”).
Although I won’t be sending a letter to the editor on this topic to respond to the responses, I want to state that I stand by my initial response. I fail to see any valid comparison between the ‘faults’ that Bud Fink ascribes to our Gov. (using the phrase ‘Girle Men’, increasing state debt, being a successful fund raiser, failing to commute the death sentence of a lawfully convicted murderer), and the ruthlessness with which Adolf Hitler set about to exterminate an entire ethnic group and other groups with which he disagreed. I also was amused at the back tracking that Bud Fink did with his first point. In the original LTE, Bud Fink originally stated that the Gov. ‘wants to disband the legislature …’ But in his response, Bud Fink tones down his rhetoric and instead makes the more accurate claim that the Gov. ‘Pronounce[d] the legislature unnecessary or at best part time’. A part time legislature sounds like a great idea to me, no matter which party controls it.
The public debate has sunk to name calling, so I am bowing out.