Archive for Home base
January 22, 2008 at 8:19 pm · Filed under Home base, Places to go
There are a lot of aircraft smiling at the Pima Air & Space Museum, despite the fact that they don’t fly anymore. They must like retirement.
I’ve visited the museum before (see blog entry here) , but with over three hundred aircraft and four major buildings, it deserves a second visit. It’s one of the best aviation museums in the USA.
It’s also a great place to take pictures, and we aren’t the only ones to realize that. Halfway through our visit, 450 photographers from a convention showed up and mobbed the place with enormous cameras, reflectors, and even a couple of models.
Fortunately there’s a lot of acreage for everyone. When the photogs arrived we were about to hop on the bus for the other great attraction associated with PASM: the 309th Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Group, better known as “the boneyard.”
You can get a peek at the boneyard for free just by driving up Kolb Blvd in Tucson. But if you want to get a guided tour of the place, it’s an extra $6. Since it is part of an active military facility, there’s an ID check and nobody can get off the bus, but the tour is great. There are hundreds of amazing aircraft to be seen, in seemingly endless rows. Some of them are mothballed for future use, some are being parted out, others (like B-52 bombers) are being chopped up and left in the sun for Russian satellites to observe under the terms of the SALT II agreement.
A fraction of the 309th AMARG — click for larger
The boneyard also has all the dies needed to build B-1B bombers, should the decision ever be made to start production of them again. Those dies alone take up several acres of space. Then there are the rows of F-16s, A-10s, T-37s, F-14s, and a few one-of-a-kind aircraft. For a warbird or aviation geek, it’s a really cool tour. At the end of it, we were grinning like the aircraft.
January 19, 2008 at 10:56 pm · Filed under Home base
We’ve moved a few times in our lives, but I have never had as much fun getting to know a place as I am having discovering Tucson. It’s an interesting place, despite the near-rabid attempts by local real estate developers to turn every square inch into a chain retail store. Like a lot of desert communities, Tucson has had a healthy share of local oddities, western lore, and quirky individuals. I’m trying to find them all before they disappear forever.
One such place is the Valley of the Moon. This is a special little fantasy park for children, made by a very special person decades ago. It’s in serious danger of closing forever. Today (Jan 19) the foundation that administers the park held an open house to try to save it. Click the link above and read the story of George Phar Legler — it’s inspirational.
Another such place is the last drive-in theater in Tucson. It’s called the De Anza drive-in, and it has been on the chopping block for a while, as out-of-state land owners wait for Tucson real estate prices to rise enough to make a profit by turning it into yet another shopping center. They’ve been waiting since 1997.
The De Anza was once one of a dozen drive-ins in Tucson, but of course they’ve all closed over the decades. Now the De Anza is surrounded by the city’s sprawl, but it still shows a double feature every night. We’ll go there sometime in the next two weeks, because you never know …
Think I’m paranoid? Well, when we bought our house in May there was a neat old mini-golf place a couple of miles away, called Magic Carpet Golf. We made a mental note to drop in on it and play a round among the old-time statues and corny sets. But when we got back this December, we found the Magic Carpet Golf had closed. Recent reviews have not been kind to it, but it was a Tucson institution for decades, and it’s a shame to see it gone. There’s still a chance the statues will be saved, however, thanks to active members of Vanishing Tucson group (on Yahoo).
Today Emma and I went over to see Jack Norton, “The Man From Mullet River” perform at a local coffee shop. I happened upon Jack during an Internet search for ukulele music in Tucson. He does a fun show with his banjo, guitar, ukulele, harmonica and an amazing invisible trumpet. Jack is sort of a one-man revival of vaudeille music, and I like to see people who keep neat old things alive. I’ll even buy his CD. (But don’t be too flattered, Jack. I have the same respect for people who sustain lines of heirloom vegetables.)
Brett arrived today, which was great because we haven’t seen him in a while, and because it caused us to get serious about making the house habitable. Eleanor got busy cleaning the bathroom of plaster remnants, hanging shower curtains, and picking the scraps of vinyl floor and old sinks out of the tubs. We now have two usable bathrooms, albeit without cabinets or sinks yet. The giant refrigerator is stocked with cold drinks and all the things we couldn’t fit into our little Airstream refrigerator over the past two years, and we have wood for the fireplace. This house is starting to become home.
