I have the wrong backyard.

Even though I live on the Westside of Santa Cruz, surfer land, and take my dogs to the beach almost every morning, I work way out on the far side of Watsonville. Where there is no beach. It is kind of like a whole other country away from the Westside, yet only a 45 minute drive! Where sometimes on the way home, I have to follow tractors going about 3 mph on the road for a long time. Where you can buy tamales and popsicles from really old guys with little carts out in the middle of nowhere, walking around. Where you really need to speak Spanish, and there is also a brand new Safeway with a Jamba Juice in it that no one goes to. And everyone has animals in their yards.

You have to drive slow on our road because a lot of dogs live in the road. They are good dogs, they just don't have to live in a fence. It works out there. Way back when, our road used to just have farms and commercial nurseries. Now there are a couple big and fancy houses along it. The little houses along it all have their animals, a burro that lives in a metal scrap pile, the pony and the big dog that live with a metal scrap pile (animals and metal scrap piles are a common way to keep horses on our road), a white cow that lives with a white horse in a field, the herd of mares and baby horses that live in a field with some trailers.

These guys live under the tree on the corner. It's been really, really hot and they just sit under there.

This guy stays chained to the fence all the time.

Do you think it would be cheap to buy a house on our road or a road near it? Not with enough land to have animals in a scrap pile, or especially with enough land to have animals in a fenced area and the scrap pile somewhere else. Still too much! Actually, we could probably afford the scrap pile option on less than an acre. But it is too far away from one of the jobs that would have to pay a lot of our subprime jumbo loan to buy the property.

Can you get the idea I am back on the idea of maybe we have to leave our state? Then as soon as I write that, I am very sad and I think of all the nice things about California (no snow! no rain! the beach! my family!) and then I realize that once you are here it is sure hard to go.