I wrote to support, I'll let you know.

@ollbobbi..great. We can "do" lunch in Old Town Sacramento near Amtrak. I can pick you up.

Darzy and Bob, I am so jealous! You have to take a group houzz pic! :)

Darzy, AWESOME!!! Hubby just told me there's an Amtrak station right here in this pathetic little town!

MP, We can save you a doggy bag! It seems like everything you like is here in California, do you stay in SC because of family?

It's a little better, www.normwaltersconstruction.com

Two thumbs up, Norm!!!!

Here's one for Dave, or possibly Norm? https://www.houzz.com/discussions/polycarbonite-roofing-dsvw-vd~433200

Norm...your website looks great ! Amazing how the color change really make it more polished looking. Like painting a fresh new wall color. :)

norm...mucho better :)

i may have a dilemma for us tomorrow....a real house suggestion one...headed to my friend's house in a few! :)

bob, if i could afford to live in california i would....trust me...and i would also have tobe able to afford to fly back and forth to see the grand chica.....malorie really killed my plans on escaping! ha! it's always somethin!!!!

MP, trust me, I understand. Everything is so expensive here! Ok, I was just wondering :))

DD is in San Fran now and having a great time. She ran a half marathon and the route included the Bridge. That was a hill run.

bobbi, heard that your gas prices are over the top.

Judy, the gas prices are somewhere between $3.60 and $4.00 per gallon, what are yours?

Well, it is 6 PM as I type, and 95 degrees. And it will get hotter! We have not reached our hottest temps of the day yet, and it's only April. Somebody pray for me!

MP, I just saw the listing you posted. That house would easily be $700-$800,000. here. At the height of the housing boom, there was a 500 sq ft 1/1 home with multiple offers over $500K - BEFORE it hit the multiple listings!

Morning all, lots of chatter today and I am sooooooooooooooo jealous of you lot getting to meet up.

mp I can't believe a house can only cost that much, surely it would cost that much just to build that place. You would only buy a small vege patch here for that money.

I see our tyre changing post got deleted too. I can almost see Disney making a cartoon here, someone puts up an alarm and like a plague of locusts over we go and swarm. Can't you just see it to the tune of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

BOBBI!!! I have spoken to you before about this, Christmas in shorts and flipflops (aka boardies and thongs) is NOT BORING!!! Don't forget you can only pile on so many clothes till you can't move and olldcan's post one time about her eyeballs freezing finished me.

We are supposed to be having 3 days of beautiful sunshine, 24-25 deg and the humidity has gone. Perfect autumn weather!!!

Oh, and I've won the battle of the moths.

Good job on the moths, roo! A plague of locuts, huh? So true, so true. But some of these posts just ask for it, don't ya know. And don't get jealous about the lunch just yet, it's eight months away for heavens sake! We'll save you a doggy bag, too.

Thanks Bobbi, you can have a glass of wine for me too.

BTW - where is Dave? He has been MIA for 2 days now.

Roo, what are you trying to glue?

nomee - bobbi is trying to glue flowers to the underside of her glass table. Superglue always works for me - generally manage to glue my fingers together too, so not sure if it is safe with Bobbi.

Either a gel type superglue, or a five minute two part epoxy.

Ooooh, so does the gel type superglue not stick fingers together? You are talking to someone here who failed pre-school!! I will have to look out for that, didn't know there was a choice.

Night before last is a long time in the henhouse. How fantastic you have such a good report from drs today, can't tell you how thrilled I am for you and being able to get off even one drug is truly a milestone. Sounds like you are going from baby steps to giant strides.

Will have to Google Earth to see the area you speak of.

Of course you know what chooks are like in the henhouse - what we really want is the lowdown on your date with Carolyn. Fess up - you don't waste any time do you!!!

Just love Google Earth, wow, that was some drive. That coast road looks so beautiful and I have seen a lot of photos of the spectacular views. I note there is a Whale Watching Inn??

