santa barbara, ca

from your description of the location, I thought you were talking about: http://pacefoodanddrink.com/

yes that's it thanks

i'm jetlagged btw

it has kind of a strange menu. what did you end up trying? it has good reviews, but I remain skeptical.

that looks like a place that won't be there in 2 years

i only had desert, bread pudding. it was amazing. didn't like the beer selection. the staff were really nice.

xpost the turnover at that location has been swift. caek, you should've gotten the 24 oz PBR

and then you should have sauntered over to The Neighborhood and played beer pong on their PBR tables with more PBR

i actually should have yes. i suppose the location down there is a bit remote without being cutely tucked away.

I'm too old to drink anything but PBR. When I went out on Friday, I had 6 fat tires and felt awful the next day. That was at Dargan's, which I'm pretty sure is a legit irish pub just like the ones in ireland.

The photonics/materials UCSB grad students favor dargan's because it's apparently owned by an MOCVD grower

xpost. yeah, the 400 block seems to struggle. with the exception of Baja Sharkeez, which is a favorite of the undergraduates. Sharkeez has moved up state st. a couple of blocks now, though.

well shit

yeah. well this all happened in isla vista, which is a good 15 minutes on the 101 from santa barbara.

#califroniapedant

totally

thank you for explaining santa barbara to me kind sir.

anyway, shit

well shit

― wat is teh waht (s.clover), Saturday, May 24, 2014 6:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you really want to get pedantic the airport is legally santa barbara so it's 2 mins away

or we could get on that county vs city tip

you wonder if this guy goes on a rampage if he went to uc riverside, like watching his videos being surrounded by beautiful happy people was not a minor issue

should have gone to ND. Parietal rules and everything.

Santa Barbara revive.

Anyone from ilx living here/visiting here lately?

Should I move to there.

do u like fleeing fires

For context, spouse and I are planning to relocate from DC to CA in the coming year or two. Given that I abhor DC summers and spouse abhors DC winters, a year is sounding better than two years but housing market situation blah blah blah it could take a minute.

We visited LA and I vetoed because I don't want to do that level of car culture. Also vetoed because we have a 1000 pound complication: a horse that will be coming with us. LA does not have any close-in horse housing that meets criteria.

So then we thought OK, we will do Bay Area. Horse will live in Castro Valley and we will live in Oakland. Decided that we would really prefer to be in SF than Oakland, making the commute to horse a real bitch.

Recently more discussions about what really mattered to us boiled down to this:

• Excellent weather year-round
• Neighborhoods where you can walk to decent food shopping (farmers' markets, etc.)
• Reasonable proximity (half-hour drive) to horse boarding with plenty of pasture (I want my guy to live on pasture with friends 24/7 and not be jailed in a 12x12 stall 23 hours a day). Access to great trail riding.
• Excellent weather year-round
• Nightlife (bars, clubs, live music, etc.) not important at this stage in life. A good bookstore or two would be nice, a coffee shop or two, handful of good restaurants will do the trick.
• Excellent weather year-round

I love cities but for day-to-day life, excellent weather year-round and lots of horse time and good farmers markets--these have become increasingly important.

xpost taking sides: fleeing fires vs. fleeing Mike Pence as a neighbor

Oh I forgot that proximity to airports is also important. SBA will be fine for domestic and for international we can schlep to LAX.

well i mean if you can afford it i can't talk ill against santa barbara anymore and have been considering doing the same, when our jobs go away and maybe a trailer and a swift death by rising sea levels would be nice.

SB does have those things u require. Keep an eye on the city land/county land boundaries for when the fire does come and you have to hope the state can get mobilized in time. Also if you do research on the previous decade of fire management you'll see the cutoff pattern of where they set the evac lines.

Have you looked at SLO-MORRO BAY-LOS OSOS? IDK what your employment situation is/how important being near a hub is but that whole area is pretty and has all that stuff too (except maybe bookstore; i haven't looked lately. Santa Barbara has Chaucer's still, bless it).

ALSO re: airport domestic flights get cancelled later in the day fairly regularly due to backups w/ ATC at other airports - there is a good chance you will miss a connection or etc. We stopped flying into SBA direct and instead airbus to LAX, which hasn't let me down and is very stress free (and sometimes they send you up/down to LAX via PCH which is a very happy experience).

Ah good tips, thanking u. I guess I really do need to educate myself on fire sitch--especially since horse will be in the hills and I will need to have an evac plan for him. Is downtownish SB safe enough, fire-wise? Ugh why do all of the good places shake, catch on fire, flood.

yeah downtown is fine. basically foothill is the drop dead fire line tho the last few years it's gotten hairy enough for the greater san roque area to get mandatory evac notices. then mud slides:))))))))

have you looked in santa ynez valley? like if you don't actually have to commute may as well stay in the valley with ur pony

Santa ynez valley too rural by a lot.

It is not easy to be a city-lover with a horse.

Should have been a horse cop or something.

Also spouse needs a jobbie and I doubt there is much of a demand for IT operations folks in santa ynez.

My jobbie will hopefully come with me (remote work), so less of a concern for me.

Ya very good - wasn’t sure of ur commute situation.

