Postcards from the Funny Farm

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My wife ordered me out of my Papasan a couple hours ago to get out in the bright sunshine. The season is turning from Winter to something warmer. We’ve applied for a home loan and she wanted me to look at houses. What I found while we looked astounded me, here’s why:

We looked at a total of 5 homes: all labeled on the front window as “BANK OWNED.” It was a staunch reminder that the high desert boom is definitely over.

In 2002, you could get a home up here for 80k. In the time since then we have seen the same home prices vacillate and peak out at 4-500: astounding. We’ve laid low and rented since 2002 because I’ve been getting established in my teaching career.  Plus, we weren’t looking to buy because my income as a teacher could never get financing for such high prices. That is why I am literally in awe of what opportunity lay before us now.

Each 4 bedroom home that we looked at today was well below 200k. This is right in the price range we can afford. Tuesday we find out the details of our loan acceptance, according to our officer: how much and whether it will be immediate or 3 months of cleaning up our credit. I feel very confident we will be accepted but I guess ya never know ’til ya know. Of course I will be recording it all here. As you know, that’s what I do ;)

Wanna move up here and buy a house?
Check out the Victor Valley Multiple Listing Service

Your jaw will drop.

The winter season has brought some amazing cloud formations up to the high desert. As I walked around campus and drove home I saw some that begged to be captured. I managed to get these four great pictures today. The first is taken from my classroom window and the others are taken from the side of the road I take home every day. It’s a really breathtaking scene on some days like today.

Just a shout to the blog readers about my upcoming show at the Ponderosa in Apple Valley October 19th. They’re giving me 45 minutes and I’m going to debut a couple new songs: “Julianna” and one I have been working on that is yet unnamed. (You can hear my tunes at MySpace) Below is a flyer for the show. Hope to see you there.

Damien Riley
Performs at the Ponderosa in October
Modern rock and original tunes

When:
Friday Oct 19, 2007
at 9:30 PM

Where:
The Ponderosa
9544 Kiowa Rd
Apple Valley, CA 92307
(760) 247-7727

The Ponderosa is a restaurant and bar in Apple Valley that features lives music on a stage. It has a powerful sound system. Other acts will perform before and after Damien’s set. They include: “Burned Arrow” and “Alibi.”

Cover Charge: $8
“Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World”

Hear: Damien Riley Tunes at MySpace.

We went to the library today as a family. It’s really a cool one up here. We checked out 27 books between us all! From Dr. Seuss to the Magic Schoolbus to books on what dad picked, you guessed it: Blogging!

I’ve been trying to define my blog since its inception. The saga continues . . . I checked out three books on blogging that look really cool:

• Memoirs of the Soul (a book on creatively writing your autobiography which is basically what my blog has become)

• Blogosphere: Best of Blogs

• Blogging, and

• The Blogging Book

Lately I’ve written about how studying the history of blogging is a great research tool. I’m a big proponent of going to the library and doing those sorts of things. Well, off to read what published stuff has to say!

I woke to the rustle of little 2 month old toenails scratching in fits and starts at my back. She was hungry so I tried not to wake her mother and went downstairs just before sunrise to prepare the formula in the bottle. As I peered out the window into the backyard, the trees were all still and there seemed to be a Twilight Zone stillness to the air. My 9 year old son was flat on his back, head hanging off the side of his bed and my 2 year old had both her arms pulled up alongside and under and just looked like an absolute angel.

As I scooped the Nestle Good Start powder into the bottle I couldn’t help but recall that Talking Heads song: “This is not my beautiful house!” And me:  An established teacher/husband/dad at 38?  Where did the skinny 18 year old go who thought he was gonna be a famous songwriter? When I say skinny, trust me I mean it. I’m 5′8″ now and 165 pounds. At graduation in 1987 I was the same height and 122! My child bride wife (9 years younger), who didn’t meet me until I was 32, laughs at that and says: “I can’t imagine where to take the weight off you! That’s scary.” Good thing the food started sticking to my ribs about age 25. But I digress . . . I guess God had other plans for the songwriting and I had to let that dream go.

[quote]Next, I thought about how much I do indeed have. This is such a positive action. I highly recommend it multiple times daily.[/quote] I looked around at all the baby and kid stuff in our TV room. I realized that it all came about through my schooling, the loans, the headaches, the papers, the work dramas. I thought about atheists, again. I thought about how sad their state is. (Just my point of view, no offense to anyone please) Then I remembered the verse about judging others.