January 16, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Home base
This morning in Quartzsite dawned a bit cloudy, and the usual break of the sun over the mountains was obscured by my new neighbors in their enormous fifth wheel trailer. Colder air has come in to southern Arizona too, all of which added up to a lot more power usage (for the furnace) and not much solar gain. I’m glad I had already decided to go today.
Amazingly I managed to get home without encountering another rock in the windshield or ripping parts off the trailer. So Eleanor may allow me another trip by myself someday. I even backed the trailer into the carport myself, a tricky job, and got everything set up for the family to come home tonight.
At this point we have to resume the house project. Those of you who are interested primarily in travel stories will need to avert your eyes for a while. Our next firm travel date is in March, but I am hoping to put together a couple of short trips before then. We also have a few other interesting things planned locally, while the Airstream is parked in its corner awaiting us.
(Photo above is courtesy of “The Airstreaming Meteorite Dealer”, Jim Breitinger. See his other portraits of people at Quartzsite here.)
January 9, 2008 at 10:54 am · Filed under Home base
Today we leave on an Airstream trip! Whew — just in time for our sanity. The house craziness has been a lot of work.
Yesterday the gas plumbers showed up to dig a new trench in our back yard. We need a new gas line because we want to have a gas stove, and the code doesn’t allow us to to connect another appliance using the existing (small) line. All the utility providers were called out to mark their lines, but Cox Cable didn’t show up. We didn’t know they had a line in our back yard, until of course the plumbers “found” it with their Ditch Witch. Cox got a call and sent someone out to repair it.
Interestingly, they don’t actually repair the line. They simply replace the entire thing, underground. At first they said they’d do it when we ordered cable service, which isn’t going to happen for a loooong time, if ever. But we didn’t want them coming back to dig up our newly landscaped yard next year, so after some negotiations Cox agreed to come back today and lay the replacement line in the same trench as the new gas line.
The gas plumbers also discovered that the sewer line that we are using for our full hookup in the carport isn’t buried very deep. In fact it was only about 12″ under the surface. So they clipped that with the Ditch Witch too … but spliced in a repair today. At least now we know where everything is.
My camera is back — just in time for our trip. The CCD is cleaned and the problem with the onboard flash is fixed. You can expect to see a lot of photos from this week’s trip, as I start to use it again. We will be on the road by 1:30 pm today, heading to the Phoenix area for a night and then west. Time to go hitch up the Airstream!
January 7, 2008 at 11:06 pm · Filed under Home base
People who meet us here often comment on the stark differences between Vermont and Arizona. Vermont is cold and damp, Arizona is hot and dry. Desert versus Green Mountains. It seems to amaze people that we’d relocate to some place so totally different.
I prefer to think of them as yin and yang. We need both to stay balanced. In Vermont we play on a lake full of water, and all summer I see the rain and clouds passing by. It seems that water is a constant presence, in endless supply. Moss grows near the Airstream and at times the dampness invades to the point that even the furniture seems to go limp. I think longingly of the vast dry sands and succulent saguaros posing in the sun. Then we come to the Sonoran Desert and it is so dry (“how dry is it?”) that I can drink two liters of water a day just sitting at my desk, and still feel thirsty.
But it is not always so. The typical winter day in Tucson features blue-gray clouds that cruise by in the breeze, and temperatures only in the 50s, like today. As I write this I can hear an unusual sound: water dripping off the eaves of the house. We’ve had rain, actual soaking rain, today. There are puddles in the back yard, and I hear a slishing sound as cars drive by. Those are things I associate with the northeast, not here.
And with this rare rain we have gotten a bit of humidity. It’s still a dry day by northeast standards, but there is enough moisture in the air that the mid-50s feel cooler than usual. This has led me to a discovery about our house: it’s chilly.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. Our house was built to be cool, defended again 110 degree July days by a reflective roof and thick masonry walls that absorb the cool at night. It has no insulation except a few inches of fiberglass in the ceiling. The windows are single-pane cheapos that the wind whistles through. The floor is concrete covered by slate. There are no windows on the west side, and only two small ones on the east side. Southern exposures are protected by overhangs. In short, everything about this house is designed to feel cool.
