Dinner with Elvia, Josh, Cecilia, Roman and Israel

Grandma Joan, Israel, Cecilia, and Roman,

Olive Garden, Hayward, CA, 11-22-2009

Josh and Grandpa Don, Roman and Israel

Elvia, Roman, and Israel. The boys will be two in January 2010.

Ceci, Roman, Israel, and Elvia

Cecilia McLellan just had her fourth birthday.

Russia 2008

The glow reflected in the airport windows behind us is the setting sun. It's 10:30 p.m. and will be civil twilight for at least another 45 minutes. Being this far north near the longest day of the year means that the sun comes up early and goes to bed late; and so do the humans.

The Auction Begins

People were parked everywhere.

The make-shift auctioneer's office. Wayne's station wagon and pickup are in the background.

Ann Sydes, the auction caller, is in the yellow sweater.

It didn't rain; but, it was very cold. During the auction, a mass of cold air moved over the site making the weather even more miserable.

Inside Wayne's shop. He stuffed the one-car garage attached to the house from floor to ceiling with materials of every discription. Alan managed to organized and clean up so that the good stuff could be sold and the useless stuff could go into the dumpsters.

This stuff was behind some more stuff.

There was a path to the freezer. The saw and the laundry facilities were behind more stuff.

In the same space with the freezer and laundry facilities, these pieces of equipment were a complete surprise.

Alan calls this the "ant at a picnic" stage of the auction. Up till now, people have been moving in an orderly fashion around the property with the auctioneer, waiting patiently to finish bidding on the items they want. After the bidding is completed, everyone pays and starts to collect their goods. They are now full of smiles, triumphant about their successes, and moving in every direction.

Wayne built this large-varmint trap. The guy who bought it is trying to trap a cougar that keeps eating his sheep. Would you want to be anywhere near this thing with an unhappy cougar in it?

Auction Day, 16 December 2006

The road to Wayne's acreage. Top is a photo of Aunt Mildred's and Uncle Ross's house. The house is on the right. Wayne's acreage is on the left.


The little red truck attracted a lot of interest. Nearly everything had a trailer hitch and wheels. Wayne built these little trailers to suit specific purposes and used a riding lawn mower to haul them around the property.

Below, the roof structure covered Wayne's two huge rock saws. You can't see it; but, he had a special water tank set up to provide lubrication when he used the saws. No body wanted the tank.

One of the auctioneer's, Alan Hall, spent days on the property sorting through and organizing this stuff. He is an amazing person with a wealth of knowledge about the esoteric and archane. His memory, supplemented by a collection of old catalogs and magazines for reference, would put the Library of Congress to shame. I can only imagine what his collection of STUFF looks like.


This green box under the shelter is Wayne's fall-out shelter. It was filled with supplies. Nobody bought it so it had to be cut up and put in a dumpster.

No one could figure out what this steam generator was for. It was on piers and all of the rubber seals and insulation were long gone. It wasn't until I got home and reviewed some of the photos that I realized Wayne used this to generate steam for his portable sauna.

The portable sauna is the little box on wheels with a window in the door. It fits one person and has a seat. The thing is so small and coffin-like. Just thinking about being inside it gives me the willies.

Alan and the clean-up crew performed a miracle inside the house. This view is standing in the front door looking toward the back wall. When we were here in November, you couldn't see the floor, much less the book shelves and the cabinets.



Looking to the left, this was Wayne's sleeping alcove. He hadn't slept in the bed (now gone), for a long time. It was piled high with stuff. I'm pretty sure he hadn't used the closet, either. You couldn't walk up to it to open the doors. In this photo, the auctioneer has put stuff up on tables for customers to view. The little maple table in the center of the photo was a surprise. It had been completely buried.


The kitchen, now gutted, except for that pink thing on the wall. It is the range hood. The bathroom was behing the door to the left. It is also gutted to the walls.

From the center of the room looking back toward the front door. Alan did all this organizing, too.

SEE NEXT POST FOR MORE . . .

Entering the property and exterior views of the house

The driveway entrance off the private road at 22275 Berry Drive, Salinas. Isn't it lovely? You can't see the house until you get past the gate (which doesn't work). The fencing on the left is the northern border of the property. To the right is the western property line. Aunt Mildred put the house on the south west corner of the lot instead of plunking it into the middle of the property. This gives you a view to the oaks and the seasonal stream. It also made the house secluded and she wouldn't have to see it from her adobe house, which is the next house up the private road.

This oak tree is dead, having been toppled during a recent storm. Wayne's good neighbor, Tom Bailey, found a friend who was willing to remove the wood without charging us, if he could have the wood. What a bargain. This thing would have filled at least one dumpster on it's own. It took them five hours to do the work.

The area in the last photo, without the fallen oak tree. Just inside the main gate, to your left, Wayne built this plywood fence and the open gate you see. In the middle of the photo, what looks like reinforcement for the fence is really a drop-leg table. You can unhook it and have a surface to use. In the lower left is some sort of boiler or burner. Maybe Wayne built it to be an outdoor heater.


A close-up of the possible outdoor heater.

The house and a dumpster from the drive way, looking directly south. To the left, thru the open gates, you can see the part of the acreage that serves as a parking lot for Wayne's equipment. Those green plants on the left are geraniums. The brush in the middle is part of a butterfly bush hedge. We have to remove the hedge because it is too close to the house to please the fire insurance inspector. It looks dead. Other bushes of the same variety in neighborhood yards are still green and in bloom.

