Zoe at the Farmer's Market

When we are in town on the weekends we try and hit the Framer's market. Fresh, organic, and overpriced ($4.50 for three tomatoes), the Farmer's Market not only has fruits and vegetables, but also ice cream, pretzels, and Himalayan food. We bought a few onions, nectarines, and a melon and showed Zoe off to the fruit vendors and other shoppers. Zoe enjoys any activity that puts her in contact with people. Fruit sellers offer her snacks (whih she is not allowed to take since she has 2 teeth and 2 teeth are not quite suffiecent to chew much other than baby mash), she gets smiling gushing attention and gasps of "what a cute baby, oh she's so beautiful," and she gets a long walk in the Baby Bjorn. Basically the perfect day for Baby Zoe.





We also managed to take a look at a house in the Berkeley Hills. Normally anything up there would be out of our price range, but "an extreme fixer-upper" at 600K intrigued us. Max drove up to the house, hidden away at the top of a narrow dead-end street. Yellow Caution tape adorned a rickety railing leading up to the house. We peered into the windows, Max occasionally gasping (and not with delight). A fortuitous "open house" allowed us a quick tour of the property. There was no single straightline in the house-every wall, every doorway, every floor tilted and buckled. Max stood in the corner of the living room, remarking at the lovely high ceilings and the fact that he was two feet lower over in the west corner than he was in the east corner. The small dark kitchen smelled of gas (no open flames in there for us!) and the second bedroom (aka Zoe's room) was actually in the far corner of the unfinished basement (although it did have its own bathroom, though whether the toilet and sink were functional was something we did not investigate). We did tell each other that "it had potential" which it did if one had an extra 200-300K to fix the most immediate problems (i.e. the house's imminent slide down a gully to the north west, the 90K of termite and dry rot, and the roof with its undulations and waves, poorly disguising it's secrets of water damage and habitat for weird nesting vermin). By the end of the ride back, Max had started referring to it as the haunted house. It's feel of tragedy and abandonment made me long for the more cheerful homes we had seen by Monterrey Market. One look at the little imp and we decided to forget any nascent dreams of renovation and find something actually liveable. I couldn't put my lovely baby in that horrible basement bedroom, anyway that was reserved for "a crazy relative" as Max put it.