Tuesday, September 21, 2010

California Dreams

Within the short span of four weeks, Patti and I packed up our Grand Vitara (dog included), crossed the border, driven 1500 miles to Indian Wells, California, taken up residence in an older gated community, established our residency in the US, bought furniture and a car and a bike, and taken up a new life as snowbirds in California. 

 So how is it to this point?

Pretty seamless, discounting the big corporations who literally enslave you to their legal overkill way of doing business. If there's a rule they haven't discovered, it's probably somewhere out past Pluto. They leave nothing to chance, and will cover the same ground ten times over to make certain you are not out to take advantage of them. Even a simple exercise like using your debit card to pay for groceries is enough to wear a millimetre off your molars. How are you paying? There are at least 10 options - 10! and don't ask me what they are. Do you want cash back? Are you sure? Is the total correct? Are you sure? Swipe your card. Are you sure you want to do this? And so on. There's two schools of thought here. One, the overkill keeps the store from having to extricate the stupid customers from situations they can't maintain a thought for for more than seven seconds. The second, closely related, is that most of their customers are stupid and can't be relied upon to know their own minds. Either way, it's discouraging. Curiously, the small contractors with whom we've dealt have all been efficient, reasonable, and prompt: a reminder that big corporations are not our friends and never will be and, I suspect, are terribly inefficient when looked at closely. Only limited fields of competition allow these bloated scavengers to exist.

But back to Indian Wells. Although mid-day temperatures are well over 100 in September and our trips outside the home are generally limited to the market and back, the mornings and evenings are spectacular, refreshingly cool, redolent with the smell of flowers.  It doesn't hurt that a small brook ambles by our house and is given to soothing babbling.

We've met several neighbors and look forward to seeing more of them. Many of them like to walk their dogs early in the morning. Our community, Los Lagos, makes it easy for walkers to make a circuit (Tahoe Circle) in 15 or 20 minutes. Our dog, Stanley, loves company and will sit down in the middle of the road to wait for whoever he sees coming up the street. If he's lucky, another dog will be accompanying the walker(s). Our neighbors on the left are Mexican. he works for Time-Warner and they are renters, we hear. We've met the mother (Esperanza)and daughter (Iris) who is 8 and loves playing with Stanley. Unfortunately, they have two unfriendly dogs, one of which is a pit bull. The neighbors on the right are a father and daughter (David and Suzanne). He is 95 and she is 55. They are both very nice people.

Los Lagos is startlingly beautiful with mature trees, well-tended flower beds, 4 swimming pools, bougainvillea everywhere, and the piece-de-resistance, the brook running through the entire complex. The compound is relatively quiet now but we expect residents to be arriving in October.

Not for one second have we regretted making this move to California and hope that we will have many visitors. It IS that nice a place.