Arizona

For this next frustrating event to make any sense, I need to put a little back-history up.

We moved to Arizona the first time in March of 1999 and lived in an apartment in "East Mesa" (Greenfield and Southern) until we built our house in Queen Creek and moved in, December 2001. We lived in our house until late August/early September 2005, when we sold it, then moved to an apartment in Tempe (Priest and Southern).

In all that time, we saw our fair share of scorpions, snakes and even black widows. shudder When we owned the house, we did pest control, especially during those hot summer months when all things creepy and crawly liked to come out to feast. Randy has even "sparred" with a scorpion---these suckers are vicious, don't let anyone tell you otherwise! But in all that time, NONE of us has been stung by a scorpion.

Fast forward to our return to Arizona... and I'm sure you can already see where this is going. We arrived in Scottsdale very early on the 13th of February. We moved in to the house on the 15th and have been sleeping here for 5 nights.

At 5am, I was woken by fire on my leg and realized something wasn't right. I turned a light on and there's a fucking (pardon my unladylike language) scorpion on my bed! Randy's pretty sure it was a Bark scorpion. All I know is PAIN! It felt (and still feels!) like a colony of fire ants have taken up residence along my leg and are chomping merrily away.

Poison Control basically told me what to watch for (signs of anaphylactic shock, which I haven't shown yet, so I'm guessing that's ruled out), and possible problems with the Bark scorpion's venom as it's one of the more toxic ones in North America. Lucky me!

Wikipedia told me I might find some relief with an ointment of antihistimine/analgesic/corticosteroid. So, Randy's definitely going to be my hero here in a little while and locate something for that!

Meanwhile, I did some looking around online (ain't the IntarWebs amazin'? *grin*) and discovered our house was sold at auction last fall. For $60k less than we sold it! I feel bad for the owners (the people we sold it to). It isn't the next chapter in the house that I'd hoped for.

*sigh* I'm glad to be back in Arizona... I'm just wondering if Arizona's glad to have me!

Post drafting, Day 1: Well, it's currently around sunset on the 17th of February and we've slept in our new home two nights now. In the meantime, there's been some struggles... Grab a cuppa joe or your knitting, it's been a bumpy ride.

First, the movers arrived on Wednesday, the 8th as expected. They loaded (and loaded... and loaded!) us up and I messed around with some cleaning in the kitchen while I waited. This is our third move with Graebel, so I know the drill: I have to be on-hand for the driver and his crew of movers while they load and I have to sign off at the end of the loading on all they've done.

As I look back on the whole week+, I wish I'd worked harder that day, but I was exhausted... and looking at a week and a half without my Kingsdown bed. So, Wednesday afternoon, Randy took us to lunch when the movers were done and then I dropped him off at work. Next challenge: gather the most important elements which we'd be packing in our car for the 2100 mile trip and check in to the hotel.

Bluffton sucks. That said, I was extremely pleased with the Holiday Inn Express there in Bluffton. They are pet-friendly... and I paid less for a handicap-accessible (I guess it's called "an ADA room") room. We had enough space to set up the Marshall's playpen we've had for close to a year now. (Note to potential buyers of this pen/matt: The vinyl matt is safe against their constant digging/scratching but not against the pee/poop! If you must protect your floors, spend a couple dollars on a clear shower curtain, lay it under the vinyl matt and continue with a normal set-up. Worked perfectly for us.)

Back to the Townhouse from Hell: Nick and I got to work "bright and early" on Thursday with all the cleaning. And by Thursday night, I was beyond my limits, exhausted and truly no longer caring. Friday morning, the carpet cleaner came and did a really miraculous job on the carpets. I used ChemDry, which is now owned by HomeDepot. I was thrilled with the initial team that came out but they called their boss and he finished the job---sorta. The first team still had to go back upstairs to vacuum and the boss never did it. The only place I was truly disappointed was the stairs: they were soaking wet! The ChemDry machine was too big/bulky to really do the full job on the stairs.

