Surprisingly quick visit to John Muir's ER after my thumb got in the way of a potato peeler

At about 8 p.m. Sunday my husband said I would probably need to go to the emergency room. The bleeding had not stopped from the gash on my left thumb. A steady trickle of blood kept filling up the gauze bandages I kept wrapping around my it. This was about three hours after the skin of my thumb got in the way of my peeling potatoes for dinner.

"Do I really have to?"

I so much did not want to go to the ER.  Not for something stupid like this! I wanted to just get into my pajamas, curl up in bed with some peanut M&Ms and--I don't know--read a Walnut Creek city staff report. (Aren't I fun?)

My thumb didn't hurt, and I figured that, after triage, a cut thumb would wind up pretty low on John Muir Medical Center's emergency room priority list--even if the emergency room wasn't busy. I could be there for hours, sitting up in the waiting room, with that artificial waiting room air and something obnoxious--like Fox News--playing on the TV. Would they even have  trashy magazines to read?

But my husband, the son of a nurse, said the cut looked deep, and it looked like it would keep bleeding, unless I got stitches. He offered to drive me, but I said I could drive myself, and by 8:15, I was in the car on my way to John Muir.

Things didn't look promising when I arrived. Half the waiting room seats were filled, and I was third in line to register. At least, Fox News wasn't playing on the TV. Rather, it was re-run of House. Yes, the TV medical drama--yes, the irony of this show being broadcast in a hospital waiting room. Given that I'm rather fond of House, I decided I could pass the survive this waiting room for a little while.

But it turned out I wouldn't be left out in the waiting room. As soon as I signed in, a triage nurse came to get me and take me back to an exam room, where I was invited to sit on a hospital bed. I thought, well, if I'm here for a while, I can at least lie back and try to zone out.

But right away, a nurse came to check my vitals (blood pressure 121 over 73) and look over my bloody thumb. A few minutes later, the doctor herself appeared, and she looked it over, too. We all had a little laugh over my injury, with both reassuring me that potato peelers are involved in a lot more finger gashes than you would ever realize.

A technician irrigated my thumb, and the doctor saw that stitching it up wouldn't be possible. There was no flap of skin. There was no skin at all, just a deep little hole that the doctor said looked like it reach pretty close the bone. She recommended placing this synthetic material over it, which would act like skin. She would then wrap it up, and she recommended that I wear a splint for a few days, so that I wouldn't be tempted to bend my thumb and re-open the wound. 

And that's what the ER staff did. The nurse also gave me a tetanus shot, because I couldn't remember the date of my last shot. "I've been giving out a lot of these today," she said, adding that a lot of people had come in Sunday with cuts and other injuries that would warrant tetanus shots.

It all went pretty quickly and efficiently, despite the fact that, as he technician mentioned, a trauma case had just come in, and "a lot of people are dealing with that."

An added benefit: in between the visits of the nurse, doctor, and nurse technician, a staff member came and took my insurance information and co-pay.

So, I was out of the emergency room, armed with my discharge papers, in about an hour, despite my presumably low-priority injury. I'll have to go see my primary care doctor in a couple days, to make sure my thumb is heeling and to probably get some antibiotics.

And, now I'm back home, writing this. To my surprise and delight, I'm not having any trouble typing. I'm also OK with the splint. It looks rather dramatic--more dramatic than my so-called crisis was, of course. But as the nurse and I joked, if you're gonna go to the emergency room, you should at least leave with some visible reminder of the "emergency" you went through.

I will soon curl up in bed with my M&Ms and my Walnut Creek city staff report.

But I need to close with some words of advice. You know how your mother tells you to always wear clean underwear in case you get into an accident and have to go to the emergency room? Well, it's probably good to keep up with your manicures, in case you slice a digit with a potato peeler or a bagel knife. Alas, I had to expose my ragged, need-to-be-cut-and-filed-fingernails to strangers.

Oh well, I'm sure they've seen worse.

