Wednesday morning, whatever else remained in our house in Colorado Springs went into a truck. We spent the rest of the day vacuuming and polishing and getting the Colorado house back in full staged condition. We spent the night (as we had the previous two) at a hotel. Thursday morning bright and early, we went over to Jimi’s to pick up the Pack, and with everything else piled into the back of the Durango, we blasted south on I-25.
I had hoped to keep you all informed, but while stopped for the night in Grants NM that evening I discovered that eight keys on this dorky laptop had ceased to function, making it impossible to enter my Windows password, much less type anything useful. I could, of course, have plugged in a USB keyboard…but my spare keyboards were either already in Phoenix or in a box on the truck.
This morning we got everybody fed and pottied and tucked into their kennels and headed west on I-40 to Flagstaff, where we had a quick lunch and then turned south onto I-17. About 2:30 PM we pulled into our garage, and when we popped the doors we rediscovered what 111 degrees felt like. It felt like…home! Sure thing. We lived here from 1990 until 2003, and in July 1996 we saw the temps at the Scottsdale airport (where the Coriolis offices were) hit 123 degrees. 50C. Don’t get that hot much outside of Death Valley. The heat was ugly when you had to commute in it, but this time I’ll be trekking either down the hall to write starship stories, or out the back door to stand up to my nostrils in the pool.
I can deal with the heat a damsight better than I can deal with snow in May, trust me.
Anyway. Tomorrow we have a day to get everything ready to roll here. We turned off a lot of stuff, like the soda fridge, the standalone icemaker, and the reverse-osmosis water system. We found that there was a little dust and a few dead bugs in the odd corner. All fixable. Then on Sunday the truck arrives, and the crew will unload 50-odd boxes, the treadmill, a teak lateral file cabinet, my steampunk computer table, and some other odds and ends. The coming week will likely see us sorting stuff into various closets and cabinets, with a pile to one side of stuff that will go to Goodwill. I may have kept a few too many winter shirts. I’m sure six brooms are four brooms too many. Etc. It adds up.
The Colorado house is on the market. It’s not a very strong market, and if it takes six months or a year to sell, so it goes. In the meantime, we have a lot to do.
More as it happens. It’ll be a lot easier when my quadcore catches up to me.
Carol’s packing glassware and kitchen and office stuff and much miscellany. I have to get rid of a solar panel that I cobbled up in 1977 from six 6-cell subpanels that doesn’t work anymore, and I would like to investigate the peculiar failure mode if I had time: When first placed in the Sun it generates 17 volts, but over a period of no more than five minutes the voltage drops down under 10 volts and eventually to 5. It hasn’t been in the Sun at all these past 40 years…so what died? I’m curious, but not curious enough to keep it and do exploratory surgery on it.
