Safe and Sound: Part Duex

I've discovered the most awesome place in Santa Cruz and made it my home. The Santa Cruz Mountains, though recently struck with a string of horrible forest fires (luckily far from my mountains), is the most beautiful, peaceful yet adventurous place i've ever been fortunate to call home. I'm renting an awesome one bedroom cottage on lots of land with the love of my life Zsolt, our super awesome dog Yogi, and my "bag of bones" Bahgeerah (aka- Bahgs, the black cat of doom), and a soon to be new addition a female kitten (insert name here____, we're thinking Nakita?).

We've been working on a lot of maintenance "stuff" that I'm so not used to thinking about. When you live in the middle of the mountains you encounter many things... most I can deal with, bats in our room at 4 am not being one of them. I've grown very fond of tending to our veggie garden, tomato harvest is in the makings, squash and peppers up next. Fresh mint (mostly for Mojitos) is harvested often, and rosemary for potatoes, fish etc. I love the self efficiency of it all, we also have a compost area shared by our neighbors.

We've grown accustom to the strange animal noises at night, though occasionally my man goes on flashlight patrol to investigate rather loud ones (which we've titled the "Crunchy Beast"). I don't know that I'll ever lose my bat paranoia however... since about a month ago we were accosted at 4 am, like I mentioned above. It was terrifying and hilarious at the same time. Zsolt woke me up with a rather loud, "oh, shit". I stirred and tried to get a grip on what the weird fluttering, scratching noise was. When he told me it was indeed a bat, I did the only rational thing a woman that doesn't believe in wearing pajamas could do, cover yourself from head to toe with your blankets! Soo, my awesome man... armed with nothing but a sheet over his head and a flash light, inched his way to the door and lured the bat out. It was the best rescue a damsel in distress could ask for!

Everything has been safe and sound, with the exception of a couple nature induced incidences. I couldn't ask for anything more, I'm the happiest i've ever been... and it's only getting better.