Life in Oakhurst

By Lori Howard

Writing little snippets about my daily life is nothing more than trying to
remain connected to people I care about most.
How often do we cruise through life not relishing even the tiniest of
successes, learning opportunities and pleasures much less sharing those chosen
moments with people that support and even look forward to our next adventure in
life.
2002 was the year of loss for my husband and I.
Not all of our losses were negative between the two of us we lost over
100 lbs.!
Once youve experienced the type of losses we did during this year, you
begin to take stock in your values, dreams and priorities. So in an attempt to redefi ne
ourselves we sold our fully paid for San Diego based home and moved to a
one- bedroom, two-story, beyond-ugly green, get away pad on a ten acre parcel on
Deadwood Mountain. (Makes me want to keep an eye out for Outlaw/ Rustlers)
A perfectly reasonable diversion for two city folks, with the belief that bears
belong in the zoo and lattes should be available on every street corner! Why not
uproot the declawed cats, and never consider asking ourselves the question So
what is the difference between septic and sewer?
What we found, are the experiences that make us smile, question (what
were we thinking?) and somehowsome way appreciate our new life through the
absurd and benign evolution of every day events.
To add to the mayhem, we decided to become innkeepers and pool our
resources together to build our own little slice of heaven as we create the perfect Bed
and Breakfast. It didnt really matter that I never met a bed I ever wanted to make
up or the thought of scrubbing toilets leaving me a little disgruntled. It was the
idea of living in paradise and sharing it with great people along the way.
So here we are sharing a few snippets of Life in Oakhurst

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462878130

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Lori Howard.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2011908473

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4628-7812-3

                Softcover        978-1-4628-7811-6

                eBook             978-1-4628-7813-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/30/2014

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Fifty Years In A Nutshell

Christmas 2009

The Continuing Saga Of Life In Oakhurst

Writing little snippets about my daily life is nothing more than trying to remain connected to people I care about most.

How often do we cruise through life not relishing even the tiniest of successes, learning opportunities and pleasures, much less sharing those chosen moments with people that support and even look forward to our next adventure in life?

Two thousand and two was the year of loss for my husband and me.

Not all of our losses were negative. Between the two of us, we lost over 100 lbs.!

Once you’ve experienced the type of losses we did during this year, you begin to take stock in your values, dreams, and priorities. So in an attempt to redefine ourselves, we sold our fully paid for San Diego-based home and moved to a one-bedroom, two-story, extremely ugly green getaway pad on a ten-acre parcel on Deadwood Mountain. (Makes me want to keep an eye out for rustlers!)

A perfectly reasonable diversion for two city folks with the belief that bears belong in the zoo and lattes should be available on every street corner! Why not uproot the declawed cats and never consider asking ourselves the question So what is the difference between septic and sewer?

What we found are the experiences that make us smile, question (what were we thinking?), and somehow appreciate our new life through the absurd and benign evolution of everyday events.

To add to the mayhem, we decided to become innkeepers and pool our resources together to build our own little slice of heaven as we create the perfect bed-and-breakfast. It didn’t really matter that I never met a bed I ever wanted to make up or had the thought of scrubbing toilets leaving me a little disgruntled. It was the idea of living in paradise and sharing it with great people along the way.

So here we are, sharing a few snippets of life in Oakhurst.

CHAPTER 1

Fifty Years in a Nutshell

No story is complete until you sort through the how did we get here? story. So here it goes…

Bruce (my loving husband), and I grew up in the 1950s and the 1960s. While love inn’s and LSD were the news and the trend du jour, amazingly enough, we were both raised by our own personal versions of Ozzie and Harriet (Note: that was Ozzie and Harriet, not Ozzie and Sharron 10854.png ).

As for me, I was raised with a bit of a silver spoon, which through the years appeared either a little tarnished or gold plated depending on point of view. No childhood is perfect (except for my husband’s), but neither was a strong-willed child that fell into the older/middle child slot in the family pecking order.