Big Ugly Houses, Chapter 6: Tarp House, a Metaphor for our Times

No, not TARP, as in Troubled Asset Relief Program—you know, that US government program to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions.

We’re literally talking tarp, as in the four varying-sized lengths of black, plastic tarp that drape down the steep slope behind this very big house on top of a ridge in Walnut Creek. Actually that’s what this house has instead of a back yard: tarp, tarp, tarp, and tarp. The sheets of tarp cover the steep areas of bald dirt and gullies that get muddy and slippery when it rains, as those areas have with the storms of the past couple weeks.

The owners unfurled the tarp several years ago at least, and they haven’t taken it down since. They leave it up all year, even during the long dry months of summer.

They apparently had the money to buy this Big Ugly House, no doubt for a million or two or three, but they don’t have the money to reduce the risk of their house sliding down the hill. Or, the house was built in such a way and in such an unstable location that it is beyond help.

If this house tumbles down the hill, it and all its mass will land in the playing field of a local elementary school.

With the rains, it looks like the owners have propped sandbags up on the hill, on top of the tarp, to hold the sheets in place. Let’s hope those sandbags do the trick.

I could go on about how this house, perhaps more than others I’ve featured so far in Big, Ugly Houses, is a metaphor for our strange, shifting times. You get it, don’t you? A big house that someone bought with ideas of grand, suburban living (and with spectacular central Contra Costa and Mount Diablo views). But a house that sadly, for the homeowners and for the rest of us, was constructed on apparently unstable ground.

Obviously, this house is a literal representation of all those homes across America that people bought with risky loans, the shaky foundation that helped bring about our economic crisis and the creation of more government programs with weird-sounding acronyms like TARP.

Big Ugly Houses and my recession-provoked “populist rage”

After my most recent post about some big ugly houses in Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, a reader accused me of being jealous and spiteful, and then of being intolerant of well-off people who incorporate “all THEIR dreams, THEIR plans, and THEIR design ideals” into what I’m labeling ugly and excessive residential architecture.

Dear reader, thanks for the perspective.

The thing is, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the homes I’ve highlighted are eyesores. In fact, on some larger ideological plane, they are even more of a blight than acres of mass-produced tract homes. Here’s why: These big ugly houses are built and purchased by people who obviously have earned—or come into—enough money and power (or had enough money and power before the recession hit) to have a choice. Actually, someone who, for example, can afford a $28,000 monthly mortgage, which is what you’d need for one of my recently featured homes, has a lot of choices, certainly a lot more than the people who populate those mass-produced tract homes.

Those in this high-income bracket could choose to pay for some top, high-end architectural advice—advice that would steer them to artistry and innovation in design and construction. And away from Big Ugly House aesthetic, which, the more that I think of it, strikes me as both dated and excessive in a non-ironic ‘80s way.

It’s like the owners of these homes are still caught up in that fervor for lavish displays of wealth and ostentation that, pop culture-wise, we saw on display in cheesy primetime soaps like Dynasty and Dallas. Homes that I have thus far featured in Big Ugly Houses harken back to the Ronald Regan/Linda Evans/Joan Collins/J.R. Ewing era of big hair and shoulder pads. Looking at these homes, I immediately hear Robin Leach, host of that quintessential ‘80s show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, oozing, in his Brit--tabloid-sensationalist voice, about the glories of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”

Aren’t the ‘80s so, like, two decades ago? Also, in a post-GEC (Global Economic Crisis) world, the Zeitgeist has shifted. Sorry to throw in this big German word, but the German language does have a way of summing up those big themes in the human condition. Zeitgeist, roughly translated, means “spirit of the times.”

And the spirit of the times right now is saying that lavish displays of wealth are no longer fashionable or trendy, whether it’s choosing to build and live in a Big Ugly House or buying $800 Jimmy Choo shoes. These houses and those shoes are so pre-September 2008.