Unfortunately, the incredibly clean carpets now revealed how much more cleaning we had to do on the baseboards. Ugh. More Work. A quick call to Randy had him on the way to pick us up and we dropped him off at work. I had errands: some ferret toys (I packed them all and the babies were bored!), new toilet seats (those were kinda cool but expensive) and a wrench for the disposal. While out, Nick and I wanted to get lunch and we found this place called "Blue Coyote" which we'd never been to before. Of course, in true fashion, it was amazingly good and we wished we'd known about them sooner. Really good and fresh guacamole. Nifty plates. Cool decor. Would have made living in Bluffton less painful.

Randy departed work early on his last day---what a cool boss he has!---and joined us at Blue Coyote. This meant we could get to work at the townhouse and finish early and get a good night's rest. Right. 11pm and the final straw: Randy couldn't get the dryer vent re-connected and needed to buy another one. He decided to do that first thing Saturday, bring the very last of the stuff we were packing in the car (!) and quit that place forthwith!

Saturday morning, I felt/heard him moving around in the hotel room and got up as he left. I began organizing and packing and trying to go through the room for any items belonging to us. While I was doing this, Randy called to tell me about his struggle with the dryer vent. We'd always had a bit of a humidity problem when drying laundry. The master bath backs the laundry room and the cabinets in the bathroom would get really warm and humid, as though the dryer was venting into it. I mentioned it to the D R Horton representative who did the one-year inspection. According to him, this well-built (note: sarcasm) D R Horton townhouse was designed that way.

Well, according to Randy, the vent in the wall connects to... nothing. So, after all the physical effort to get the darn dryer vent connected the night before and then buying a new connection kit on Saturday, he left the townhouse with the dryer sitting out in the hall.

Then, after a good Holiday Inn Express breakfast, we began loading the car. While doing that, in the wild-and-wooded area off the parking lot, a fire started. I was about to call 911 and report it, but Randy thought it might be smarter to go in and have the hotel call it in. After two years in South Carolina, he still hadn't adapted to their slow-and-casual way of doing things. In Arizona, the threat of wildfire is serious business---and with recent fires in the southeast, one would think it was similarly serious in Bluffton as well. Several minutes later, as I headed back to the room for another load, a hotel employee was coming to the door.

"Yeah, John, there's a fire out in the wooded area." Her demeanor was real nonchalant. I heard through her radio John's reply: "I'm calling it in now." That ended up being about 5 minutes after I was set to call 911---and in that time, the fire had doubled its width in one direction. An employee came out with a large fire extinguisher, but the time for that was long past. We were finally loaded up and heading out as the first fire engine showed up on-scene. We passed another one headed to the scene as we left.

Two hours and change later, we arrived at Mom's. Randy and Nick needed showers and I needed to get to a Jiffy Lube before we hit the road the following evening. Mom went with me and managed some Knitting In Public, but my hands were too sore from all the cleaning I'd been doing. One oil change and tire rotation later, we headed back to Mom's and piled into her car (we had the moving guys take the back bench and the second captain's chair in the second row, so we could put a platform Randy built for the last move) and went to Al-Amir's for a late lunch / early dinner.

We visited with Mom and her friend Ron, had a wonderful meal of ham-and-pineapples-with-cherries, lima beans, carrots and Irish potatoes (yum!) and finally, it was Sunday evening and time for us to hit the road. We planned to travel from Columbia, South Carolina to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (well, Chickasha, OK actually...) in one massive push across the country. I'm not sure how, but we did it. We checked in to the Holiday Inn Express in Chickasha, OK... and found the room hadn't been cleaned yet. sigh We were so exhausted and just wanted to set the furbabies up in their playpen so we could clean up their cage.

Randy and I finally grabbed something to eat at some place called A&E Grill, which was so-so. We took dinner back to Nick, who'd been too tired to go out to eat. A quick night's rest, breakfast, pack the babies and luggage back into the car and get on the road. This time, I took the wheel and drove us across the rest of Oklahoma, the narrow part of Texas and just shy of Albuquerque (about an hour east of it). It was a very windy drive, but some MadLibs and a fun word game which Nick suggested helped. (The word game: Start with a word, each player makes a single change to the word, go until there's no progress to be made.)