Well, I brought that spiritual ba-ba upstairs as the sun was starting to splinter its light over the mountain. The beauty of it caught me as I stopped shaking the bottle. I was overcome with emotion. I thought: “Wow. I’m human. I’m alive. This is so great!” It was overwhelming.

I got a letter in the mail yesterday from my school district showing my contract pay for next year. Though it’s only a third of what my dad and brother make in real estate, it’s approaching 3 times the amount I made when I started teaching back in 1997.

The tortoise and the . . .?

My wife was so pleased when she read it because she does the budget. Usually we have to use hand-me-down big ticket items like sofas and TV’s because we use our monthly income in the first two weeks on food, bills, and life. We try to keep credit spending down. My wife said as she did some figures with the new monthly amount:

“Honey, we are gonna be doing really well this year.”

WOO HOO! I was so relieved. Like I said my Dad and brother do very well in new home real estate. I have close friends that have become ridiculously wealthy through their songwriting and music. I’ve hung in there, I’ve become great at teaching. But I’m no Dave Matthews like I once dreamed. I used to pursue rock music as my life. It worked for my friend Gwen Stefani. Not for me? Not so much anyway. I have a MySpace, does that count for anything? The following are a couple of lines from a song I wrote back in 200 when I started to see my life had a different calling:

“I don’t need a million dollars and don’t want fame. I just want a place in the world and a chance to stay in the game.”

I’m still a songwriter, I’m still a writer. I am firmly convinced that God is not impressed with fame. In my life I have seen it play out again and again that He wants me to be faithful in the little things: like lesson plans, parent conferences, being kind, and making bottles before dawn. I went up and fed the baby as I fell back asleep. Then about an hour later I woke up and couldn’t sleep. I had to write about the spiritual baba. I was overcome by the inescapable realization that we have just 80 years with luck or even less. Maybe if I write things down, I can cheat fate. Maybe I can make something eternal in a world where it all (including me) swirls off one day as dust in the wind. Maybe? I’ll close with a line from John Lennon’s artistry in anticipated response to any detractors:

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

Yesterday before our “date,” my wife and I had to mail out some packages so we went into the little post office by our house. It was 3:59 and the sign clearly said CLOSED at 4. We felt extremely lucky to have made it under the line. A tiny woman threw some keys to me and said, could you lock the door? I did, and then we saw why. Person after person tried opening just as we did earlier with different results.

I looked at the small woman running the counter and serving the line of 5 or 6 people we were in and saw her name tag said “Soon.” I started daydreaming, as I am wont to do, and imagining what type of ethnicity such an odd name was. My wife was was getting impatient and spoke out harshly, “When is she going to finish with that person!!” I saw my “LOL” opportunity and even at that moment imagined blogging about it (oh no!). I said to my wife:

“Rather than answer that for you, I think her name tag says it all.” Then my wife read her name tag and chuckled.

Speaking of chuckled, we saw “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” at the mall theater then had Italian food and a bottle of wine in Apple Valley last night. Needless to say, no one we have talked to since the post office has thought my “Soon” joke was as funny as we did, especially over the bottle of White Zin!

How successful is the author of this blog? Well, it all depends on who you compare me to. My wife and I live modestly by some standards. We have 2 vehicles, a minivan and a Jeep. We rent a 4 bedroom house in the gorgeous High Desert of California with Satellite and high speed wireless internet. That alone is the Baliey’s to my way of thinking. I’m a public school teacher and have been blessed with 3 amazing kids aged 2 months, 2 1/2, and 9 years. Oh yeah, And I’ve been writing this blog for cool readers for about 200 days. Would you call that a success yet? Maybe not. It all depends. Everything is relative.

My wife and I have grand plans to see better days financially in the years to come. Like the typical suburban couple, We aren’t 100% satisfied until we have more. Still, we know how to be thankful in all circumstances. Somebody has aways got it worse (and better!).