That’s all fine ten months out of the year. But when the temperature drops and the humidity rises, it feels like a drafty old stone castle, and running the furnace seems futile. It can heat the air, but it can never overcome the stored coolness in eight-inch-thick adobe block walls. I am fighting the urge to run out and buy lots of thick wool rugs for the floors, and to crank up the heat to 72. With the windows we have at present, and the general leakiness of the house (I’m talking about air infiltration, not rain), running the furnace more would heat the local neighborhood more than the house.
Window replacement on the house doesn’t pay here, because the heating season is too short. If we replace the windows it will be for comfort and convenience rather than energy savings. We probably won’t heat the house for more than a few days this winter, and we don’t expect to run the air conditioning at all since we’ll be traveling during the warmest months.
Up in Prescott AZ, where our Airstream buddy Rich C is living, they are getting occasional snow. Rich is up around 5,000 feet and things are quite different up there. People associate Arizona with sunshine and desert, but in reality half the state is above 4,000 feet and it is covered in green forests that are quite a bit cooler than the southern half of the state. Flagstaff, at 7,000 feet, has a climate more like Denver than Tucson. People are skiing up there right now.
This is why our Airstream travel routes are quite limited this time of year. We stay south of a line defined by the Mogollon Rim (muggy-on), which is why our travels are focused on places in southern New Mexico, southern Arizona, southern and coastal California, Mexico, and west Texas.
Speaking of which, our next Airstream trip is the day after tomorrow. We have to stop doing house stuff and get on the job of prepping the trailer for the trip, but it’s hard to stop the momentum. Handy Randy showed up to work on the bathroom tile that was failing, and a guy from the gas plumbers showed up to scope out the job. Another guy came by to measure for window shades, too. Tomorrow the gas plumbing begins in earnest, and I’m expecting another contractor to stop by to estimate some masonry work. Also, FedEx LTL (Less Than Truckload) says we may get 213 lbs of toilets tomorrow. Wheee. It will be a busy day.
January 6, 2008 at 7:27 pm · Filed under Home base
So much for playing outside the house today. I resisted the pull, but eventually the house sucked us in and we ended up spending most of the day puttering around inside. We have four rooms we can use, because no further significant work is being done in them: dining room (where I’ve set up my office), living room (where we are stacking miscellaneous boxes that we need access to), the middle bedroom (our primary storage area), and Emma’s room. So we are spreading out and beginning to open a few boxes.
Handy Jerry came by around noon and solved our electrical woes. Turns out the painters didn’t tie off the electrical connections properly when they took down the ceiling fans. That was half the problem; the other half was caused by Handy Randy when he moved a bathroom fan switch and didn’t make a tight connection. I should send a bill to both parties splitting the $90 it cost to figure out the problem and resolve it. We also re-installed all the ceiling lights, wall sconces, and duct faces.
One project I’ve had on my list is to somehow deal with the two large boxes of photo prints we’ve been toting around for a decade. Remember the days before digital? Well, I’ve got plenty of souvenirs from that era, which are slowly deteriorating and never viewed. They just take up space in a storage area somwhere.
We’ll never get around to putting them in albums, so I figured if we had them all scanned we’d have them available on our computers. Then we would have them to view and enjoy anytime, even as we were traveling in the Airstream. I was planning to use ScanCafe to do the work. You just send them all your negatives and they scan them and put them up online for you to view. Then you pick the ones you want, and they burn them onto DVD for $0.19 per image.
Today I found the boxes of photos and cracked them open for the first time since 2000 (when I bought my first digital camera). I quickly discovered that we have waaaaay too many photos. There are approximately 4,000 negatives between the two boxes. ScanCafe will scan them all, but I have to pay for at least half of them whether I want the images or not. That’s $380.