Randy took over before we reached Albuquerque and we grabbed some DelTaco in Albuquerque itself. I would have liked to just crash then, but we had a reservation we couldn't cancel in Scottsdale, Arizona for that night. So, we pushed on. And on. And on! Finally, at about 2 in the morning of the 13th, we made it to the Holiday Inn Express in Scottsdale... only to learn that our reservation was for the following night! And she was booked. And surly. Finally, she found a double-booking she could clear up and got us into a two-queen suite. We got the babies in, got them settled... and crashed.

I didn't sleep well and Randy had been feeling the edge of a cold since Oklahoma. But we were up bright-and-early. A breakfast---the worst Holiday Inn Express breakfast so far, despite the $180/night room fee---and Randy and I hit the road to handle business. We drove out to the house we were about to sign lease papers on. We finally got in touch with our rental agent and he agreed to meet us at the house. We had time for lunch----yum, Garcia's! Adam let us in the house (which has a for-sale sign on the front lawn and two lockboxes on the security screen door) and we walked through it for the first time. Frankly, I'm no longer surprised this place didn't rent sooner. It was poorly represented and the massive spaces were ill-described.

From the entry (which is a double-door entry), there's a sunken room to the left (two very tall steps down) which measures 18 feet by 13 feet. It's just long enough for our two Galant desks (minus their half-round ends) and we're hoping to put a futon up against the long side of the desks, to create another seating area for watching tv in here.

From the entry, if one passes the sunken room we've dubbed "the office", there's a very large half-bath with an old-style toilet (the kind where the tank is mounted up on the wall way above the toilet). Then, past the half-bath is a double-door entry to the master suite. It's huge. One wall was designed for a king-size bed: it fits just between two wall outlets which are each followed by a narrow vertical window.

(Most modern houses I've seen stick one outlet on each wall and that's it. Now, if two people sleep in the same bed, that's at a minimum, two clocks and two lights, which is four outlets, right? Sheesh. Planning people!)

The master suite continues with an amazing walk-in closet with a skylight. This closet is set up galley-style: a rod on either side. There's a lower shelf across the end and really deep shelves above the two rods, plus some corner cubby things and a really neat shoe-shelf for my shoe-whore of a husband. grin It was really humorous seeing his shock at the quantity of shoes he has!

The master suite wouldn't be complete without a bathroom. This one is your basic two-sink, toilet and shower/tub. Only, it was last updated in the 70s or 80s sometime. At least it's a tile floor and not linoleum. Yeah, the whole upstairs is tile, except for the master bedroom/closet and the sunken "office".

There's a dining "room" just off the entry, which faces the french door to the basement. The kitchen/breakfast nook/great room is beyond the dining room. The kitchen has been upgraded recently with granite counters (the kind with an annoying mirror-particle scattered throughout) and features a really tall "turret" roof with three windows at the very top. Puck would love it if we mounted stepping shelves for her to get up to one of those windows! There's a ceiling fan over the kitchen, which I'm sure Randy will love once he's recovered enough from this cold to cook.

The great room also has a ceiling fan... and a really attractive beehive-type fireplace set up on a tall hearth. There's a shelf which runs the width of the room which Randy thinks the ferrets will be able to climb up on, but there's a fireplace screen which sits right in front of the opening and should prevent problems. There's a laundry room just off the kitchen, which connects to the two-car garage. My washer and dryer will be here on the 18th.

There's a small pool in the back yard, orange trees in the front and back yards, a storage shed in the back yard and an RV gate with room to bring one in and park it.

The downstairs has 3 bedrooms and a bathroom, all cleverly dealing with the need for two exits in the event of a fire or other emergency. One of the bedrooms is carpeted and has a pretty low ceiling with a ceiling fan. The other two bedrooms lack ceiling fans, but their ceilings are still too low to assemble Nick's loft bed. For now, his mattress is on the floor and he loves his new room.

Post-drafting, Day 2: I've kinda blended the tour with the move-in, which happened on Friday. And here it is Monday, the 18th and I'm writing this up, wondering when I'll be able to post it.