Yes, the commenter who accused me of jealousy and spitefulness had a point. I am jealous. I am spiteful. These are not pleasant qualities to admit to, and I’m sure that some of you don’t want to read my vitriol.

At the same time, I am merely offering yet another voice to the groundswell of frustration and even rage that’s rising up in this country.

While I’m railing against Big Ugly Houses, “a new kind of street warfare is breaking out,” says the New York Post. This warfare is directed against the Wall Street titans who derailed our financial system, and it consists of corps of agitators, making the rounds of suburban mansions and co-ops of Wall Street bankers and CEOs. The protesters are chanting into bullhorns and waving signs to harangue these former rulers of our universe for their errors in the housing crisis.

“I’m afraid there are rich people all around the country who are about to suffer similar social self-immolation because they don’t understand that the rules of privileged society have undergone a radical transformation,” writes conservative columnist David Brooks in the New York Times. “But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules.”

Frank Rich, another Times columnist, adds that “the tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than [Tom] Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus.”

Rich goes on to say that Americans are fed up with displays of arrogance, “whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom were contradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

Rich assures me that my, and perhaps your, revulsion, frustration, and rage isn’t just “mindless class hatred.”

He quotes the president who said of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.”

I said something similar, about not begrudging anyone for achieving success, in a response to that commenter who didn’t like my attack on Big Ugly Houses. This response referred to my recent visit to what I considered to be a big, beautiful house—though at roughly 4,000 square feet its size is modest by Big House standards.

This house is in the Oakland hills, which probably has more Big Ugly Houses (built to replace those destroyed in the catastrophic fire of 1991) per acre than anywhere else in the Bay Area. The house I visited was also a replacement for a victim of the firestorm. The new home’s owner/builder is creative, innovative guy with a strong sense of aesthetics and respect for his community. He worked hard with his neighbors to make sure his home fit in, design-wise, with those on his block. I added that it doesn’t hurt that this is a super green house.

“While touring this house, I felt envy, but a good kind of envy,” I wrote in my response to the commenter. “Admiration and respect for someone who used his hard-earned money to build him and his family a home that is a true design showcase--beautiful, tasteful, livable, and, certainly filled with high-quality materials. But despite location and value, there was nothing overly showy about it.”

Meanwhile, here’s something of an update on the Big, Ugly Houses mentioned in my most recent post. There was an 8,000-square foot sprawling hilltop home selling for $5.4 million near Sugar Loaf Open Space in Walnut Creek, and the other, a 14,000-square-foot 7-bedroom, 9.5-bath monster in Pleasanton’s Ruby Hills selling for $10 million. They are still for sale if anyone’s in the market. They’ve been available for sale anywhere from more than two to three months. Maybe they are Big White Elephants.

The rough economy is also certainly a factor. It turns out that the high-end real estate market has also hit the skids, with sales of homes above $5 million have all but frozen since November. SFGate.com’s On the Block blog reported earlier this week that its writers could only find one house priced over $5 million that has sold over the last three months, and this one was in Atherton.

Big Ugly Houses, Chapters 4 and 5: Just $28,509 or $52,795 per month gets you one of these monstrosities

Chapter 4: A Walnut Creek tipster directed me to real estate listings for this "beauty" that sits in her neighborhood, prominently on display and on a hill near the city’s Sugar Loaf Open Space Recreation Area.

It’s a 8,300-square-foot faux Mediterranean villa with five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a wine cellar, tasting room, game room, theater room, and exercise room.

Plus two master suites. Phew! I’m getting exhausted by all this excessive extravagance. And it has an elevator, room for a pool (what, no pool already?) and views from Mount Diablo to Lafayette!

And, it’s all yours for $5.4 million—or $28,509 per month.

In my demented way of thinking, I can see how the audacious hideousness of this house actually sounds perfect for some Merrill Lynch refugee who fled that firm just in time to, of course, cash in on his/her generous John Thain-approved accelerated bonus, which was paid for by the $15 billion in bailout money that Merrill Lynch and Bank of America received from U.S. taxpapers.

