So I just moved to the Central Valley, where your delicious plums, apricots and other orchard edibles come from.

This weekend here in ag-ville, Michelle Obama is set to give the commencement speech to the first graduating class of UC Merced. The youngest campus in the University of California system scored a major coup in luring the first lady to the area, slammed by 20 percent unemployment and stalled development thanks to the recession.

Hopes were sky-high not long ago that the university would inspire an economic rebirth for the community, which didn't quite work out the way the powers that be had hoped.

For instance, I'm sitting in a spacious tract house with fruit trees in my backyard next to a field that had been slated for yet more sprawl homes that, thankfully, appear on hold while local construction is at a standstill. Between me and the school is about four miles of spotty housing development and lots of open fields awaiting the roar of bulldozers.

Merced is popularly known in the media as ground zero for the housing boom turned bust. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble .... 

CLICK HERE for more housing-downturn details in my expanded San Jose Culture Examiner post on this topic.

Culturally speaking, the local kiddies refer to their 'hood as Mer-dead. Still, I like the mood here a lot; must remind me of the rural outskirts of Chicago, near where I grew up. 

It's peaceful in Merced compared with the frantic, freaked-out Bay Area I just left. The wind rustles through the trees, and time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, but there's no place I'd rather be: