Travelogs

Carol and I drove down to Phoenix as homeowners. We drove back as multiple home owners. As I’ve said far too often, the real work starts now.

Not that there wasn’t any work involved in the events of the last three weeks. I took along my Paperwhite and the print edition of Nicholas Wade’s book, A Troublesome Inheritance, expecting to finish Wade plus an SFF novel or two. Well, I got three chapters further on Wade, and no Paperwhite progress at all. Buying a house is a process with a lot of moving parts, as most of my readers will know from personal experience. Some goodly number of these moving parts had contingencies, so the order in which we did things was significant. We felt, at times, bent over the kitchen table of the small house we’d rented on VRBO, making lists and drawing diagrams, like we were waging a brushfire war or planning Thanksgiving dinner for the entire city of Dubuque.

The house needs work. Not a huge amount of work, but enough to involve interviewing and cutting deals with:

• Painters. The house is off-white (in the direction of gray) throughout. I like color.
• A color consultant to help us choose colors. This sounds extravagant but worked out very well, especially as the consultant was a very savvy artist lady who had paint color chips considerably larger than my thumbnails.
• Landscapers. The house is on something greater than half an acre, with fifteen or twenty trees and lots of miscellaneous shrubbery, all of which required some attention. The catsclaw was taking over, and had already devoured our gargoyles.
• Tree surgeons. Not all of the trees are healthy, as Carol suspected and the landscapers confirmed.
• Pool services. We now have a 42′ X 20′ diving pool plus a seats-six Jacuzzi spa, both of which will need weekly tending to avoid turning green.
• Local governments and utilities. We had to establish accounts with the City of Phoenix for water and trash pickup, with Southwest Gas, and APS for electricity. The paperwork, at times, was boggling: The state of Arizona requires a separate title transfer for our septic system, sheesh.
• Pest control. Where there are palm trees there will be palmetto bugs, and we do not intend to share the house with palmetto bugs.
• Alarm services. The house has an entry alarm but not a smoke/fire alarm, and we had to add that capability to the system.
• A general contractor. We hired the guy who remodeled Keith’s house in Scottsdale, to do some drywall repair, put pulls on all the cabinet doors, and install an A/C unit in the small garage so I can use it as a workshop.

We also had to do some shopping, for:

• Pool furniture. Lounging by the pool by lying on the cooldeck is a nonstarter.
• Patio furniture. I like to have breakfast alfresco when possible. It’s possible lots more often in Phoenix than in Colorado.
• A new dining room set. The one we have up here is too big for the space we have down there.
• Cabinet and drawer pulls. Cabinets without pulls were stylish when the house was remodeled. I realized I was scratching the wood finish with my fingernails trying to grip the doors at their edges. No thanks.
• A refrigerator. The one that came with the house doesn’t fit the space where the refrigerator is supposed to go. Nor does it have a water/ice dispenser.
• A waterbed. We had a waterbed when we lived in Phoenix. For us, it’s part of the Phoenix experience. After all, your waterbed won’t freeze in Phoenix.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Ok, it wasn’t all drudgery. Carol and I had two swimming pools to play in: one at the small house we rented as a base of operations, and the much larger pool at our new place. We actually tried the spa one night, when the temps got down to a chilly 78 degrees. The big problem with the house’s water features is that it’s extremely hard to get out of them once you get in, which has nothing to do with the ladders.

Now you may have some sense for why I haven’t posted here in three weeks. We’re still writing lists and the work is far from over, but with some luck (and a far better system than the crappy 2009-era laptop I’m using) you’ll see me a little more often here in the near future.

Carol and I were away for three weeks, of which two and change were spent in Scottsdale, where we lived from 1990-2003. Rumors are circulating that we’re moving back there, which (like so much else) is complicated. It may be getting warmer somewhere in the world, but here in the US, winters are getting worse. By mid-November our nightly lows here in Colorado will probably be in single digits, and we’ve seen one scary forecast of nightly lows below zero–five weeks before winter actually begins.

