Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

I just added some links to a smattering of the work I did for 805 Living where I was a regular monthly contributor from 2004 to 2008. I stopped writing when my real estate work amped up to the point I simply didn't have time. Somewhere in storage there's a big old cardboard box full of pieces that I wrote about area places and people including Q&A's with some notable names ie Colbie Caillat, The Bachelor's Chris Harrison, CNBC 's Jane Wells, ABC's Ellen Leyva, Patrick Warburton, Anne Lockhart, surf queen Mary Osborne and more for the magazine's last page feature, PS. I'm going to try to find that big old box and scan some additional pieces and put them here.  I'm not delusional enough to pretend I'm doing this for you. I know it's for me. For my ego. You don't even have to read 'em; I can see them. I can say 'okay, Simmy, you never threw a decent dinner party in your life but every once in awhile you wrote some...

#33: Mountain View Avenue, Mar Vista, California Next door to our little house on the hill in Mar Vista there lived a very old couple. Among the first to move in during the post war building boom in the early 1950's, Bob and Helen saw little three bedroom bungalows springing up all over Los Angeles. Back then you could still see the Pacific coast from their front yard, and behind them the orange groves spread clear to Los Angeles.  Their love story isn't a story at all, it's the real deal. Untitled Love Story The coleus under Bob and Helen’s front porch window are looking a little scraggly, nothing but tall leggy stems bending in their bed of dry cracked earth. I think how the gardener wouldn’t let them go like that if Bob hadn’t been so sick. If he’d been up and around, those plants would be standing tall, their leaves firm and perky, the ground blanketed with a soft, moist layer of mulch. Well tended, that was the best way to describe Bob’s garden, and come to thin...

Kisses as Deep as the Ocean  Liz had arrived in January along with her parents, her brother, and younger sister. They were all as white as the Canadian winter they'd left. The trees in Niagara Falls had been bathed in ice, everything was white, even the sky, as if blue had flown south for the winter. They flew south too, into the blue. When the stewardess flung open the cabin door they'd been the first down the stairway onto the airport's tarmac. The sudden shock of steamy air fogged her glasses. “It's like a hot house.” She'd taken her glasses off, letting the perfume and warmth wash over her face. Beyond the airports chain link fence, palm trees beckoned from their turquoise background. She wanted to drown herself in a sea of blue. “It smells funny” Nancy complained. Her father explained. "You're in the tropics. It's the humidity. Wait till you see El Yunque. The air is so heavy it rains all the time." EI Yunque, he told them, was...