Apologies for the fathomless silence...

NOTE: Comments are off, because I'm being deluged with spam, even with the captcha. And I just don't have time or skills to deal with it. Feel free to email.

For any old friends who may still be reading, I've been MIA because the Weidners have been engaged in our biggest and most difficult operation since the annus mirabilus of 1985, when John and Charlene got married, joined a church, had a baby and bought a fixer-upper house, all in one crazy year.

No more babies this time, but we've pulled up stakes and moved to the country. After more than 40 years in the big city. We are now living in Sonora, CA. A Gold Country town in the foothills of the Sierras, about 2 1/2 hours due east of SF.

I haven't blogged all this, both because of a superstitious dread that we might jinx things, and also because it's been horribly hard work. We've been pretty much working 7 days a week for more than 6 months.

We haven't retired. Charlene's lawyering covers N Calif, so she's no more out of things here than in SF. With an Internet connection she can do most of her work from anywhere. (Internet was a big problem. We ended up having a T-1 line laid in.) And I'm farther from my old customers, but have more space to work more efficiently and that may balance out. And I may find cabinetmaking work around here too.

It's a big upheaval for our kids, but their careers and lives were not flourishing in SF, so maybe a change will be good for them.

And frankly, we've been feeling like a lot of things in liberal SF, underneath a thin veneer of "niceness," are increasingly just evil. (And, worse than evil, downright stupid!) When we started our "urban project" long ago, we we thought our neighbors were too far to the left, but we assumed they we were all sailing on parallel courses. Turns out, not so. We have diverged. (For myself, the turning point was 9/11. I had always assumed that, disgusting as lefty anti-Americanism was to me, if America were attacked in a way similar to Pearl Harbor, we would all come together in her defense. To observe leftists claiming that the 9/11 attack was a result of our sins, and seeing how they hated the displays of American flags, was a huge eye-opener for me. It was sick and crazy. Evil, pure evil. I started this blog a month later.)

I feel like God has hugely favored us. I prayed for help to escape the tangles of many frustrations in SF, and the whole thing just unfolded. Deo gratias!

Anyway, we are loving Sonora so far. Working like crazy. Were having lots of work done on the house, we are planting trees and vines so as to not miss the year's growth. I'm getting my shop put together, and spraying herbicides on Poison Oak. We have ten acres, which should keep us busy for the rest of our lives.

Here are a few pix...

Charlene and the back of our house, where the gardens and terraces are...

My sons moving rocks with our tractor, a John Deere 4310...

We get this every evening. We've never lived with a view before. That's East Sonora in the distance.

For a rock-lover like me, this place is mind boggling. I could take a hundred pix like this...