2014 Wrap-Up

If 2013 was a life-changing year, then 2014 was the aftermath. 2014 was the year of taking stock and moving forward.

I spent much of the first third of the year, dealing with my aunt's estate. This was emotional and stressful. It was my first experience with selling a house. Luckily, Dan found an amazing team of relators (Team Kociela with First Team in Tustin), who took care of everything and made the process as painless as possible. The house sold fast and for well above asking. My aunt and uncle had bought their house before I was born and it was very hard for me to let go of a home that held so many happy memories. Luckily, a nice family with a new baby bought it and at the risk of sounding sappy, I hope that they fill it with love and wonderful memories of their own. I especially hope that they have epic pool parties!

After selling my first home, I turned around and had my first experience buying a home. Dan and I are now proud owners of a house in Big Bear Lake. We have spent many weekends enjoying our mountain retreat and we have already made friendships with several locals. We are starting to feel like part of the community.

I spent about four months working as a professional dog walker. Unfortunately, the company that I worked for, folded. However, during the short amount of time that I worked, I got to know two of the sweetest dogs around, a Golden Retriever Puppy named Busy and an energetic Labradoodle named Milo. My stint as a dog walker nearly turned me from a cat to a dog person. Nearly.

In 2014, we bought a Jeep Wrangler and took up a new hobby, Jeeping. We attended the Big Bear Jeep Jamboree and Big Bear Forest Fest. It's amazing how many trails are in our new backyard. We learned the real definition of JEEP ( Just. Empty. Every. Pocket.), as we got the bug to modify it, until it looked nothing like it did when we purchased it. We are looking forward to more events and modifications in the new year.

Between heading to Big Bear and our other travels, it felt like we were never home in 2014. We spent fifteen days, over four separate trips in Las Vegas, which included Jeeping in the Valley of Fire for the first time. Beautiful! We did a weekend in Chicago and we spent our first anniversary in Lake Tahoe, a place neither of us had visited previously. Our summer trip to Europe included three weeks in England and a little over a week in Sweden. It was great to finally see the country where my stepchildren live and to see their home/school/city. I ate Reindeer for the first time. Rudolph is delicious!

Life was filled up with other things, so I didn't go to as many plays, concerts or movies as I typically do. I did manage to see Josh Ritter, The Airborne Toxic Event and Britney Spears. The first two were phenomenal and the third was much better than I had anticipated. I finally got to see a touring production of The Book of Mormon. Hilarious!

I read fifty-two books and discovered both Booksparks and Netgalley.

I've finished five writing classes towards my Fiction Certificate at UCLA Extension. More exciting than the actually classes, is I've made progress on a novel idea that I've been contemplating for years. 2014 has been creatively, very productive.

2014 started off a mess, but the maelstrom has subsided and I'm entering 2015 calm and focused. I look forward to 2015!

Moonridge Construction - Guest Writer: Dan Germain

In 1991 the construction started on our second home in Moonridge, which is in Big Bear Lake, California. As we purchased the home from the original owners, they were kind enough to give us photographs of the original construction.

As far as I am aware this is probably the earliest photograph of the house under construction. What we are looking at here is the main staircase which is set in concrete and surrounded in brick, leading up to the wooden deck which in turn leads to the front door.

These are the concrete foundation piles which are 6 feet tall and 12 inches across. The entire house and deck rest on these piles, so it's obviously very important to make sure that the earth around these piles remains in good shape. When we purchased the property, 4 of the piles had to be dug out and recapped due to slippage and erosion in the soil from earthquakes and water. Although it sounds alarming, this is a routine procedure for houses of this type and location.

This photograph shows the entire location of the deck foundation with main staircase, basically finished. The other half of the staircase will be completed in wood as part of the deck construction.

When I think about it, this is probably the very first photograph of the construction as it show the driveway without its concrete and a nice shot of the french drain, now buried deep beneath earth behind the retaining wall.

Interestingly, the truck is parked where the entrance to the garage has been constructed. It's a shame that there are not any photographs in my possession of the garage foundations as that is where the water lines and electricity enter the building and it would have been interesting to see them before they were all covered in concrete!

I really like these two photographs as they clearly show that the house in fact a perfect square shape. The tree in this photo now grows up through the middle of the deck.

When you walk into the house today, you would be convinced it is twice a wide as it is deep, but it's only when you see the plans that you realize it is indeed a perfect square.

One of the biggest and most important features of the house are the large retaining walls which basically keep everything on the hill from sliding down into the street below. There are actually two sets of walls holding back all the earth on the mountain. This is the wall closest to the street, as you can see it's of fairly solid construction and survived the 1992 earthquake.

It's quite interesting to see this photograph as the wooden frames are nothing to do with the main rooms of the house at all, they are just the beams which form the walls of the basement. The horizontal beams are at the level of the first crossbeams which will provide the strength for the wooden floor boards to be placed on (that's the ground floor in layman's terms).

I guess because the original owners primary residence was far from Big Bear, the next photo in the construction collection is of the completed house itself. Those tiny pine trees in front of the deck now tower proudly above it, higher than the handrail. It looks like the top set of windows are parallel with the large bottom window , when in fact the are cut out of the central supporting wall, 50% back from the front of the house.

One thing to note is that the bear, with it's own purpose built stone seat and lamp was at the house from the very beginning. The rather pot-bellied bear still sits on his log today and has is own hat, fishing rod and bag, which I'm sure we'll cover on a later post.