Looking a few sample packs of prints, Eleanor and I realized we don’t really want more than about 10% of them. The pictures are pretty lame — lots of photos of building our last house, generic pictures of flowers, sunsets, etc. Very few are the type of photo we want to save for posterity: images of people and special moments. The one below is an example of a keeper. That’s me on the left (pre-beard), with my friend Steve B, preparing to go flying on August 14, 1993, just before Eleanor and I got married. I don’t remember where we were going that day, but I do have a lot of fond memories of that airplane. It was our “Airstream” back then, and we flew it all over the northeast.
Our neighbor Carol popped by for a visit late in the afternoon and was suitably impressed by our progress in the last two days. It just happened I was in the storage area and dug up a gift box full of goodies that Brett sent us for Christmas, so we took it over the dining room table, shoved my office equipment out of the way, and had an impromptu buffet with Carol. Crackers, smoked salmon, camembert cheese, cinnamon cashews, garlic toasts, stone ground mustard, green olives, and we added summer sausage, parmigiano reggiano cheese, and root beer. So that was dinner in the new house. A few Ghirardelli chocolates from the gift box made dessert, and then we made a fire of the excess packing paper and some scraps of a cut-down tree that I found in the backyard.
It is clear that we will never have a “move-in” day. Like our Airstream life, entering this house is going to be a process. We are moving in by degrees. Each day a little symbolic step or two forward occurs. Today, the first picture hung on a wall, and the first guest for dinner in the house. Tomorrow, who knows?
January 5, 2008 at 8:55 pm · Filed under Home base
Yesterday afternoon as the painters were leaving for the day, Eleanor and I stepped into the plastic-shrouded house and tip-toed past piles of ceiling (now in crumbles on the floor) to see what the first colors looked like.
It was horrifying. The hallway color we had chosen, with a name like “Sahara”, looked on the sample chip like a nice balance between adobe and terra-cotta. In reality, it was RAGING ORANGE CREAMSICLE color, almost fluorescent when the sun hit it. We stared in disbelief and then did the usual things we do when the color seems terribly out of whack (because this has happened to us before on other renovations):
- Think, “They must have put on the wrong color.”
- Pull out the paint chip and compare to the wall.
- Realize with a sinking sensation that the color is correct, and we are color-blind idiots who should probably stick to shades of off-white from now on.
- Mentally calculate the cost of a new 5-gallon bucket of paint.
- Call the painter and recount the disaster.
- After some free counseling from the painter, drive to the paint store and quickly find a new color that is boring but very safe.
So this morning the painters restored the hallways to a benign taupe. (Sounds like a medical condition: We have a benign taupe, which is better than a malignant orange.)
And then they painted Emma’s room.
Now, I knew Emma’s color was going to be unsuitable for most adults. She picked it. I tried hard to convince her not to go with a blue-green and managed to get the color lightened a shade, but it was still very blue. It appears to be precisely what it is: a kid’s room. Did I say “very blue”? Very very blue. The camera imploded when I tried to take a picture of it.
After that things went better. We love the kitchen color, called “Olive Oil” (sort of a light green), but of course this, our favorite color in the house, will be mostly covered up when the cabinets and appliances are installed. The living room and our bedroom are not bad either, in a mellow shade called “Almost Peach”, and the ceilings are a light cream color. It all works. Even Emma’s BLUE actually matches a lot of the slate floor.
Covering up the mistake
I am greatly relieved to have this phase over. The painters will return next month once we are done installing things, to do some touch-up, but that’s nothing. At this point we have no other major disasters scheduled inside the house, so we can start to unload things from the Airstream and open a few boxes from the storage room. Although the house won’t have a kitchen for another month (and no bathroom cabinetry), we’ve got a few rooms that are usable.
So we are going to take Sunday off from house stuff and try to go have some fun in the local area. A day to play will clear our heads for the next phase of planning, which is “details”. We’ll need to pick out drawer pulls and cabinet knobs, rugs, a couple basic pieces of furniture, faucets, one or two more light fixtures, closet systems, window shades, etc. Hmmm… sounds like a lot of work. We may hold all that for after we return from the next Airstream trip, which starts on Wednesday.
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