Wayne paid his house insurance premiums by credit card. Apparently Social Security notifies all credit bureaus when the county tells them someone has died. The credit bureau notified the credit card company. The credit card company cancelled the card. The fire insurance company cancelled the insurance. I have my fingers crossed that we can get insurance on the structure while we are having the necessary remodeling done. If not, we will have to buy a more expensive construction policy.

The front door. I have a photograph of the house from the inspection report done when Aunt Mildred died in 1995. The door looked the same. The house was built in 1985, about the time when Wayne married Pat. Wayne had always lived with his parents. When Wayne said he was going to marry Pat and stay with Mildred and Ross, they decided to build him this house on part of their acreage. It is a one-room house with attached garage, basically a studio and very small. You sleep, eat, and cook in the same room where you live. The bathroom door opens into the kitchen. Wayne turned the garage into a workshop.

We don't have any photos of the interior, yet. The Disaster Cleanup people wouldn't let us be inside without protective clothing until they could make it safe. From the doorway, I could see a path from the front door to Wayne's chair and tv. There was a path to the fridge and the bathroom and one to the door to the workshop. The crew completely gutted the kitchen and bathroom. There was so much mold and filth, they decided it was the only way to go. After seeing the photos and the mounds of dead flies and rat urine stains everywhere, I agreed. We didn't save any furniture, except a roll-top desk and a glass-front cabinet that Aunt Mildred and Uncle Ross cobbled together from other pieces of furniture. They were famous for doing this.

There is a commercial strawberry field on the whole western border of the property. The dust from their cultivation seeped onto everything in the house in a fine talcum. It would have been out of character for Wayne to have dusted his house or cleaned his bathroom or wiped off his kitchen counters.

The west side of the house. The white thing on the left is a solar collector and the little box on wheels is a portable sauna. Under the tarp behind the sauna is a home-made cement mixer. Wayne built it rather than buying one; because, it was more fun, according to his neighbor, Tom. You can see the garage door behind those two vertical boards. (We haven't been able to figure out what the boards are used for.) The way the house is situated, you could never have driven a car into the garage. As I took the photo, I tripped over a pink enamel bathtub buried in the ground. There are bathtubs everywhere. People use them to water stock. Back in the Wayne/Pat days, they did have a horse.

Another view of the west side of the house. This was Wayne's garden plot. He had drip irrigation nodes buried all over the property. My husband, Donald, is musing over a leaking node. People pay a set amount for their water every month, no matter how much they use, so a leak doesn't seem too important to one's pocket book.

Behind the house, you can see more impromptu shedding to cover various projects and equipment.

Still on the west side of the house and in the garden plot, in the middle of the photo, there is a lean-to against an aluminum garden shed. Both are full of agricultural chemicals that can't just be thrown into a dumpster. They must be legally removed and disposed of.

The massive trees on the left will probably have to be removed. They are dying from a pine-bark beetle infestation that is 90% of the conifers on the west coast. Once infested, the trees die quickly and become an explosive fire hazard.

Eastern and north sides of the house, with dumpster. The mountain views to the south and west are beautiful as is the view of the ancient live oaks and the seasonal stream on the north edge of the property. On the eastern border of the property, Wayne planted a hedge of butterfly trees to shield his view of Tom Bailey's house. Most of them are dead or in need of serious triming to save them. Tom has since erected a deer fence around his property. Now all the deer come to Wayne's house. The gophers are world-class. And a badger was living under the storage shed. Some of the scat in the yard looks like it could be from some pretty serious critters.

Storage shed

Aunt Mildred built a storage shed to match the house. It is still in pretty good shape. I don't see how Wayne had the patience to wade thru all this stuff to get to what he wanted. The auctioneer was so excited to see what was in here.

The four men standing in front of the storage shed cleaned up outside. They also did a lot inside the house, after the hazmat crew made it safe for them. The green blob on the left is Wayne's fall-out shelter. The building is the storage shed shown earlier. When we first saw the property, you couldn't walk between the fall-out shelter and the wall af the shed, there was so much junk. There is a lean-too behind this shed that is crammed with more tools and equipment. By this time, two of the trash dumpsters are full and two dumptruck loads of trash from the house have gone to the dump.

Cleaning crew discoveries

As the cleaning crew tore down the sheds and other make-shift coverings, this is what they found. The white thing is made out of fiberglass. Wayne probably had high hopes for using the utility wire spools. Between the time he had his idea and acquired them, and now, they are falling apart.

You can see the ground here, now. When the crew started, the shed structures that used to protect this had collapsed over all of it. The green barrels are what is left over from building the windmill tower (shown below.) There's a fridge, a hot water heater, mounds of irrigation and other types of pipe, some empty barrels, and one that has oil in it. It's going to cost a lot to have the hazardous materials people come out and legally dispose of the oil and gasoline. Thankfully, no oil has spilled onto the soil. Remediating that would cost even more. There is no way to avoid the cost. We can't sell the property and close the estate until all of this is cleaned up.

The wind mill tower. Sorry you have to tilt your head. I can't get the blog to import the photo in anything but landscape orientation.