And it is a pro thing about Houzz...I hope! i accepted the invite WITH Darzy! kimdee, you can come visit NorCal anytime. I have a golf tournament happening in September...wanna? I don't play...anything! Bobbi..sorry for the heat wave...nothing but more coming! Your heat brings in my ocean cool...average man temp in Sonoma County? 65 degrees, just like SF. But we have more extremes of highs and lows. Snow on Mt. St Helena in January and 108 in Healdsburg in July. My Russian River area only hits about 95 tops for a few days a year. Froze pretty good this winter..lost all my Meyer lemons. Roses burst out today and the perfume just about knocked me down...

Dave, Aussies are notorious stirrers, don't mind me, it is in the blood. If you were here you would never live it down. I'm partial to a game of golf, haven't played for 50 years or so, but I'm up for anything sporty. These days I'm just pretty good at playing the fool. I would so love to get over there and catch up .............one day ................. maybe.

olldroo...nothing to fess up to I hope. I am a confirmed bachelor/monk. I have good friends that are women and no tension in the non-face area. I'm done with relationships and romance. It has never worked too well despite multiple efforts. I'm too co-dependent and enabling...have a rotten picker. Now I'm just plain selfish. I'm done moving my clothes out of my closet and making room in my home. I like my Boho/eclectic man cave and my horses, cats, soon to be dogs, goats and chickens (and my tools and books..and come June...red wine and whiskey). I'm a workaholic and like myself that way.

Mate, I'm just pulling your leg.

Driving Hwy. 1 doesn't allow much sightseeing for the driver. The road is crazy twisting and sometimes no guardrails with a 750 ft cliff edge. I was pushing the entire way up this morning..hitting 70 mph on the straightaways and never less than 10 mph over the recommended speed....more like 20 most of the time. I drive about 25K to 30K miles a year, mostly on back roads...never drive the speed limit and have had a couple of terrible head on collisions...neither of which were my fault. Both I got out of my truck and asked the other driver if they were OK. No fear. Death is always around my corner. Roo..anytime you want to visit. Let me know/!

In other words, if the plane trip doesn't get me - you will??? LOL.

Just read that back to myself and figgered nobody will want to visit if they have to ride with me!

You are cracking me up - I thought that might have been the general idea.

Hwy 1 California....twisty, turny gorgeous ride I've done many times..with no collisions. ;) LOl...Ironwood....I'll "ride" with you. Can't live forever. :)

NorCal sound like summer in Edmonton -- all year long. Our summers are perfect (but short) with temps around 20-25C, though we can get 'hot' stretches in the low 30s (too lazy to do the conversion, sorry). The days are lonnnnnng, and the sun doesn't set until 10 in the middle of July. I can start a round of golf at 6pm and be done before dark!

I haven't been in that area since I was a kid and we drove down to Anaheim. I have a fondness for California though, I take a golf trip every year with friends to PS and it always makes me want to stay tho I think summer there would be unbearably hot. Never know, I might just give norCal a visit, and I never turn down a chance to play golf!

Time to go back to sleep, the dog woke me with her snoring! How can such a little thing make so much noise?? Nite all.

David! About time you chimed in, we hens were bred to worry you know. Congratulations on your glowing medical report and losing one of your meds. That is fabulous, we're all very, very proud of you.

No golf for me! Well, the occassional game of mini-golf maybe. And our temps are back down again today and the wind is back. So wonderful for the seasonal allergies that seem to last all year. I could use a trip to the coast just to clear my head.

David, never say never, that next great relationship could be just around the corner......

Roo - Started watching a series last night on our PBS Channel, part of the "Nova" program: "Australia's First 4 Billion Years: Awakening": "Of all the continents on Earth, none preserves a more spectacular story of its origins than Australia. NOVA's mini-series takes viewers on a rollicking adventure from the birth of the Earth to the emergence of the world we know today. With help from high-energy host and scientist Richard Smith, we meet titanic dinosaurs and giant kangaroos, sea monsters and prehistoric crustaceans, disappearing mountains and deadly asteroids. This is the untold story of the Land Down Under, the one island continent that has got it all."

Astraea - didn't know we were 4 billion years old!! I wonder how they figure all this stuff out. Sounds interesting. We do like to think of ourselves as original.

Maybe someone dug up an aboriginal? hehehe Roo, I posted a question for you on OLLD 4/11, please help me?

