Category Archives: Forever Home

Getting out into the community.

The Long-Suffering Wife got an annual family pass to the local museum, which turns out to be an annual family pass to ALL of the San Bernardino County museums, which turns out to be a group of five. She wanted to go tour the local museum after our usual Sunday morning breakfast, which turned out to be a great idea.

It was lovely! A ton of stuff about the history of the area, the whole Roy Rogers & Dale Evans connection, and so on. Also some stuffed critters.

It also turns out that every Sunday morning the local farmer’s market is in the parking lot there. Lesson learned – next time don’t eat breakfast and then come here, just come here and get breakfast! Several very nice BBQ & Mexican food trucks that we were too stuffed to sample.

But the radishes were huge (I was afraid I had gotten beets by mistake) and carrots.

Onion, potatoes, garlic, strawberries, and blueberries, all disgustingly fresh. We’re gonna be eating so healthy…

Remember how I was bitching about not getting enough varieties of apples that aren’t developed and grown for the major grocery store chain markets? Something else to keep an eye out for in future weeks. And oranges. And pears. And…

On July 22, 2025 we closed escrow on our new Forever Home in Hesperia / Oak Hills and started moving in, so as of today it’s been six months.

We’re still loving the mountain and desert views, especially with snow on Mt San Antonio (Old Baldy).

It hasn’t all been peppermints and rainbows and unicorns (although we’ve had our share of rainbows, which is nice!). The Christmas Eve downpour that left the interior courtyard flooded and overflowing into the garage was probably a low point. And along with home ownership comes the joy of home repairs. I LOVE fixing toilets when they stop flushing! *sarcasm*

I miss some of the birds we had in West Hills which we don’t have here, but we’ve got quite the flock of sparrows and finches here (as long as I remember to fill the feeders regularly) as well as crows and hawks and owls, so it’s still pretty good. And we have our squirrels.

We’ve met a number of our neighbors and gotten onto the neighborhood group text connection. We’ve started participating in local events and have plans for more in the upcoming year. All good.

One realization that came to me a couple of days ago, which probably has a big impact on my appreciation for and enjoyment of our Forever Home, is that this is the first place I’ve EVER lived which I actually chose. Ever since I was 18 and moved out of my parents’ house in 1975 I’ve lived in apartments (where I took what I could find, or afford, but they weren’t what I wanted), rented homes, the home we bought that we were already renting and living in, the house we rented because we stumbled on it with just days to go before we HAD to move and the only other option was to go back into an apartment… Every place I’ve lived has been a compromise, settling for whatever I could get. Some of those weren’t terrible – the Pomelo house where we stumbled onto the rental through a connection with a co-worker, then bought when we were already living there, was a great place, we lived there over 30 years, but it was still a product of chance and luck and one stumbling step after another, not choice.

The Forever Home is the place we chose after something like four years of looking (including homes all over the country in Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, Arizona, Washington…) and Hesperia’s the community we found and liked.

We’re good!

For years we have gone out to breakfast on Sunday mornings, followed by our major weekly trip to the grocery store. COVID put a hitch in our getalong for a while (we ordered breakfast to go and I went shopping by myself to get in and get out) but now we’re getting back to that routine in Hesperia. It’s nice.

A couple of the places we go are about five miles away, near the post office, so it’s a good chance to also swing by and clean out the PO Box. The place we went this last Sunday is right near the Main Street overpass of the BNSF mainline railroad tracks, which might be one of the taller structures in the area. And it was the first day after the clouds had finally cleared out following the Christmas storm.

While we were waiting for breakfast to get cooked and served, I took a short hike.

That’s the back (north) side of Mount San Antonio, known better as “Old Baldy.”

With several inches of fresh snow, it was beautiful! Too bad that with several major mountain roads closed and washed out by the flooding, no one could get up to the ski resorts there.

While I was up there for five minutes, I also got to see two freight trains, seen here just before they meet going in opposite directions. The one on the left is headed down into Cajon Pass and down the hill into the Los Angeles area rail yards, while the one on the right has just come up the hill and is headed to points east. The main line goes through Barstow, Flagstaff, Kansas City, Fort Madison, and Chicago.

Later, from a lower point of view, i.e., atop the fence surrounding the flood control basin near where I took last night’s pictures of the Christmas lights hanging over the back yard wall, you can see the mountain rising about twenty miles to the southwest of the Forever Home.

I’m thinking we won’t get tired of that view any time soon.