We Know the Way.

XMAS EVE, SAN JOSÉ: Well, another hectic day with Eoin and Joey, a pair of total high-energy grandsons. Just watching them play, and fight, is exhausting. The house construction project is progressing, perhaps a bit slowly, but progressing. It will be great some day. Flowers are blooming up and down all the streets, roses, iris, bougainvillea, but the deciduous trees are leafless, an incongruous effect.

California cities look different from eastern cities. Out here the streets are broad with center islands beautifully planted and building set back from the curb and separated from one another. Cross streets just as wide as main streets. In the east, the streets are narrow and the buildings close together across the street and touching their neighbors on either side creating an enclosed, densely packed effect that gives me a feeling of greater energy and vibrancy. The California feeling is openness, low density and lower intensity. City planning as cultural ethos.


Xmas decorations.

This isn't supposed to happen until May.