An old theory I once saw had Asia, the sub continent, Africa and Australia all as one big continent. I presume volcanoes blew holes and the oceans flooded in till it got to where it is today. Along the way the Aboriginies island hopped from further north till they reached Austalia and then were cut off when the oceans flooded in.

Roo - There are places where the rock has come up in layers, and they can time-date it. They mentioned the formation of Uluru, and another place where there were several large rock formations. When did everyone switch from calling it Ayers Rock to Uluru .. a "politically correct" thing about using native names?

I think the contintental separation was due to the tectonic plates moving apart.

Eztia - my guess is that people feel more stable & therefore more comfortable, with their furniture not moving/swaying. This looks "interesting", but may result in "seasick" dining guests!

EZ, Eeeew! I'm getting this visual image here.....

Astraea, I forgot about the tectonic plates, you are right they were the cause of everything moving.

We had a bit of an uprising by the Aboriginal people quite some time back, basically demanding recognition of their culture and their sacred sites and everything else they considered they owned. The end result was what is now known as the Mabo decision

http://www.nfsa.gov.au/digitallearning/mabo/info/definingNt.htm

At one point they were trying to stake their claim on half of Sydney, no one was really against their claims, it was just they starting going ridiculously over the top. There was something else in South Australia that had to do with Secret Women's Business and that dragged on quite a bit too. Anyway after all that places like Ayres Rock reverted to the Aboriginal name, hence Uluru. I think it is nice, we need a lot more 'heritage'.

Back in the 30s and 40s - maybe even went into the 50s a lot of church groups went outback trying to educate the Aboriginies and teach them how to live like the white men. Most of them were a bunch of over the top do-gooders who expected to be able to change centuries of tradition overnight because they said so. Aboriginals are basically a nomadic race and built their own campsites, or humpties as they are called, from corrugated iron or anything else they could get their hands on. They lived very simply off the land and were happy with their lives, but these idiot do-gooders had a thing about them having to have everything the white man had. They built a lot of homes for them, created Aboriginal housing on the outskirts of some major country towns and plonked them in them and expected them to just adjust. Of course whenever it got cold, they would just pull the floorboards up and light a fire in the middle of the house to keep warm. The sad part of it all was that putting them in towns exposed them to alcohol which they just can't cope with and it caused many problems - again though they were punished for it under white man's laws, no one took into consideration how the white man had caused the problem. Even today many aboriginal townships are alcohol free zones but of course now it isn't just alcohol causing the problem, drugs have been introduced too.

The do-gooders also took many children from their parents, in the belief they would be better off and these people are now referrred to as the Stolen Generation. After many years of fighting for recognition, the Govt some years ago made a public apology and we now have a National Sorry Day each year. I don't know if you have heard of the movie The Rabbit Proof Fence. It did very well - it was the story of some kids who were stolen and is a pretty moving movie.

Roo - It's not that different from missionaries other places, who tried to convert the Native Americans .. or did it forceably. They shamed them into wearing more clothes, and gave them all the diseases Europeans had. Recently, Native Americans were given the right to open casinos on their tribal lands, and some have made a lot of money that way. Where I used to live in north Jersey, one group tried to get tribal status (Ramapo Indians), but apparently they couldn't convince the courts that the people today have connections to the original tribe. A lot of people worried what would happen if they were given status, and then laid claim to a lot of land that had already been developed & people were living on. They also worried that we'd wind up with a mega casino in our midst .. and all the traffic it would bring.

Yes, the laying claim to land already developed was the big problem here to. Basically they pretty much got it, but nothing has ever been done. Seemed like it was more an ego thing. It is sad really, and I do understand where they are coming from, the British were no better in their outposts like India, they just had this opinion that white people were superior.

That's why Peking went back to being called Beijing, China, and Bombay went back to Mumbai, India.

As an Indian all I can say is that wherever there is progress to be made people will migrate and displace the existing guys. In India I am often confronted by fishermen who say you have this beach house now but the land once belonged to them! The way we travel, migrate and assimilate now a days, one Korean told me that there will be no more blacks and whites or Chinese. Only Mocha coloured people!!!

Remember the hit song by The Three Degrees -

What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all it's got
Keep it stirring for a 100 years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score

If all the gloom and doom about global warming is correct, we will all need coffee coloured skin to protect us from the sun.