Dan's 40th Birthday Big Bear Weekend- Day Three

We began our last morning in Big Bear with breakfast at the Grizzly Manor Cafe.

The Grizzly Manor Cafe is a small restaurant with a ton of character. The interior of the cafe is covered with drawings, stickers, signs and business cards. Unfortunately, I didn't have any blog cards on me, otherwise I would have put one up on the wall!

I took some pictures of the menu. I like the warning regarding special orders and I heeded it!

Grizzly Manor isn't the only Big Bear cafe that has coffee cups supporting local businesses. I love it.

Dan drinking coffee out of a First Mountain Bank mug.

Dan loves pancakes and we read that Grizzly Manor Cafe had enormous ones. The pancake came and it covered the plate!

I don't normally order waffles, but it seemed like the thing to do here. Breakfast was delicious in this quirky establishment. I highly recommend checking out Grizzly Manor Cafe.

We had about an hour to kill before our Action Zipline Tour, so we drove around to the other side of the lake to check out the observatory. Unfortunately, we found out that the observatory was closed to the public this summer. Hopefully it will be open on our next visit, as it is something that we would love to check out.

Bear art is all over Big Bear and we contemplated buying a piece. Some of the stores had wooden bears that were hanging off window sills, like they were taking a peak inside of a house. I must have one.

It finally came time to begin our Action Zipline tour. The tour began at their office, where we filled out waivers and we were given a short briefing from the office staff.

Action Zipline  Office, Big Bear. — Action Zipline Office, Big Bear.

We were told that cameras and cell phones were not allowed on the tour due to safety reasons. Also, they wanted us to leave all lose articles, specifically car keys, in lockers that they provided at the office. The lockers had a key with a wrist band and felt secure. I don't mind that they wanted us to leave things behind, although I thought that it was funny that they specifically mentioned that we could take our wallets to tip the guides. I was planning on tipping the guides of course, but if things falling out of pants was such a big problem, wouldn't wallets be included in that?

Our group had about fifteen people and they took us up the mountain in two vans. It was approximately a twenty minute drive. At the base of the zipline camp, we were outfitted with helmets and our zipline harnesses. The four guides introduced themselves and helped us get into our gear. We were then taken in two groups further up the mountain in military style vehicles. The bumpy ride was fun!

We did nine ziplines, most of which I found to be completely terrifying.

I was absolutely trembling after the first two lines and nearly backed out when I got to the third. What made me jump off of the third was a rude woman in our group threatening that she would push me, if I didn't get on with it. Nice. She was scared of heights and it was hard to have sympathy towards her after that comment.

The heights didn't bother me. I also trusted the guides and the safety equipment. What got to me was the speed and worrying about having to reach up and use my gloved hand to brake myself. I don't really enjoy fast movement and was completely intimidated by the speed in which I was hurling towards the guides waiting to catch me if I didn't properly brake.

This was 100% outside of my comfort zone and although I am glad that I tried it, I would never do it again. I was actually supposed to go on a zipline tour with my mom in Maui about six months before she passed away. The day of our excursion the winds were too high and it got canceled. My mom was the daring one in the family. I inherited none of her love of adrenaline rushes. She went sky diving for her sixtieth birthday and loved every minute of it! My mom would have been proud that I went through all of the ziplines without bailing.

Action had a professional photographer on the excursion and we were encouraged to let go and wave. All of my pictures were terrible as I refused to relax and had a look of complete fear on my face. They managed to get one good shot of Dan. He looks like he's having fun!

Just like the Segway tour, it was a good idea to wear bright colors. The bright colors really pop in the pictures. Even though we didn't purchase proof of me in action, we did decide to buy a nice picture of Dan and I together.

Action Zip Line Tour! We still had two more zip lines to go when this shot was taken.

I'm not going to deny it, I was happy when the tour was over. It was terrifying! If you decide that it is something you would like to try, I would definitely reccomend Action Ziplines, as the guides were fantastic and we thought that it was a good value for an adrenaline packed morning.

After the hot and dusty excursion, we were parched and desperate for a beer. We headed to Village Pizza for lunch.

Oddly enough, our last meal in Big Bear was the only one that we thought wasn't a very good value. The prices were more akin to Los Angeles restaurants, so maybe it was a good way to ease back into reality. We each had a large beer and shared a medium pizza, which was more than enough food for two. Good pizza with loads of tomato sauce, toppings and a thin crust.

On our way out of town, we made one last stop, The Magic Mountain Recreation Area. Magic Mountain, not to be confused with the Six Flags chain, is a small family fun zone with a water slide, horse rentals, an arcade and an alpine slide ride. In the winter they offer snow tubing. Dan really wanted to go on the Alpine Slide, so we bought five tickets for twenty.

Tip- Don't store the tickets in your pocket. We used two tickets and lost the rest. Dan bought a single extra ticket to ride the slide a second time, so that I could record him coming down.

The best part of the Alpine Slide is the ride to the top. The transportation is via ski lift chairs, which gave us great views and made the entire experience last twice as long.

The lift has hooks on the sides that carry the "sleds" back up the hill. The speed of the sled is controlled with a hand brake. I took it slow down the slide, but Dan flew down!

I love this shot that Dan took of the slide. There are two tracks, one for slower sliders and a fast track.

On Dan's second ride, I took a short video of him finishing the track. It looks like he's moving slowly, but it's only because this is the part of the track where he is required to slow down to prepare for stopping.

Dan's 40th Birthday Weekend was a huge success and we were sad to drive home. Hopefully we will return to Big Bear soon!