In some ways its a perfectly normal late spring on the hilltop and in other ways its all a little bit different. The normal part is that San Diego weather is just about as nice as one could ask it to be. While we had a little heat wave glory a few months ago, since then I would say it’s been very mild. The rainfall has been a little bit above normal (about 115%) with 9.62 inches so far for the season. That’s a meaningfully wet year by San Diego standards, though the tendency for microclimates makes it possible that the exact rainfall on this hilltop has not been quite that much since we get more of the desert effect up here than they do down at the airport, where that measurement came from. The season started dramatically as January opened with record rainfall, described as a “soggy start to 2026,” with reports of some record amounts in the first days of the year. For context, all of 2025 came in at 9.65 inches — almost exactly normal — while 2024 was above normal at 11.16 inches, though almost all of it fell in the first three months. In terms of temperatures, its been a mixed picture. The winter ran cooler and wetter than expected. The Farmer’s Almanac had predicted the opposite: their forecast called for winter 2025–26 to be warmer and drier than normal, with April and May also warmer with below-normal rainfall (No they are NOT going out of print…the 208 year old Maine version is, but the 234 year old New Hampshire one is going strong). The early part of the year apparently defied that forecast, at least on precipitation. Our inland North County hilltop location typically runs warmer and picks up more sporadic precipitation than coastal San Diego. The 2025–26 rain season has been a good one — above normal at the coast, and likely proportionally wetter up here in the hills. The region is in better shape than the dry 2025 season (normal) or the brutal dry stretch of April–December 2024 when barely a drop fell.
But everything else about this spring feels different. Let’s start on the property. My loyal team has abandoned me (at least for the time being). Handy Brad is out for hip replacement surgery and has been MIA for some time. His one helper, Omar has gotten too big for his britches (according to Handy Brad), so he’s off to greener pastures as a smart and competent guy. Elias, his other helper, has been picked up and deported by ICE, so he’s somewhere south of the border. And then there’s my all-important Joventino. He has just gone back to Mexico to be with his ailing mother and expects to be gone 5 months or more. He says he’s a legal resident (green card?) and is coming back, but who ever knows these days. I have yet to connect with his proposed substitute, Caesar, so we’ll see about that. My current day laborer, Miguel, is available for specific tasks, but fine tuning and maintenance are not his thing and last time I had to do a lot of clean up after him.
Bottom line, I’m left to do a lot more around the place than normal, but the good news is that this spring I not only have more energy to do it, I am, in my slimmed down state (272 and falling), more anxious to get out there and be physically active. I have taken on tasks that one of those guys would have done, like cleaning the basalt garden fountain, which involves moving lots of rocks and all done on hands and knees. I have also self-generated an ongoing to-do garden list. For instance, I bought 300 pounds of large pineapple-size black river rocks to fill in the roadside and driveway border and was again on hands and knees digging out border stones and adding new ones where the old ones have sunk (presumably on their way to China). I have also planted more border succulents and then there are the 20 new pots I have planted and filled in throughout the agave gaps in the lower front garden. Neighbor Melisa likes to lecturer me on the value of negative space and I like to use that as an excuse to buy yet another pot to highlight an empty spot here or there. I have told her that I embrace my pot fetish and am negative on negative space. There is something rewarding about using your garden to express yourself and throw caution, convention and aesthetics to the wind. My garden randomness appeals to me and Kim and lots of people and it is pleasing to find a little surprise around every corner, even if it ain’t 100% feng shui. I may have to write a book about eclectic feng shui and the art of pissing off the conformists.
And then there’s the walking. I now take Buddy for at least one, if not two, long walks every day. We have a program. We start by him getting excited by the word “walk”. I go get the leash and harness. He runs around the living room playing hard to get until I trick him into submission. Then its out the door and down the driveway with a degree of urgency since he has stored everything up for just this moment. We go left to the end of our short street whereupon he finds a spot he likes and gets the job done so we can head back down the street to the corner. That is Buddy’s big decision for the day. If he goes left we go up the small hill toward Augie’s house (Augie is of neighbor kid who is paying for his college tuition on the back of Buddy-sitting). That’s the longer route that takes us to Faraj & Yasuko’s house. If we go right we are heading to the Camino Elena overlook for a nice view of the ocean and Escondido while I sit on a big address rock at the French Horn player’s house. We might go down the big hill to Mike and Melisa’s, but that takes a lot of energy to get back up so we only do that every once in while. Sometimes its worth it just to see the bench and blue pot which I gave to Melisa and positioned at the top of her property…just to annoy her and her negative space. I personally think she’s getting to like the bench and the pot and sense that there will soon be a succulent living in there.
Kim does this Buddy walk program with us one third of the time, but usually she’s too busy with the stage direction work she’s consumed by this spring. Her production company is putting on a show called Road Trip. There’s lots of good road trip musical numbers that are about things like Rt. 66, but somewhere along the way, the show finds its way into a cornfield in Iowa. From the show Shucked, the all-American corn-pun-fest that became a surprise Broadway hit, she has landed on the opening number from it, called, what else?…Corn. Corn opens Shucked like a barn door in a stiff wind. It establishes Cob County’s worldview, a community portrait number that doubles as a love letter to a crop, using mock-biblical imagery and pep-rally harmonies. The show received nine Tony nominations including Best Musical, so its easy to see why it was chosen. Kim has spent literally months making cornstalks and corn face placards that will be held by the 60 performers on a set of risers that will resemble a corn field.
So, to paraphrase the old adage, the corn is already knee-high in our kitchen and its not even Memorial Day. Meanwhile, I’m cornering the market on landscape pots and destroying negative space wherever I find it. Buddy and I are always at the corner of our walking program….and Kim….well, let’s just say that she’s involved with her own special can of corn.