A stream runs through it
Friday evening, I drove down to Santa Cruz to visit Kam. She's house-sitting for a friend of her family's for the next few months, in a huge house on eight acres of land in the Santa Cruz mountains. With a hot tub. Oh, and there's a stream (or is it a creek?) that flows through the back yard. It's the kind of place that has a bridge on the property. And an elegant garden fence to keep the deer out. And lots of trees.
After some discussion, we decided that the moral of this story is "Be nice to rich people." (It could just be "be related to rich people," but if you're not nice to them, even your relatives (by birth or marriage) might not ask you to house-sit for them for several months.)
Reminded me, of course, of Tom Lehrer's bit about his friend who decided to become a doctor specializing in "diseases of the rich."
Note that if one is going to take this approach to fine housing, one should also have a flexible schedule. And either not a lot of stuff, or a good place to store most of one's stuff most of the time.
Another approach to fine housing, though, is simply to have a reasonably large amount of money 35 years ago, buy a reasonably nice house on some nice land, and then spend three decades making it much nicer by adding big glass-enclosed rooms to the house, installing skylights, setting up a heated towel rack, and so on.
Early Saturday afternoon, we wandered over to Zachary's for a late brunch. Zachary's (not to be confused with Zachary's Pizza, in the East Bay) is a longtime Santa Cruz institution; I went there a couple of times eight or ten years ago and loved it, but somehow haven't managed to go back since. I had come to the conclusion that my memory of it as the best breakfast place ever was probably exaggerated, and that I was inevitably bound to be disappointed when I finally went back, so I haven't gone out of my way to go there. But, wow. It was just as good as I remembered it. I still like Hobee's just fine, but Zachary's hash browns and scrambled egg (with cheddar and scallions) was the best breakfast I've had in ages, possibly in years. Highly recommended. (The above link is to a Christina Waters review in the Metro; I'm not normally a fan of Waters's reviews (she gushes about pretty much everything, including some restaurants where I've had lousy service and mediocre food), but in this case I agree with her.) Oh, and my breakfast was approximately twice as much food as I could possibly eat, for about $6.50. I took half of it home and had it for breakfast on Sunday; not quite as good reheated, but not bad.
The rest of the weekend was something of a blur. Did some lounging in the sun. Did some SH reading. Napped a little now and then. Did very little of the day-job work I needed to do, unfortunately. Sunday night, went up to SF for a dinner party with my co-workers (a going-away party for one of them combined with a 40th birthday party for another); was fine, but went way late.
Anyway, speaking of day job, I suppose I'd better go work on that.
