Haze

LA is famous for it's haze and smog - this is actually (trivia fans!) an accident of geography - here's what the Freakonomics blog has to say about it:

air pollution in the region long predates the arrival of the automobile. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to lay eyes on Santa Monica Bay, saw the area shrouded in smog from native campfires and named it the Bay of Smoke.

The haze is always worst in the morning, and then gradually clears up over the day. So I thought I'd record that with my video camera, and the haze would miraculously lift revealing the mountains and their famous landmarks (Hollywood sign, Griffith observatory) in all of their glory.

Problem is, of course, that when you start recording (at 1oam) you don't know if the haze is going to have lifted. So it didn't quite go according to plan. I didn't think you'd want to watch 10 hours or so of haze not going away, so I've speeded it up about 500 times to just over a minute. I realize this is still way beyond my average reader's attention span, but what can I do?

No pizza

We went to the Theodore Payne Foundation Nursery today, to buy some plants (they sell native Californian plants, some of which are endangered and which don't need much water) - but that's not what this is about. On the way the boys were hungry, so I went to buy some pizza. I went into Little Caesar's on Crenshaw, and all the staff were on the phone. I waited, and they kept on the phone, ignoring me. Eventually someone got off the phone, and wandered over to the register. They poked at it a bit, and looked in the drawers. Eventually they acknowledged my existence.

I asked if they had any pizzas ready. She sort of looked confused, and said no, and closed the door on the place they keep the ready pizzas. I asked if I could have a pizza, with the complicated selections the boys wanted (involving one quarter black olives, one quarter tomatoes AND black olives, etc). I spent a while explaining it to her - she didn't seem to get it. Eventually she said "We've got no pizza. We've got no money. We've been robbed."

Then two policemen came in. I said I'd return later (which wasn't true, but I didn't want to make her feel bad). As I was leaving I heard her saying "Two black guys ... semi-automatic".

Pool permits

Now we know about the pool restrictions, we are in the stage of planning and permits. The people at Mr Carlos pools will apply for a permit to build a pool from the city. The city might decide that we live on a hill (I'm not sure why it's something that needs deciding, but I won't trouble myself with that). If it turns out we do live on a hill (and I'd say it was pretty obvious we do) we'll need a soil grading report, which will cost $450 and delay things.
If we don't need a soil grading report, they'll start digging in (optimistically) 10-11 days. After they have dug the hole, then the inspectors from the city will come and do whatever inspections they do.
On Saturday, someone is going to come and put fences on the walls - the fences need to be 6 feet high - this is part of the inspection. We also need to get the gates fixed - they have to be self closing and automatically locking.

Neighbors, everybody needs good neighbors

There's a rule which applies in LA (County, or maybe city, or maybe California) about how far your pool can be from the boundary to your neighbors. If you want a 6 foot deep pool, you have to be 6 feet away. But if you want to have an 8 foot deep pool you need to be 8 feet away. It's not hard.
However, if you want to, you can get closer than this by getting permission from the neighbors, in writing. Our neighbor is about 107, has 24 hour care, and possibly never gets out of bed. (We've met a couple of the carers, one of whom was in her 70s. So we wrote a nice letter (recorded delivery) to the neighbor (I had to use propertyshark.com to find out her name) asking if she would mind if we built an 8 foot deep pool 5 feet from the boundary. The cool thing is, if you don't get a reply that says no within 30 days, you can take that as a yes. So we sat back and prepared to wait.
A letter came back, 4 days later - through the post, which I though curious, as the nearest mailbox is considerably further from her house than our mailbox (I'm trying to use American words here, and getting confused. What's the equivalent of a postbox, where you post the mail for the postpeople to pick it up? And what's the thing that we have outside our house that hte postpeople leave post in? Are they the same word? How do know if I mean postbox or letterbox if it is the same word). It said "I do object to ...."
Oh well, back to the drawing board ....

Pool Plan

Here's a photo of our yard, with the plan for the pool drawn on it (using my extraordinary graphic design skills) - after 3 consultations with Steve, from Mr Carlos Pools (sometimes it's Mr Carlos and Associates).
The yard slopes in a slightly tricky fashion, so the pool will be slightly raised above the ground, and dug into the ground. On the back left corner there will be a wall about 2 feet high, then a gap between the pool and the wall (we can't do anything with that gap, 'cos the wall to the neighbor's is a bit feeble, and if we fill it in, there's a chance it will fall down). The D shaped bit will have three steps going into the pool.
The nearer side of the yard is fairly flat so that will be level. The soil that comes out will be used to make a slope from the left hand side, going down to ground level.

Dogs names

We have acquired two dogs from the nice people at Southern California Golden Retriever Rescue. They never lived in a kennel or a pound - we picked them up from their previous owners, who were giving them up, for reasons not really established.
A number of mysteries came with the dogs - the owners tell us that they are nearly 2 years old (they'll be two in October), and that they are golden retrievers. The weird thing is that they don't look like two year old golden retrievers - they are much too small (about 45 pounds each - they should be closer to 60, and 80 wouldn't be vastly excessive, in my understanding). We suspect that either they are not golden retreivers (they have the shape of Irish setters, but they're too small for that) or they are not 2 years old - but why would you not tell the truth about that? (We were also told that they were housetrained, up to date on shots, and good at walking on a leash, and none of that was true).
The dogs are extraordinarily devoted to one another -we bought two dog beds, but that was a waste, because they sleep in the same bed.

