Finding the Warmth
Today it was overcast to start what will likely be a fine day. An overcast day always makes me want to jump in the hot tub in the morning. I have my spa app set up to have my spa warmed and ready from 7am to 9am. I would guess I go in three or four days a week during those hours. Other days I go in later and just manually turn it on. The beauty of a spa in this climate is that it stays pretty warm all day long and you really only have to top off the heat by a few degrees to have it be warm enough to be comfortable. I am not a pot-boiling sort of spa user. Technically they are supposed to be safe up to 104 degrees, but then you can only stay in for maybe ten minutes. I most often like the temperature to be at body temperature (say, 98 degrees). During the warmer weather, I am looking to cool off in the spa since I don’t have a pool. I set the spa at 90 these days and I hope it will help keep my propane bill significantly lower. In January – March this year, my propane bill was my biggest utility. It is used for the spa heater, the furnace, the dryer and the stove, so its an important utility category for us during those winter months.
As I have mentioned, we have added an outdoor propane fire pit table to our deck furniture. It houses a small propane tank underneath, just like the Barbecue on the patio. We’ve really only sat and used it once so far, but it is very pleasant sitting out on the deck watching the sun set on the Pacific as the thermometer drops low enough to appreciate having a fire pit. Probably one of the nicest things about this climate out here is that it is very desert-like in that whatever heat there is during the day, runs a away quickly once the sun goes down. The evenings and nights are decidedly cool by almost any standard. It makes for a very pleasant. Lifestyle where we find ourselves rarely sweltering (it helps a lot that the humidity is so low) and most often cool in the hours of darkness. We have to be mindful of that since our COVID-19 socializing is now all out of doors and therefore in need of at least a light wrap for after-dinner conversation.
As much as I like the sunshine here, I do find myself working to avoid it as much as possible. My deck palapa works well to shield the sun through a gauzy Sunbrella covering that works well until about 5pm. The setting sun is always the most harsh and the deck has that exposure to take advantage of the distant ocean views, which I can see simmering out there about a dozen miles over Vista and Oceanside. On a good day I can see the Avalon side of Catalina Island, set in the saddle between two hills between me and the coast. By my reckoning, Catalina is about sixty-nine miles away, so I generally say that I have a forty-mile view of the Pacific Ocean. That math works very well when I go online for an ocean view calculator. My house is at 1,627 feet in altitude according to my iPhone. That supposedly gives me 49.4 miles of ocean visibility and with my distance to the ocean being about fifteen miles, I am exaggerating my ocean view by about five miles, which is well within the range of poetic license in which I tend to operate.
At first I thought I wanted to have an attached awning on this side of the house. I got my architect sister involved and one of her guys went at the problem with a CAD program that incorporated the sun movements from this location throughout the year. He then optimized the proposed awning structure so that it would maximize sun shading for the longest period of the year. The problem was that it would have required a very weird triangular shade that would have served mostly to block our view in return for shielding us from the setting sun. That was a way-to-complicated non-starter. I then hit on a palapa, which I have always liked in terms of look and feel. I have one covered in wisteria in Ithaca at the far end of the pool. Palapas have a very relaxing look and feel about them. Luckily, I had just the guy to build it, Jeff. He did a fine job on executing on the general idea and it works great as a napping spot on the deck during a sunny afternoon. AS for the setting sun, we like to think that’s more of a positive than a negative.
Morning sun is not a problem on the patio on the other side of the house since Jeff built Palapa v.2.0 over there for me. It is build with custom structural steel and has colorful LED lighting in the rafters and the columns such that you can put on a light show whenever you want. I have just ordered some white snowflake laser up lighting to put out there shining up into the trees to add an even more magical lighting effect. I hope I am not overdoing it. To add evening warmth after dinner I am not going to add another fire pit over there for fear that I will obviate the use of my deck in the evenings if I am not careful. The after-dinner laziness might be too much inertia to overcome for a sunset.
We really do live indoors and outdoors here in California, much more than I expected. We have one of those sliding window walls in the kitchen out to the deck, so we can literally just have the outdoors and indoors be one. The temperature is moderate enough that it is not a crazy idea. We are also blessed with a low insect count though I do use some fly traps and keep a zapper racket handy in case some flies decide to bother us. Human beings have a very narrow comfort range when it comes to temperature and perhaps an even lower tolerance to flying insects. So far, I find California very agreeable on both counts. The days seem to hang in the 70’s with a hot day touching 80 and a cool day hiding in the high 60’s. That really is quite pleasant when you stop to think of the range of temperature most any other place you can live.
Today (Sunday), Kim, Cecil and I decided to take a ride over the hill to Palm Desert. It’s a wonderful and lovely inland SoCal ride up to Temecula, over to Agaunga, up to Anza and over the hill to the Palm Springs communities in the valley. We turned around and just headed back since we had no agenda in Palm Desert at all and we had seen a Dairy Queen in Anza that looked ripe for the picking on a sunny and warmish day. I know it sounds very mundane to those of us urbanites and cosmopolitan sorts, but in the era of COVID, I think we all have to find our warmth wherever we can find it…even at DQ.