In 1997 at 27 I made about 18,000 dollars a year. I was finishing my Master’s in Language and already had a hefty student loan debt hanging over my head. I worked in a coffee house and subbed elementary school part time. I was single and as lonely as it gets! I could barely make my bills every month. As I recall I had about $1500 dollars each month to live on and my rent alone was $1000. TOUGH DAYS. It was that year that I was offered a job as a teacher on an “emergency credential” in a local school district in Orange County. The pay was 29k. Of course, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. 29K? You mean . . . no more payday loans to pay my car insurance???

Fast forward to 2002 at age 32 with a teaching credential under my belt (and more debt). I had been teaching since 1997 and had a lot of experience. I accepted an exciting job in a small desert town called Victorville (The place I often brag about here). I was like one of the 3 little pigs leaving my home of Orange County to seek my fortune. I met my wife, we started our family and now we live the life of the first paragraph!

When it gets tough, and we are at the end of our paycheck, I remember those days when I would live my bachelor life off $1 whoppers, generic mac and cheese, and bolied potatoes. I’d drink coffee all night to cram for lit exams, and call my parents quite frequently when I needed help (sorry to say, but it’s true!) People I know make 200-300k a year in real estate, one friend made millions off writing one song, and some fellow teachers have moved up into Principal positions making a lot more than me. My wife and I have found that on my teacher’s salary of 9 years seniority (over twice as much as what I started at), I still cannot qualify for a local home loan. It apparently will require 2 teacher incomes which we one day hope to have in our house when the kids are older and her college is through. Nonetheless, success is just a matter of who you compare yourself to. To a high roller, I live quite modestly, but to somebody starting out in life as I was at 27, I’m a damn-prime-time Oprah interview candidate I tell you!

I found an amazing set of vintage Victorville, California photos from 1902 through 1956. These pictures are quite beautiful and meaningful to me since Victorville is my hometown.  I found these vintage Victorville photos at oldtownvictorville.com

Let me tell you a little about the place I live. It’s in an elevated ex-mining town in the County of San Bernardino, California, USA and it’s about 4-5 hours South of Las Vegas down Interstate 15. It is a tri-city region that includes Victorville, Hesperia, and Adelanto. Victorville is the most well known. It’s also about 1.5 hours to Disneyland with good access to the beach too at about 1.5 hours as well. (more…)

I try to walk every day. The walk I take is a big circle through High Desert Suburbia. Our neighborhood is about as plain as it gets, which leaves the mind open to wander and imagine all sorts of off-beat things. Such as: “Why is ‘Murder She Wrote’ always playing on the Biography Channel?” But something I noticed today was the fences I walked by; they vary quite a bit.  Seems like the worst fences are the ones with barking dogs.  They snarl and it scares me out of my shoes every time. I guess that’s their purpose, to protect the home.? There are cement fences, brick fences, even plastic fences.  Some appear stock, like they came with the home new while others look like they were made afger a few trips to Lowe’s.  Robert Frost wrote in his poem ‘Mending Wall,’

I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

I don’t know my neighbors.  That’s one thing I regret about myself, I’m not very outgoing that way.  I’ve seen them coming and going, but never had the time or get-up-and-go to introduce myself.  I’m sure I will sooner or later.  Maybe that’s a good New Year’s Resolution.  We’ve only lived here since February. But fences are aplenty in Suburbia.  good fences make good neighbors I guess.  My son was excited to show me the place where a dead crow was.  Apparently all the kids walking home have made it a landmark of sorts.  I beheld the crow . . . yep there it was.  Funny how kids and grown-ups landmark locations in life.  When the crow is gone it will be just another line of sidewalk, but he’ll never forget the dead crow all the kids shouted about on the way home when he was in 3rd grade.  I remember when I was about his age, a bunch of mean kids tied a living frog to the top of a sewer pipe and shot at it with pellet guns.? Horrible.  that always disturbed me.  That was also in a Suburban neighborhood.  Today it’s just me . . . walking to reduce my blood pressure, get inspired, to write, lead a family, teach.  I feel the crisp cold December air and check my nose to find how cold it is.? I’m pushing my 2 year old in a stroller and decide to turn back into the heated house.  That’s where I am now.  There are new toys in use all over the carpet.  We’re out of food so I’ll have to take the kids to the supermarket.  We’ll probably have stew.  Still in the final afterglow of Christmas, I’m blogging and watching the Blues Brothers.? There is a sort of Suburban Blues . . . maybe I’ll write a song about it . . . I wonder if my neighbors would relate . . . on the other side of the fence.