With our nation in a recession, or GD2 (Great Depression 2), as my pessimistic friends like to call it, and our world in GEC (Global Economic Crisis), I think that the only person who would be able to afford this sprawling mega house would be a recipient of some generous executive payout.

And, by the way, it appears that this home has been on the market for 65 days. Gee, why?

Big Ugly Houses, Chapter 5: In checking out this Sugar Loaf area home, I found that it was represented by a certain realtor who has a knack for representing some really prime examples of Big Ugly Househood.

Here’s this realtor's other prize property: a 16,000-square-foot, two-story, seven-bedroom monster of “luxury” on just one acre in Pleasanton's exclusive Ruby Hills neighborhood. It's available for $10 million, or $52,795 per month. And, it's been on the market for 86 days. (Again, I wonder why?)

“This estate has an amazing view,” this realtor’s ad reads.

It’s also got a six-car garage! A stunning iron- and bronze-cap floating staircase (whatever the hell that means)! Six fireplaces! An amazing kitchen with two large islands and granite counters! A game room!

A “teen room” (Wonder if this "teen room" would be useful for the after-school sex, pot, and meth parties that I often hear about occurring amongst ennui-afflicted teens in our affluent suburbs).

And a “banquet-size formal dining room" with an adjacent “incredible temperature-controlled wine cave.” Gosh, I get all tingly and pea-green with envy reading about all this superb luxury.

As for those seven bedrooms? All large and “en suite.” And the master suite has a separate exercise room, so that you, master and mistress of the manor, don’t have to mingle with all the riff-raff of the rest of your family. Or the housekeeper, gardener and nanny (who are perhaps in the country illegally and whom you pay under the table.)

Besides the wine cellar, another common feature of monster homes like this one seems to be a home theater, which this Ruby Hills estate has with a vengeance. Not only does it have seating for 20 guests, it also has “its own ticket taker booth!” Oh, goody!

Outside, there are "cascading waterfalls" to a pool, spa, and bridge over a 7,000-gallon koi pond, lush lawns, beautifully landscaped firepit and loggia with flat-screen TV.

Yeah, what F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "The rich are different from you and me." Or, I suspect, in the case of buyers of homes like these, out here in the East Bay suburbs, we're mostly dealing with the wanne-be rich, the ones who, Gatsby-like, are desperate for some fleeting idea of American respect and status. So desperate, that they choose to assuage this desperation by buying the garish and cheesy displays of supposed wealth and status that these homes offer.

Cascading waterfalls! Wine cellars! Home theaters!

Then again, if you consider one of these monstrosities a dream home for you and your family--well, good luck in life. You're gonna need it.

Yeah, sorry to all those who think these houses are the epitome of good taste and inevitable rewards to people who work hard and smart for such privileges. To me, these homes absolutely reek of desperation, of a sad, sick longing to be respected, envied, and admired.

P.S. I e-mailed the realtor a copy of this post. Let's see if she chooses to respond.

Big, Ugly Houses: Chapter 3, WC's Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff! Heathcliff!

While my son was at basketball practice in the Northgate area I decided to take a walk along a short horse trail that winds down through what should be a very pretty valley at the base of Mount Diablo.



On the clear January morning, the sky sparkled blue, and the green winter grasses waved softly in the breeze. I heard the clip-clop-clip of a horse, mounted by a young woman come up behind me and then pass.

What a moment, so full of potential pastoral loveliness.

And then I looked southeast to take in what should be have been an absolutely spectacular view of Mount Diablo.


And what do I see? Wuthering Heights. Or rather, a desperate attempt by some builder and homeowner at approximating English country manor elegance. To the manor born?

More like, to the manor aborted. And what design of homestead is that next to the faux Wuthering Heights? Neo-Spanish Hacienda or Post-Suburban-Modern Riviera Villa?

