California Observations and More “Afters"

Hello.  For a while now I’ve been thinking about sharing some of the little oddities we’ve noticed about our new location, and we have some exciting developments on the exterior of our property!  Also, Caleb is coming home this week so we’re looking forward to that.  Also, we are now officially less than four weeks away from the wedding.  Ack! And ahh!

Some fun little trivia about California*, most of which we find irritating: California traffic lights do not have the “left-turn yield to oncoming traffic” option.  You may only turn left when an arrow invites you to do so.  At all intersections with traffic lights, even minor ones.  Also, each and every intersection has a sign that indicates whether or not you can make a u-turn.  Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and we can’t seem to find any pattern to it.  Also, in my experience, you turn to the north (left or right depending on if you’re coming from the east or west) to go north on a highway, and south to go south.  At some junctions in this area, the situation is reversed.  That was confusing at first.  The other big thing is California’s big push for every home to have a certain percentage of light sockets exclusively wired to accommodate CFL bulbs.  That one actually makes me more legitimately angry than irritated if I think about all the implications, so we’ll just move on to more pleasant topics for now.

I’m very excited that our back yard looks almost normal now!  We still want to plant some vegetables and flowers and stuff around the border but here’s another set of before and after shots:

Unexpectedly, our neighbor alerted us to this issue with the roots of this sycamore tree in our front yard encroaching upon our mutual water line.  It was shocking to walk around the yard and see these roots all over the yard, about to pop above the ground.  So, I had it removed.  And now you can see the blooming rose bush better and there’s no shadow on the house. :-)

Before:

Now we just have to fix the mini-crater in the front!

*I should add that I do not know for sure if these statements apply to the whole state of California, as so far we have only traveled in a forty mile radius around our house.