Yes, UPS screwed us again. I had my Qwest DSL/Broadband/whatever it's called set up to be on and here by the 13th. By the time we had our stuff delivered and our desks assembled and computers set up, I wanted to be able to jet online and catch up. Well, thanks to the three (yes, one got added...) lockboxes on the front door and the place being vacant, the UPS guy decided we'd moved, so he sent the package back to the sender. And we couldn't intercept it. We picked up another modem at Fry's Electronics... and can't get it to connect to our service. So, I'm sitting here typing this up, having gone very close to two whole weeks with no internet connection... I'm in major withdrawl here. I have no clue what's going on in the world.

There's only a ga-zillion things I want to check out right now. The tax assessment for this house. The locations of various preferred restaurants of choice. The nearest ATT store, so I can bitch someone out about changing my contract without giving me a choice to tell them to f-off! The release dates for the next book in about 5 or 6 series (I'm plowing through books right now). I feel like crap (spent the night fighting a fever and trying not to hack up a lung), am sick of take-out/eating out but no one here feels up to hunting down real plates, let alone cooking. The 1700 books I've catalogued and boxed are sitting in the great room, still in boxes. Hell, my keyboard tray still isn't installed on my desk yet. And I want to install some lights under my desk to light up my keyboard 'cause I still haven't seen a lighted/wired keyboard I like as much as the cordless one I have now.
(Well, perhaps one, but it's $80 or $100!)

Post-drafting, Day 3: I've been working up this post in bits and pieces, as I feel up to it. My keyboard tray (only recently lamented as un-installed) is now in place. My sinuses are driving me bat-shit-loco right now, between the sneezing, the runny nose and the nasal congestion.

There's one other thing I'm looking forward to my internet connection for: checking out the records on the house we sold in Queen Creek... Yeah, we stopped by there on...Saturday, was it? (The days are running together with this damn cold.) Get this: vacant. Not only vacant, with a lockbox, but stripped. Every light fixture, every appliance is gone. Even the mega-sized peephole we installed in the front-door is gone, leaving a gaping hole in the door. The yard looks like it hasn't been maintained in a number of months. I must admit to a high degree of curiosity here... What the hell happened?

Considering how much Queen Creek has changed, they might as well have re-named every street. They ripped out Rittenhouse Rd, which used to be a very straight NW-to-SE running road. It curved a slight bit to the south as it neared it's end, but not much. Now the damn road looks like a freaking spaghetti noodle. And the number of major chain stores going in mere miles from our old home is nothing short of stunning. It doesn't bode well for my own hunt for a piece of land to "get away from it all" (while still being local enough for Randy to work).

And finally, at the near-end of Day 3 of drafting this darn message, I'm actually in the form on my blog page, adding this last bit in... The modem arrived this afternoon and it took Randy over an hour on the phone with Qwest Tech Support to get it running. Fortunately, it seems to be quite the speed demon. Now, if I can just stop sneezing (and blowing my nose) long enough to type and do some web searches...

Of course, should I mention the expected secondary absence as I catch up on Ravelry? grin

Finally, I can tell everyone and the world what I've been dying to tell you!

We're moving home!!!!!

Randy has been asked to rejoin the THEMIS team at ASU. In other words, my hubby's gonna be a rocket scientist again! *grin*

Meanwhile, this creates my own Mission Impossible: pack this house and be ready for the movers on 6 February 2008! All while nursing Elijah back to health and keeping an eye on my own health.

I've been seriously packing for about 2 weeks already based on a flurry of phone calls which had the LROC team also vying for Randy's "l337 skillz". But, the hard part is over. We've accepted an offer and Randy has told his really cool boss the news. We're still awaiting word on an address for the other end of the trip. Eek! But, wherever we end up, we'll be in Arizona again!

As one might imagine, my Mom is trying so hard to be excited for us....but I think deep down inside she's very sad. Even though we don't get to visit as often as we'd like, it's only a 2 hour trip each way and that means we *have* had a lot of contact for the last two years. In a dream world, she'd transfer to Arizona and be happy there, but I don't know that she really liked it when she visited us out there.

Let the countdown begin!