SLO-MORRO BAY-LOS OSOS

My m-i-l lives in SLO and I would say it's not generally walkable, so I think you'd end up with a fairly narrow range of (expensive) housing options. Also, the airport has added a few more routes recently, but it's pretty hard to get there in a reasonable amount of time from, say, the East Coast. My partner and I often end up flying to LAX and then driving 3 hrs to avoid needing to make multiple layovers. That said, as a result of its relative remoteness, it's pretty chill and feels less ~intense~ than other parts of CA

YMMV! I think slo is very walkable; certainly v bikeable

We visited LA and I vetoed because I don't want to do that level of car culture. Also vetoed because we have a 1000 pound complication: a horse that will be coming with us. LA does not have any close-in horse housing that meets criteria.

did you look at la cañada/flintridge, altadena and then points east along the northern edge of the SGV, i.e. toward the race track at santa anita? pasadena in particular is relatively walkable, has a meaningful downtown, etc. "affordable" is a stretch, but pasadena school district (which covers pasadena and altadena) is not good, so it's not crazy by socal standards. if you're willing to drive 30 minutes to the horse, then glendale and south pasadena (different city to pasadena proper) might also be relatively walkable options with famer's markets.

i do not know the area at all, but given you care about the weather ... san diego?

Who were the jackasses that freaked out when I suggested Carpinteria to you that one time? Haha. Suckit, whoever you were

That was xp to quincie

Ventura/Oxnard maybe, cheaper than SB though maybe not as cultured.

Had to go to Ventura the other week. Seemed sort of grim. All I saw was strip malls. Didn't have time to poke around though

There is a smallish "old town" area that looks nice. And horse boarding may be available in Santa Paula, which isn't far.

Ventura is pretty grim aesthetically compared to SB but then most places are but it’s also the worst house on the best block phenomenon. That said if ur gonna live there you might as well live in... idk Glendale or Westlake or Thousand Oaks or something.

I've lived here for 12 years, and I don't think we'll ever leave. Fire season has become more stressful, but we still are looking to buy a home in the next few years (below the 192 as Jimmy says). The best farmers' markets are downtown, and it may be hard to achieve short walking distance to those. You can certainly bike from the upper east, oak park, samarkand, mission, east san roque areas. You could also bike down from the mesa, which is a beautiful area but can feel a bit more isolated. We currently own a condo in the Oak Park area where we can easily walk to a Trader Joe's, a Gelson's, and a grocery outlet (lol but I promise this grocery outlet is a blessing compared to the Ralph's here before it). We could walk a bit further up to a whole foods and bristol farms. We also walk downtown sometimes, including to the farmers' market, but that is a 45 minute walk. Perhaps more of a quest than a walk. Anyway, I bet you'd love it here. We're part of an HOA with maybe 20 units. I know 5 of them house people that work in IT. There's a good number of IT/tech jobs in Goleta near UCSB. May be harder to find a job that won't involve a short commute on the 101. If the I-5 closes due to mudslide or snow, that commute will become 1 hour for the day. It's happened a handful of times since I've been here.

Btw the trip from LAX took us 6 hours around last christmas due to that same I-5 issue. All hotels along the 101 were booked. The LAX schlep can be really, really awful.

Pasadena/South Pasadena/Glendale are all entirely unknown to me--thanks for recs! 30 min drive to horse if fine; I currently have a 45 minute drive to him outside of DC rush hour. Rush hour is another story; I've mostly arranged my schedule so I don't have to do it.

I will also investigate Carpinteria, though the name cracks me up for some reason.

Land of the carpenters. The native Americans who lived there were known for their canoes

if that part of LA county is unknown then here's the full list of places i would check out: la cañada/flintridge, altadena, pasadena, south pasadena, glendale, eagle rock.

all are at varying places along the walkable/farmers market to proximity to horse country scale.

if you find stabling (is that a word?) near the 2 freeway then echo park and surrounding neighborhoods (los feliz, silver lake) might actually work out for you because even though they're in the city of LA's urban core echo park sits right at the end of the 2 (which is a pretty chill and short freeway by socal standards).

What's traffic like in SB and surrounds?

Carpinteria is much smaller than all of these other locations. I'd worry about the IT job scene there. The commute up the 101 to an IT job in SB is rough, but one could take a train.

Oh and caek yes, stabling is a word, but "boarding" is the usual term for housing. Google doesn't show me a ton in the altadena area, but I will look further.

We've been looking at houses for sale in SB and I basically want to move there tomorrow despite never having visited. We'll do a trip out later in year. Would probably rent the first year just to make sure we don't actually want to do SF.

the 101 is typically not jammed within SB. But you are stuck between mountains and ocean, so any issues will cause unavoidable traffic. Montecito is a bottleneck because the insanely rich people won't allow more than 2 lanes on the 101 there. So I wouldn't want to commute through montecito during rush hour and when school is in session. The other jam occurs where the 217 hits the 101 near the airport. All of the university and airport traffic uses the 217. If you can live and work btween turnpike and cabrillo, traffic shouldn't be a big part of your life.

OK that is super useful info. I think we'd try to live near downtown, but spouse may need to do goleta because IT jobbies. Pony can live up in the hills and will evacuate to the earl warren fairgrounds, this is already an established thing unfortunately.

If anyone wants to take a drive to check out San Marcos Stables, it looks great for me and pony.