The plan was that one dog would be Alex's, and one dog would be Dan's. At least nominally - we wouldn't rely on them to do things like feed them, or we'd find dead dogs after a small number of days. So we had to decide on names. The boys don't have a good track record of naming animals (ask Karen and Karensander) so we had to try to encourage them to choose sensible names.
Early choices included A, D, X, Nicky and Nicky-Giana, Nicky and Nicky-Rover, then Nicky and Nicky-Rover, then Nick and Rover. Alex called his dog Powerbomb for about a week, whilst Dan's was called Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaax (20 a's, very important). When we said that that was too many a's, it became Maaax. They suggested Jeremy. I said that that wasn't a very good name. They said "It's your name Daddy, so it must be good". When we finally settled on Maxwell and Boulder I ran to the pet store and fixed their names in plastic, so the names could be attached to them and not change.


The dogs are a little nervous. Particularly of the cat. They are generally unconcerned about cats, but the cat is not unconcerned about them. It is a little wary of the dogs, but they are very, very scared of the cat. The cat usually sleeps on the stairs, to stop them coming upstairs. Even when the cat isn't about, they are too worried to come upstairs for longer than a few seconds (just long enough to grab something they are not allowed to have).

Dogs in the park

The dogs have had their bits whipped off. Well, I imagined that they whipped them off, but they don't, they make a hole and pull them out. This involves less trauma (in the physical sense) for the dog, but as the dogs were already, errrmm..., developed there is a bizarre empty bag of skin now hanging there. Which isn't especially aesthetically pleasing. (There are alternatives - but I can't believe that that is going to be any more attractive).

They've also had all the shots that they are supposed to have, and so are allowed to go out and play. There are very few places around here that one is allowed to have one's dog off the leash (it's a leash in this country, not a lead) - one of them is the dog park, but as the dogs are scared of almost everything, including other dogs, we didn't think that was a great idea, so instead we went to the Kenneth Hahn State Park. You're not supposed to allow your dog to roam free there, but there's an area which used to be the Baldwin Hills reservoir, but the dam holding it back failed in a rather dramatic fashion in 1963, and now there's a big bowl shaped grassy area. There are usually very few people there, and people often let dogs off the leash there.

Here's a map, in case you're interested. (You can see the two green stripes leading to where the big storm drain is).


View Larger Map

We got there on Friday afternoon. There was a poodle (which seemed to be called Poopsich) there, with its owner - the owner had such a strong Russian accent that I had trouble understanding him, and he didn't understand the boys. I thought that he was potentially a recent arrival, and so we could bond and talk about visas and things, but he had been here since 1980. (He also told me that his dog was two months old, and he got it in January, so maybe he had a problem with time, or maybe there was more of a communication problem than I thought). The small poodle was frightened of the dogs. The dogs were frighted of the small poodle. At least to start with.

But after a while, they played nicely.



Stevi, from Southern California Golden Retriever Rescue, wanted a nice picture of the boys with the dogs, so they can prove how lovely they are. This was the best we could do:

First day of School

After an extraordinary amount of work (a trivial amount of it carried out by us) the Goethe School started on Tuesday (it's pronounced gurter - which you'd never guess if you didn't know about German pronunciation). There was lots of excitement on the first day. Kiddies shuffled into their classrooms (here's Dan going in).


Then there were some speeches and prizes and general recognition of all the people who'd been doing stuff for the past 4 years to get it going. The kiddies shuffled out, sat on chairs and waved Goethe flags. Here's Alex:

We've commissioned Mr Carlos Pools

We've spent months since we moved in agonizing and thinking and having people over and then agonizing and then thinking some more about getting a swimming pool . On Sunday we finally bit the bullet, and got Steve, from Mr Carlos pools, around for the third time, and made him measure and think and draw plans and calculate and measure again, and so on. Steve seemed to know what he was talking about more than some of the other designers we had, didn't suggest that we needed a landscape designer (that made S really cross) and also was amongst the cheapest.

Then we signed a contract to build a pool in our back yard.

But there's a weird Los Angeles (or maybe California, or somewhere anyway) that if you want a pool that's seven feet deep, you have to be seven feet from the neighbors. Unless you get permission from the neighbors, in writing. Trouble is our neighbor is about 107 and bedridden, and we've never seen, let alone spoken to her. (We know she exists, because an ambulance turns up once in a while, with red flashing lights, to revive her; or something). Anyway, you don't have to get permission if you write them a letter (recorded delivery) and they don't respond within 30 days. And we think that her responding is pretty unlikely.

So the nice people at Mr Carlos and Associates (weird name for a company - but apparently it was started in the 1950s, and Mr Carlos is still about) said that they would send me a letter as an example of what to write to her. Except they don't have a scanner, and I don't have a fax. So they copied it and posted it. Except they were too moronic to notice that the photocopy (which was of a fax) was so poor that they might as well have sent a blank piece of paper.

So, in our usual fashion of finding highly skilled tradespeople, we expect people who can't read (it appears) to be able to build a swimming pool made of steel and concrete and electricity and chemicals. (And water, I suppose.)

But maybe it's different people. We'll see.

Picture at the top shows the letter they sent on the bottom, with a random letter that I had lying around (it's actually about driving in Mexico). The letter they sent really is the right way up.