Hell is moving a man who has everything into a 200 square foot house

Which is exactly what I spent the better part of Summer 1999 doing.

I would like to thank all the people who were gracious enough to help in any way at all:
Jon Cross
Jess MacDonald
Shannon O'Dell
Shannon Kelsey
Jodi Winemiller
There are many others, too many to list as a matter of fact.
A lot of the stuff that was there had been there all my life, and some years prior, so a lot of the things that won't really intrest anybody else, like a blank spot next to a window, are really weird to me. Like when I saw them taking the grandfather clock out of the living room, it was like somebody taking off their right arm. It was the weirdest thing. That's an analogy I find myself coming back to frequently. A lot of the things that I insist are strange that you wouldn't question were like someone taking off a major appendage to me. Now that you have been given an idea of the place we were moving out of, on with the pictures. I'm gonna try and start with pictures of just the landscape and stuff, then go into the moving pictures first of the main house then the Lanai, follow that with pictures regarding the new ownership, and last but not least the epilogue (where the stuff went, Michael's new house, that sort of thing).

This is the view from the southeastern corner of the ranch.

This is the garden on the other side of the pole on the left side of the above picture. It's not actually devided, it's just how I took them that gives it that kind of feeling.

The thornless rosebushes which my grandma was endlessly proud of on the east side

Some plants sort of on the southwest side

The road less traveled

There were these crooked stairs going up from the Lanai, to the main house.

Here's the whole staircase

And the view from those stairs

This was the wall paper in one of the downstairs bathrooms. It kind of reminds me of souls descending into hell for some reason.

And now they're crashing into one another. Always a bad sign

Alpine has this really weird reddish dirt abundant with quartz.

When Shannon O'Dell came up, they insisted there was nothing for us to do (and yet they still forced me to come up every day against my will for several weeks afterwards), so we went on a walk. This was a picture we took looking westward.

Overlooking the general direction of Dehesa (southwest of Alpine)

I consulted a map, and it refused to name the region pictured here, but it's east of lakeside. I know it has it's own name, but I can't think of what that would be at this point.

I don't remember what the point of this picture was, but it's the corner guest room from the outside

When I was a little girl, my grandma owned the surrounding 360 acres, and the nearest neighabor was several miles away. Alpine was basically a series of well spaced houses and a town of three or four mom and pop stores. This is how it should be, and stay forever, if you ask me. But in order to survive financially Grandma had to sell the land off piece by piece. This led to Alpine becoming more corprate and as a town conforming to the will of a capitalist govenment. The direct result of this was me turning against my family, for selling Alpine out. Anyway, it wasn't so bad, until you could actually see the other houses from the front porch. And granted, for any other area of town, the houses were still a good distance away, but something really died when you looked out the window to see not nature, pure and untouched, but MAN, dirty and ignorant. Anyway, that is why I think the house in the background, although it is one of the more remote ones, was born BAD!!!!!!

Mom and Daniel with the bubble wrap and boxes (we went through approxametly this much bubble wrap daily, and several times as many boxes).

My mom and her friend Carol's cars with some of the moving stuff

The bubble wrap (again) and our cars butt

I don't know if you can see this, but this is a dinner table. This is THE dinner table where I have eaten every important meal in my entire life. It was never used for anything else. My family has always been anal about it. It's not for sitting on, it's not for setting stuff on, and it's not for working on. It's a dinner table, you eat dinner off of it. And here it is with a large sum of boxes on it, none of them even vaguely resembling any food item. It was so strange.

This was my first statue, I call it "Ode To Moving".

And the "Confrence Of None"

The car, all loaded up.

Contrary to what this picture looks like, we did not stock pile mirrors.

My uncle collected records. No one even knew how many records he had until we had to put them in boxes and get rid of them. There was a pile of them in the living room, easily (in feet) 10 by 6 by 3. It was absurd.

There was this silver cabenet off the dining room, that I had never seen crammed full of stuff, until I took this picture

As was the case with these cabenets

The upstairs, largely empty

This was my grandma's room, which was blue, the color on the right side of this photograph. It was pale blue. You can't tell that because my scanner likes to distort pictures and then laugh hystarically when no one can make sense of them. But it was always this blue color. And then on the left it's all white, the color the new people painted it. Which again, does not cease to blow my mind.

This is where the washing machine and dryer used to be.

And here, there were always these two beds. And they're not there anymore.

This is the little pool that had the plaque, described in History Of A Mountain Settlement. Except we took the plaque off, and although there's a good chance that no one will appreciate how weird this seems to me, it was the strangest thing.

On the day that Jess and Jon helped, we found these glasses, and Jess would laugh hystarically whenever I did this.

Other kooky things I did that day

Later, after Jon and Jess and I were off the hook for the day, I took the coaster up to Carlsbad. While waiting at the coaster station, Jon took a picture of some tourists.

Even now, it is not appropriet to do as Shannon is doing here and yell "FUCK ME UP THE ASS".

Shannon and I wound up sitting in a car for about eight hours (literally). Anyway, this is principally why she's climbing the fence

Here she is again with her own spit all over her face (and every where else) after a well placed "Don't laugh".

There was this pool house, sort of in the lap of the main houes, called the Lanai. This is the Lanai in the daylight.

The wall paper in the Lanai

My mom. standing in front of the Lanai talking to my uncle Reed

The empty Lanai

The empty Lanai, clean.

My mom would always climb up on to the little pool with the plaque on it, instead of walking on the path around the big pool, and it always struck me as being so funny, because my mom was otherwise always so anal about NOT doing things like that. Anyway, here she is.

And now she realizes that she's been caught in the act

Out the bathroom window. This picture didn't turn out quite how I'd intended, but it works.

Same with this picture

The sliding glass doors into the office, with the new owner's furniture and stuff in there. Not that it's visable through the glare.

The upstairs bathroom, after the new owners had peeled off the wall paper

One of the things that happened when we sold the ranch, is it was subdevided. And this was done such that the septic tank was on a different lot than the house. So this is the hole the new owners dug to put the septic tank into.

And here they're just digging up the front yard because they like to dig.

The 200 square foot house

My uncle Reed rented a truck to take the stuff to it's final location. This is him backing into the driveway.

Unloading the truck

Still unloading the truck

You're probably sitting there thinking "You can't fit the contents of a 14,000 square foot house into that dinky abode your uncle moved into. Where did it go?". My living room!

So my living room has gone from fitting approxamately 20 people comfortably to one, if you squeeze in really tightly.