Middle kids always feel a little out of favor. I have an older brother (Wow! Both age and gender appropriate), a younger sister (cute, and dare I say… petite!), and the baby (wouldn’t you know it… another boy!) We all vied for my parents’ attention by becoming the overachievers merely expected of us. Whether it was through academics, sports, music, or socialization, we all made it through the flower-power years with pride in our parents’ eyes and the sheer knowledge that we were all expected to do well in life. (No pressure there.)

The next twenty years found me following the American Dream… marrying (inappropriate losers), cruising through eight years of college (oh, yeah, I showed up for class, I just liked the college lifestyle), washing dogs, cleaning teeth, to growing my own family and purchasing a first-time homeowners’ tract home in San Diego County.

During the 1980s, we breastfed our children until they were old enough to demand food in full sentences. As women, we were told that we could have it all! Jobs, children, sparkling clean homes, and the education and patience to sit down and guide our darling children through the hours of copious homework assignments. Yes, we were women… leaving our men with little or nothing of importance to do, so as life would have it, marriage number two fell apart (a ten-year mistake as opposed to my first ten-minute mistake).

As a newly divorced mother of two, I signed on as a teacher/administrator of a nonprofit educational program. Through the next twelve years I was able to raise my kids (Bryan and Rylie 11039.png ), travel to fifteen different countries, write a textbook, and find time to meet and marry my (pat me on the back) current husband, Bruce.

The 1990s opened the doors to the what if? stage of my life.

Armed with a husband that actually worked and brought home a paycheck (what a concept!), we found ourselves venturing into the restaurant/retail sales end of the coffeehouse business. During the next twelve years we were business owners (two locations) and community business members. As if this wasn’t enough for any family to take on, I ran and won two political campaigns for city council.

Now this phase of my life (in a perfect world) would warrant a book of its own. There were so many positives and so many heartaches throughout my eight years of politics. Suffice it to say, I entered this phase of my life with a full head of brunette hair and left it with follicle challenged platinum-colored hair.

The year (eighteen months) of change for our family happened in 2001-2002. In this short period of time we experienced the horrors of a local school shooting.

As an elected official I was on the front line and informed of the victims (fifteen) even before the parents, neighbors, and friends found out the names and hospitals students were sent to.

Helicopters flew over our homes and the local high school for days as the FBI and other agencies completed their tasks. Mortally wounded bodies remained blanketed on campus until the information-gathering time was completed. Politics, agendas, finger-pointing, and blame followed in the weeks to come. Students were traumatized; teaching staff transferred or retired from the district. The community mourned silently. This was a hard time for all of us as we lived through a second copycat local school shooting and felt the national shock of September 11, 2001.

Nine-eleven created its own spiraling effect. My job-secured husband found himself downsized and replaceable in his insurance field. He had become a dinosaur in his industry with no job safety net.

2002 found us with Bruce losing his job after a ten-month whole-industry layoff, I was faced with a third-term reelection to the city council, my husband’s mother lost her five-year battle with cancer, and my nineteen-year-old daughter lost her life (on Mother’s Day) following surgery and subsequent infection.

As if this wasn’t enough to put anyone under, my campaign for reelection found me out of politics by the tightest margin our county had ever dealt with. (I lost by 9 votes out of 14,000 cast). Not only was this a political loss, but a loss of income and any form of normality for our family.

It was time for Bruce and me to regroup and determine our next direction.

After twenty-five years (in one fully-paid-for home), we sold our coffeehouses, sold our home (as we watched the housing market decline), and moved to a little township named Oakhurst, which is where the true story begins.

Life in Oakhurst—Snippets!

So how does one share the everyday tales of building a home, living in a trailer, learning about country living, and worst of all, dealing with local government in the process?

You log it in with as much humor as one can muster because lord knows if I didn’t smile I’d be crying.

Now, I didn’t start writing Life in Oakhurst blurbs to my family and friends until I realized that everything my husband and I were experiencing in our new life was unique unto itself as far as I was concerned. I was a city girl and in pure awe of how and why things occurred the way they did on and about our mountain.

How often does a two-hundred-pound bear eat six defenseless chickens and leave behind on the chicken coop all her greasy paw prints that have lasted for over one year as proof of the dirty deed?