Uggh.

So we would certainly like to have a place in Phoenix metro, where we could spend as many months as Colorado weather is inhuman. Can’t happen for awhile still, for a number of reasons, but we came away from our trip with a much clearer picture of what we’d like. More on this as happens.

We did manage to see a few of our old friends. Carol and I had dinner with my Coriolis co-founder Keith Weiskamp and his wife Cynthia, whom we haven’t seen since the early-mid oughts. Keith has his own glass studio, with furnace, and produces art glass for local galleries. I had breakfast with the gang from the New Church of Phoenix like I did regularly fifteen years ago. (Many thanks to Vic Odhner for pulling the group together.) The Arizona Book Publishing Association (for which I served as president in 1999 and 2000) no longer exists, but Gwen Henson arranged a small group dinner for ABPA veterans at the Bluewater Grill in Phoenix, including Alan Korwin, Rob Rosenwald, Bill and Amanda Fessler, and others whom I hadn’t yet met but came out to visit anyway. We saw Jan Marvin and Sue Thurman and realized how much we had both missed the whole bunch.

The weather was more September than October, with temps hitting the low 90s until the day before we left. Imagine slopping around in the pool until November 1. I’m thinking with a decent solar heater we could keep a smallish pool swimmable year-round or pretty damned close to it.

I didn’t do a lot of online stuff during the trip because my laptop was crashing and sending the cursor all over the place and generally being unusable. Multiple scans have shown that it isn’t malware, so I guess something just started growing mold somewhere in Windows’ eleventh sub-basement. I suppose I could reinstall Win7, but this may be an opportunity to buy a new slab and learn Windows 8. Still shopping.

As we are for a number of other things. Our phones are three years old and also getting cranky. I’m looking closely at the Galaxy Note 4, and wondering when (if ever) we’ll see Lollipop for it. My current phone (a Droid X2) is stuck at Gingerbread. Android’s come a long way since then. The Note 4 has (of all things) a heart-rate monitor, which I tried at Best Buy and found that it actually works, though it’s fussy about how you position a finger over the sensor. And that display! 515 ppi is boggling, and higher res than Apple’s Retina display. I’d consider the Nexus 6 if there actually were a Nexus 6. And even if it shows up next week, there’s always that old saw about pioneers getting arrows.

We need a new car to replace our 19 1/2 year old Plymouth Voyager. I’d go shopping if our last dealer experience (in April of 2001) hadn’t been so unutterly horrible. Doesn’t Detroit understand that being dogpiled under half a dozen greasy salesmen doesn’t inspire love and kisses? Clearly, the franchise dealer model still exists only because the dealers have bought laws locking out competing models, like Tesla’s. This is what I call a brittle business model. When it fails, it will fail very badly.

I broke my 2001-era titanium frames a few days ago, and now need to find a usable replacement. Larger frames are coming back, so maybe humanity’s long hipster romance with teeny tiny glasses is over. I won’t ask to go back to what I wore in the 80s, which gave my cheeks 20-20 vision. I’d settle for, well, something the size of what I had until Wednesday.

I had the crazy notion while driving through western New Mexico that I should incorporate the Voynich Manuscript into my Neanderthals novel, The Gathering Ice. In the story, it’s a secret plan, written in the Neanderthal language, for ending a looming ice age. The Neanderthals are ace genetic engineers, and have been for a hundred thousand years. They created soccer-ball sized GMO grapefruit that grow in Montana. They created something else, too, that got a little out of hand. You can get some nice Voynich Manuscript fonts online, and I’m tempted to write some encrypted Neanderthal text for the book and see if anyone can figure it out.

I also got an insight about the recent election that I haven’t seen elsewhere, and I’m trying to decide whether to write up here. I probably will, even though I ration my coverage of politics for obvious reasons. Politics isn’t show business for ugly people, as Jay Leno said. Politics is hate in an evening gown.

There’s your clue. You’ll read it when I write it.

