We’ve done very little to the house lately, instead just inching forward in the garden with tending our veggies, tidying up, weeding, clearing, chopping back and organising. We face a constant battle to tame our garden, over the years to come. The biggest challenge is fitting all the cleared rubbish into the garden waste bin each week! (Still, we’re happy to have it collected weekly, as opposed to fortnightly as in much of the UK. Also the bin is pretty large!)

Plants tend to multiply – once people know you’re growing your own veg, they start giving you more! So far we’ve been donated one courgette plant from Celeste, one tomato plant, and one ‘giant banana’ squash plant from our old neighbour Will.

The first courgette plant, and the pumpkin plant, starting to explode… these will start fighting for space in about a week!

Other veg – tomatoes, parsley, beans, lettuces, carrots, peppers, chillies. The little pot is an earwig trap, filled with beer, vegetable oil, soy sauce and sugar. So far there are ten or fifteen casualties. (Another of the local fauna bent on blighting our happy existence.)

Chillis! I suspect we will be inundated with these; there will be too many to eat fresh, so I plan to make chilli pickle with them (like Patak’s).

Tom-ay-dohs. We have two normal-sized tomato plants, one cherry tomato, and whatever Will gave us!

First strawberry. It was delicious; we shared it.

Our neighbour Jeanette has had a lot of the dead tree cleared away from her side of the garden by our garage, possibly inspired by my cutting back the same mess from our side. (Filled the bin.) Consequently there is ten times the amount of light coming through, which will be good for the veggies, and probably also good for the weeds that want to sprout up from the nice bare patch of earth there.

I can now stand in the corner by the garage there, and get a novel view of the house (showing the pine tree in urgent and expensive need of trimming):

There is also vegetation to cut back on my head. I just haven’t had the time for a haircut!

We started, and soon thereafter finished, Jamie’s egg from the Easter Mummy. Really nice… mmm.. tastes like England…

Ken and I went for a random late-night mission to get tacos from one of the many taco trucks in Pasadena. They’re a lot like the kebab vans in England, just with more meat and less salmonella. I hope. These look somewhat repellant, but are in fact delicious.

Development has finally started in the vacant plot near Jamie’s parents’ house. There are two or three model homes built already, so Jamie and I went for a nosy peek. They’re “very nice”, but they really aren’t “Tiramisu”. They look great, with good layout, airy living spaces, high ceilings, vast kitchen pantries and bedroom closets. The quality of the fixtures and fittings, though, is only adequate. The developers could have spent an additional few grand – a fraction of the cost of the house – and fitted higher quality handles, windows, counter tops etc. This would have matched the potential and appeal of the properties.

The view from the master bedrooms is stunning. It was a bright, clear, green spring day, and the mountains really looked their best. We reckon these houses (three- to four-bedrooms, two- to three- bathrooms, 2600 square feet inside area) could be getting on for a million dollars each. The view is a not insignificant part of that…

Back to our own, more ‘characterful’ abode, and encouraged by the glamour of the possibilities we had observed, I plasterboarded the right hand side of the stairs to the basement. More rats at bay!