Or when you interview your potential housing contractors and you notice that they are eyeing the four inches of dried leafy herbs you have sprawled all over your living quarters, you recognize their thoughts and say, Oh, this is nothing… you should see the meth lab we’ve got hooked up downstairs.

(Note to self: Don’t scare off potential contractors with dumb jokes; they don’t understand just kidding! ;-)

Or the five nasty cases of poison oak Bruce and I had while attempting to get our landscaping even passable.

(Note: Poison oak changes in appearance with every season. We are now experts in recognizing the chameleon weed.)

You can’t buy experiences like these! Nor would you want to.

So you share the experiences with friends that can’t necessarily relate, and embrace the primal ability of laugher along the way. You adore and stand in awe of your livestock challenges, you scratch your head with the local governmental bureaucracy, and you learn to love and appreciate the 50 % of the times that your loving city-slicker husband gets something maintenance-wise correct.

The story starts when my husband and I entered that new phase in life called empty nested, unemployed and unencumbered.

Everything we knew and trusted in life disappeared in 2002. You know, the things that we take for granted like jobs, family, and even personal safety (post 9/11/01 and local school shooting). Job prospects were nonexistent since the market for recovering politicians and insurance underwriters were nonexistent! We were now finding minimum wage a salary to strive for! Life, if we wanted to continue living in San Diego, would have to change, or we would have to adjust and create a new life.

In an effort to live closer to family, we chose a small town outside of Yosemite to begin our new life in. We researched the travel and tourism options, looked for existing bed-and-breakfast business opportunities and (after copious hours of research) located the perfect location to build our dream bed-and-breakfast. Now we did our homework… (or so we thought.)

Before we made an offer on this perfect parcel, we reviewed the zoning plan for the County of Madera. Our parcel spelled out the potential use as a bed-and-breakfast. (I mean to tell you, it really did suggest a B&B for its zoning use!) We requested and received the conditional use permit requirements to convert our little home and parcel into a bed-and-breakfast in the County of Madera. We visited the neighbors and shared with them our goals to open a bed-and-breakfast. (We were welcomed with open arms.) We even checked into any road improvements, septic, and well requirements needed to have success with this venture.

Everything appeared to fall into place, so having done our due diligence and needing to start fresh with our lives, we left all that was familiar in life to rebuild and reinvent ourselves.

So in reverse fashion to the Beverly Hillbillies, we loaded up our Lexus and paid the moving van company a small fortune to move our fourth-generation antique furniture, dual sets of formal china, two wardrobe closets of business suits and impractical shoes, grabbed the disgruntled declawed felines, and headed to the mountains. (Now don’t we have stupid written all across our foreheads?)

Ah, but the story gets better.

All of this transition was taking place in March. March (in San Diego) is when the birds sing and the weather is seventy-two degrees all day long. March (in Oakhurst) is unpredictable, generally snowy, and can offer a forty-degree swing in temperature in any given hour.

Our first seventy-two hours of new home ownership found us with no heat, power outages, no food (other than the artichoke dip and crackers a friend gave to us as a going-away gift), and a 1,100-square-foot home with furniture and boxes from a 3,000-square-foot home. There was rain pouring down on us through the whole moving process, but the snow didn’t fall until the last boxes were unloaded.

(Note: Snow is the cold white substance that never falls in San Diego. That’s because Yosemite has cornered the market on it!)

Bruce had done a marvelous job the week before our move. It was his job to have a bed ready and prepared for our arrival, screens patched or replaced. House cleaned and ready for us to descend on, and utilities ready and waiting. What we didn’t plan for was the power outage. Welcome to the mountains!

Welcome home… welcome change?

We bought our mountain home for the view.

The one-bedroom, two-story house was a bonus. This starter unit would be a great place to live as we built the B&B. Or so we thought.

It didn’t take long to realize that many of the items we researched so diligently were true… in a mountain sort of way.

My first example is our water.

It didn’t take more than a few loads of laundry to begin noticing a difference. All of our clothes began to take