Yesterday evening, while on layover at George Bush International Airport in Houston, I was in the men’s room wondering whythehell they always put mirrors over urinals, when it hit me: I am now a person of melanin.

Really. I haven’t had a tan like this in I don’t know how long. We’ve been to Hawaii several times in recent years, but I always hid under a metric tonne of sunblock and came back as pasty as I left. Not this time. Carol and I just returned from a long-delayed expedition to the same resort (or what remains of it) where we stayed on our honeymoon in early October 1976. 38 years had not been kind to the resort, much of which was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The surviving beachfront cottages were sold for condos, and we rented one for the week.

We used sunblock sparingly. I actually sat out in the sun on our back deck in Colorado the week prior to the trip to get a little color. It was an experiment in mood management. This ugly frigid long winter had me in a bit of a funk, and I wanted to know if some vitamin D would improve my mood. I’m guessing that I got a serious load of vitamin D. Did it help my mood?

Well, my mood certainly improved. But between frolicking on a deserted beach with my transcendentally gorgeous forever girlfriend, flying kites together, drinking pina coladas at Rum Point, almost running into Baron Barracuda, and not doing much else of serious consequence for almost nine days (including not checking Facebook at all), well, I’m sure I don’t know.

The two photos above of Carol flying kites are at almost precisely the same physical location, just 38 years apart. Did 38 years matter? Sure. We know and love each other immeasurably better than we did on our honeymoon. I’ve traded some hair for muscles I didn’t have when I was 24, but Carol, well, she hasn’t had to trade in anything at all.

Tomorrow: more stories and photos of The Week Without Either Air Conditioning or Facebook.

I know how the turtle beat the hare: The turtle ate the hare, and the turtle’s nose crossed the finish line before his stomach did. The trick is staying away from the business end of the turtle. More on this in a moment.

As some insiders know, Carol and I just spent a week in Hawaii celebrating our 36th wedding anniversary. We chose the Sheraton Maui because it had almost everything we wanted: Good food, good beds, a good beach, colorful fish, rentable beach cabanas, and a 30-foot-high lava cliff from which addled teenagers were throwing themselves into the surging ocean every five or six seconds all day long. This allowed me the pleasure of congratulating myself on being a lot saner than I remembered being at that age. (Yes, my friend George Murphy and I built a pair of what amounted to wheeled surfboards and took them coasting through the Chicago sewer system in 1967. It was nuts. It was maybe a little dangerous. But it wasn’t frakking batshit.)

So we got ourselves a cabana, and we set up on the beach to do some serious lolling. I stuffed my cranky, 8-year-old Kodak V530 digital camera into what amounted to a fortified ziplock bag, parked my prescription snorkel mask on my broad and heavily sunblocked forehead, and followed Carol into the water. Taking pictures of fish with this rig is tricky because you can’t easily see what the camera’s LCD is showing, and fish don’t sit still. I snapped a lot of pictures of water where fish had been swimming a second or two ago. When I did get the fish in the frame, it was generally the wrong end of the fish.

After an hour or so of snapping empty water and colorful fish butts, there was some excitement among nearby beachgoers. People were staring into the water and pointing at something big and dark. I ducked underwater, and saw the biggest damned turtle south of Gamera steaming right at us. Carol and I dodged to one side, but turtles are better in water than we are, and by the time we got out of its way there was maybe three feet between us. The turtle was big enough to be clearly visible on my LCD display. I snapped some reasonable shots (reasonable for four feet of surf-churned water) the best of which is above. All I can figure is that we were between the turtle and an algae wad with his name on it. The turtle got to the algae wad, and Carol and I didn’t get eaten in the bargain.

Ok, I watched too many Japanese monster movies on Channel 7 when I was 12. Guilty. At least I wasn’t jumping off thirty-foot lava cliffs.

The turtle, as it happened, was a regular visitor to the beach, and we saw others cruising the nearby waters just about every time we looked under the surface. We saw them swimming around from our hotel room window more than once. It was the great unexpected pleasure of the trip.

More on this and other things tomorrow.