Tomorrow a great Airstream experiment will occur here.   Our friends Bobby, Danine, and Elise will arrive in their Airstream, which is almost identical to ours.   The original plan was for them to stay at a nearby campground, but their arrival is in the midst of the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, which means everything in town is booked solid.   I noticed from the interstate today that even the Motel Six in Marana (about ten miles north of downtown Tucson) is charging $71.99 per night, single occupancy.   It’s supply and demand time here in Tucson, and right now the hotels and motels can demand almost anything.

So the Airstream experiment is whether we can shoehorn two 30-foot Airstreams into one carport, and still have room to open the doors.   We did some quick measuring and found that the only way to do it would be to have one Airstream halfway out of the carport so the   door could open toward the sidewalk.   Our bedroom will be about two feet from Bobby & Danine’s dining room table.   This will be the closest we’ve ever been parked to another trailer.

You can expect photos tomorrow or Monday.   I am hoping that the neighbors will not panic when they see yet another aluminum tube show up and hook up (we’ve figured out how to get our guests water & electric).   We are fortunate that most of the neighbors have already dismissed us as harmless seasonal lunatics, which is basically accurate.

Officially, we have no courtesy parking.   But Bobby & Danine have something special to offer besides their friendship.   They have a seven-year-old girl.   Both sets of parents are eager to have the two girls get together and cross-pollinate girl things, as girls like to do.   So we’re hoping our odd little living arrangement works out for at least a week.

With friends coming tomorrow and the kitchen cabinet installers coming on Monday, we realized that today was our only chance to get up to the Phoenix area for a day to shop for house stuff.   So we hopped in the Fit and drove the 100 miles or so up to Tempe, where there are so many furniture places (clustered around a giant IKEA store) that we could visit them for days and still not see them all.

The trip was a complete success except that we found so much stuff to bring back that we couldn’t FIT it all in the Fit.   It can only FIT so much.   The little car did surprisingly well, however, bearing assemblies for two 3-drawer dressers, a bookcase, three lamps, track lighting, a curtain system, and a bag of frozen Swedish meatballs from IKEA. We didn’t even have to strap Emma to the roof, although I threatened to.

We’ll have to make another trip in a couple of weeks.   Since we plan to pick up several six-foot long items next time, we’re going to haul up the Airstream, spend a night in Tempe, and then bring the Airstream over to the furniture stores for loading.

Emma took the opportunity of the long car ride and hours of kid-boredom in stores, to crack the first Harry Potter book.   We had some concern about whether she was ready for reading at that level, but once again she has surprised us.   She sucked down half the book today and will undoubtedly finish it tomorrow.   We have tested her comprehension of the book by asking questions about what’s happening in the book as she pauses, and she seems to be absorbing it quite happily and without fear of the mysterious happenings in the story.

At this rate we have made it a priority to get to the local branch libraries (three within a few miles of us) and start checking massive quantities of books.   They will that on Monday or Tuesday, depending on how crazy things are when the work starts on the kitchen.   We’ll lose the opportunity to take books from the library once we get back on the road in March, so we need to borrow as many as possible while we can.   I was hoping Emma would take to reading, but this is getting ridiculous.   I asked for a little rain and have nearly gotten washed out to sea by the flood.

In karate class last week the teacher led an exercise involving headstands.   Only the older kids wearing orange belts were even close to being able to do a headstand, and I noticed Emma   was particularly challenged due to having insufficient arm strength, and not being familiar with the sensation of carrying her weight with her arms.   So we’ve been practicing in the house at night.

The challenge at the moment is for her to climb up the wall with her feet, then walk backward on her hands until she is nearly vertical.   Then we grab her ankles and try to get her to walk forward.   This is going to take some practice, but it’s fun for everyone when we try.   I’m hoping she can come into class and do a headstand soon, and completely freak out all those older boys in the class.   We’ll show them what “girl power” is.