These two houses: A picture-postcard foreground for our majestic Mount Diablo?

You can guess my opinion.

Big, Ugly Houses: Chapter 2, those Alamo freeway palaces

Back by questionably popular demand, here is the next installment of Big Ugly Houses, and it deals with perhaps the most famous Big Ugly Houses of them all in our happy, shiny suburban area: those McMansions perched on the hillside near Stone Valley Road in Alamo.

You absolutely cannot miss them if you drive up and down Interstate 680. There’s the frilly, multi-level one that seems to be cascading down the north side of what's referred to as Mona Lisa Hill (pictured, left). And there’s the flat-topped, 14,300 square foot “palace” that, for much of its years-long construction, looked like a beer distribution plant (pictured, right).

The owner this flat-topped palace insists on referring to it as a “Tuscan-style” villa, according to an interview he gave and excellently reported in this Danville Weekly story: “[Owner Kelly Adamic says] everybody should be allowed to build their fantasy house. … ‘Why does every house have to look the same? This is about expression and personality,’ he says.”

His dream is 25-feet tall and features an 80,000-pound steel roof, a movie theater, sports court, au pair suite and a guest tower for Adamic’s parents, the Weekly says. “It's built around a large rectangular courtyard that would have been used for a market place, if the structure were actually from fifth century Italy.”

Well, this isn’t fifth-century Italy. And you generally don’t see monstrosities like this traveling around Italy, which I had the opportunity to do back in my more fancy-free days. This seems more like an Ugly Americanized vision of Old World elegance.

Actually, these houses are factors in an ongoing news story: the effort by a group of Alamo residents to transform this affluent, unincorporated community of 16,000 into a city, free of Contra Costa County control. The Alamo cityhood effort received an okay from the Local Agency Formation Commission to hold a vote on incorporation. That vote takes place March 3. Coming up this Thursday evening: 16 candidates running on the March 3 ballot for Alamo Town Council will attend a Candidates’ Faire.

Alamo incorporation leaders say that the desire for cityhood involves a lot more than preventing construction of more of what I'm calling Big Ugly Houses. It has to do with creating a sense of “community” and having more local control over how public money is spent on road maintenance, traffic control, public safety, and community development.

Of course, though, the Big Ugly Houses play into the community development issue. One Alamo incorporation leader, while downplaying the role of the Mona Lisa houses in the cityhood drive, acknowledged that an Alamo-based design review commission and town council would probably not have okayed their being constructed in their present form.

As the Weekly says: “To many Alamo folks, [Adamic’s] home and its neighboring house … are one big, blaring symbol for why county planning isn't cutting it anymore. When it comes to planning in the unincorporated area, the county planning commission calls the shots”

Speaking of the cascading home near Adamic's villa, that cascading home has what I’ll call an “evil twin," or "ugly stepcousin," lower down the hill, just above Stone Valley Road (pictured left), and near the electronic gate to the pretentious sounding Alamo Ranch Estates gated community. This house, for interesting reasons, decided to take its design inspirations from the cascading house.

To read more about the Kelly Adamic's amazing Tuscan-style villa, you can check out the Danville Weekly story, which also has interior shots. To read more about the Alamo incorporation effort, go to the Town of Alamo website. You can also read the first installment of Crazy in Suburbia's Big Ugly Houses series by clicking here.

Big, Ugly Houses: Chapter I, Walnut Creek's own Xanadu

Okay, go ahead and call me mean and a scold for singling out the above-pictured home, which sits oh-so conspiciousy on top of a ridge above an elementary school playing field in unincorporated Walnut Creek; Or for calling it "ugly." But, hey, that's my opinion, and whoever built, bought, and/or currently resides in this house was obviously eager to be the center of their neighbors' gaze. Given the home's visually prominent position--you cannot miss it if you drive around certain parts of town--the builder and/or homeowner very much wanted it to be seen, and to even make a community-wide statement that says, "Look at my house!"

Also, if there is anyone out there who disagrees with me essentially calling this house an eyesore--who wants to argue that this home is appropriately sized, aesthetically pleasing, artfully designed, and Architectural Digest-ready--please do so.


I know the neighborhood association wasn't happy about it being built, but there wasn't a lot they could do. Because the home was to be built in an unincorporated part of Walnut Creek, the association had to deal with the county, not the city, and the county seems more willing than the local city government to rubber-stamp horrific looking residential developments. (We're all familiar with those homes above the Stone Valley Road exit of Interstate 680 in Alamo; they're planned to be subjects for future posts.)

My interest is shall we say, more academic, and I'm going to start photographing and searching for other local "big, ugly" houses to display and to contemplate. (If you have any photos you'd like to share, please do. Don't give me names and addresses, just towns.) Anyway, I am really fascinated by the motives and tastes of the developers, architects, land owners, real estate agents, and home buyers who push these Super McMansions into our neighborhoods. What's going on here?

I imagine all the excess cash (or, in these days, the illusion of excess cash) involved in the construction and sales of these homes, as well as the inflated egos, bad taste, hubris, and general lack of consideration for the sensibilities of neighbors, communities, and, in some cases, the local environment. Of course, there is something particularly American about all this--in holding homes like these to be some kind of pinnacle of the American dream. At the same time, it just doesn't register to all involved in building these "dream homes" that these ostentatious displays of real estate just don't fit in, at least visually, into the surrounding landscape.

And why does the proliferation of Super McMansions seem to be a particularly suburban phenomenon? Well, most probably because, unlike in a city, there is more land on which to spread out. And settling in the suburbs: that's very much in the usual narrative of the American dream, including for builders and owners of Super McMansions.

I've dubbed this house "Xanadu." That name applies, first, to the the massive, gilded fortress built by Charles Foster Kane, the melagomanical protagonist of Orson Welles' classic 1941 film Citizen Kane (and a character based on fabled newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst). I have no idea who built or owns this above-pictured Xanadu, so I don't know what their motives were in erecting the house in this location and in this very distinctive "style." But like this Xanadu, Kane built his atop a hill, in a spot that afforded him 360-degree views. And in Kane's case, he built his fortress to show off his power and to make people admire and love him. He also used his fortress as a way to escape the sorrows of his rich but lonely, disappointed life.


Xanadu also refers to Shangdu, the fabled summer palace built by the 13th Mongol emperor Kublai Khan west of Beijing. More to the point, Xanadu refers to Kublai Khan's opulent, dreamy palace as envisioned by the great English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem, "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment."


The poem begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree

(These lines, by the way, are recited in Citizen Kane.) In his poem, which Coleridge claimed was inspired by an opium-induced dream, the poet goes on to describe Kubla Khan as desperately power hungry, and crazed for his subjects,and the rest of the known world, to believe that he was glorified by the divine power of God. Coleridge ends his poem with this description of the maniacal master of Xanadu:

Beware! Beware!,
his flashing eyes! his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
and close your eyes with holy dread!
for he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise

Not to get too literary on you, but after re-visiting Coleridge's poem, I have to wonder how many Kublai Khans we have out here in Walnut Creek and the surrounding suburbs, how many have felt driven to build their own Xanadus, not just to impress their neighbors, but to prove something to themselves: that somehow, because they can manage to afford to build and/or to own an overwhelmingly big, opulent, gaudy house, that they have seized for themselves universal respect, power, admiration, awe, and, most illusively, love.

Of course, with the recession, many local Kublai Khans might have lost a fair share of their millions. So, maybe construction plans for their new Super McMansions might be put on hold. That would be one small silver lining in this economic crisis: a slowdown in the local Super McMansion construction industry. Then again, that means that many ordinary construction workers won't have jobs--men and women who have rental or mortgage payments on their own much more modest homes to pay and families to clothe and feed.