Day One

We were ready for it eight days earlier, clearing out furniture & stuff from our master bedroom (the "owner's suite") and stacking it in the —  for this purpose, the appropriately named —  "gathering room" (i.e., the living room). But Day One kept getting postponed.

The folds in the carpet, bumpy enough
to trip on, are circled in this photo.

We are having the carpets ripped out of four bedrooms and replaced with tiles. The guys showed up and started work yesterday, Day One.

We've been wanting to take out the carpets ever since we moved in here two years ago. Actually, the feel of the carpet on its thick padding was a bit luxurious, especially with bare feet in the winter. But its days were numbered. Not only do carpets store too much dirt and dust, and not only are cool tile floors more welcoming in the desert climate, but the developer and its carpet subcontractor had installed them very poorly. After only a few weeks, folds began to appear in the carpets in all four bedrooms.

Upon tearing up a corner of the carpet, I saw evidence to support a theory. The padding underneath was really thick. That's why the carpets felt so luxurious. Trouble is, the carpet tack strips nailed all around the edges of the floor are quite thin and the carpet layers cut the padding to abut close to the strips. By the time the carpet was laid down, the thick padding prevented it from being secured by the tack strips.

Tom is pleased with the tiles laid
on Day One.

Day One is a big step forward.

It's going to take a while, one room at a time, to get the tiling done and return to some semblance of normalcy. We are hopeful.

Meanwhile, I need to drive down to Home Depot to get some more small boxes. Sheesh, I thought we were done with those a year and a half ago when we moved form San Simeon to Blue Agave II in Dove Mountain. But I have to move a lot of books out of my office. 

Foreign Life

The name of our sprawling detached hotel
development is lit up in the hours of darkness,

I feel like we moved to a foreign land and that we are camping in a nice hotel.

We lived on a secluded little acre for almost seventeen years, longer than either of us had lived any other one place. The Sonoran Desert, the Catalina Foothills, and Finger Rock wash became the home that we identified with and San Simeon reflected our identity for friends and family. The house itself with its sunken living room and huge window looking at Finger Rock, its walled backyard with a tower that viewed mountains in all directions, secluded swimming pool, and goldfish pond, its long driveway, eucalyptus trees, sixty saguaro cacti and similar number of palo verde trees, private gully and paths, its raised beds, shade covered garden protected from javalina, rabbit and serpent are all unique, unlike any other property, and all remodeled and fashioned with our own hands. Our two furry children are buried there. It's an acre like no other.

We knew our few neighbors, their properties similarly sprinkled an acre at a time by the Finger Rock wash. From our house, we could hardly see any of theirs. Standing at the south point of our own acre, even our own house was not visible. Of the ten neighbors on San Simeon, only two had lived there longer than we carpetbaggers from Puget Sound. Many were retired, or retired over the time we lived there — like us. I don't think any of us play golf and there are no snowbirds. It's a neighborhood established some fifty years ago. Families had been raised there, but over our years only one home had children.

We had lived in a very unique place so, of course, any other place would be different by definition. We moved only 25 miles away, but it is a completely different world; a foreign country. True, our new home is definitely within the Sonoran Desert and is situated about the same elevation as San Simeon, Dove Mountain folk speak the same languages as those in the Foothills, and the Tortolita Mountains are similarly spectacular with familiar pale Catalina granite and caliche, views, and majestic saguaro cacti, palo verde, mesquite, acacia, ironwood, barrel cacti, cholla, prickly pear opuntia, and desert wildflowers. But Dove Mountain is also very different.

Typical street scene in Dove Mountain: a line of garages with attached living quarters.

Everywhere it's a new development with many unoccupied houses and new areas under construction. Small lots. Huge houses packed next to each other in strips separated by common areas. Intentional builder and covenant-restricted uniformity in appearance, whether colors, fixtures, layouts and landscaping. In our development, Blue Agave II, every house number is uniform and advertises the builder whose name I will not mention. (Say, whose house is this anyway?) Properties look like lines of garages with attached dwellings. Boundary walls (two types: sloped rip-rap over concrete block base and thin red-brown concrete blocks). Flimsy iron gates and fencing. Backyards are left stripped down to the hard soil, barren, dusty, muddy when it rains, and generously sprinkled with half-buried construction debris.

We have lots of neighbors. It's been twenty-three years since I made my home in a small lot neighborhood. All kinds of people: lots of retired couples both permanent and snow birds, young families with kids, professional and military retired. Some folk have dark skin but most with white. Children accompanied by a parent walk past our house to the corner where school buses promptly arrive.

But all folk have something in common: enough money to buy a large, expensive and newly built house, able to spend even more money to finish fixturing it so it's livable, and — in about one in four properties — spend another hundred thousand having a large hole dug in their small backyard to accommodate a swimming pool, ramada and outdoor kitchen.

Our detached hotel on Chaparral Sage will become our home. Like San Simeon, the desert setting is gorgeous and the views stunning. We have discovered walks in the Tortolita Preserve that we can take without having to get inside a car and drive somewhere. And, to be honest, it's interesting to walk the manicured lines of garages with attached living spaces. But right now, I still have feelings like we are camping in a large hotel complex

Tortolita Preserve. A quiet, private walk past a hole in the barbed wire perimeter.
That's Baboquivari in the middle distance just to the left of the solitary saguaro.

These feelings will be forgotten as Dove Mountain becomes all too familiar and the thrill of something foreign fades.

The House at the End of the Universe

Dove Mountain Boulevard runs about seven miles from Tangerine Road up into the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains past innumerable residential, golf club, and resort developments. The road is landscaped and maintained, lined with hiking and biking trails through saguaro forests and thickets (maraña) of cholla and bushes, and graced with views of the Tortolitas, the Tuscon and Santa Cruz River lowlands, the Pusch Ridge side of in the Santa Catalina Mountains, and the successive ridges and peaks of the Rillito, Tucson, Santa Rita, Silver Bell, Baboquivari Mountains and beyond to the south and west.

The slopes of the Tortolitas and the ridges above the road are densely dotted with huge saguaro cacti. Pusch Ridge and the Tucson Mountains are in sharp relief. The ridges of the more distant mountain ranges are arranged in sharply distinct layers of increasingly blue-grey and vague outlines. These patterns of variegated mountain formations extend three, four, five deep into the horizon. One feels as if gazing over the roof of the world.

The boulevard reaches a dead end at Dove Mountain West Park and the Tortolita Preserve.

Our new home is almost at the end of the boulevard, and when we drive up and down through the Sonoran Desert landscaped terrain and savor the views to the basin below and mountains afar until we finally reach the end, we feel like we live in the house at the end of the universe.

P.S.  Credit to Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second in the series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Crossover Dinner & Calories

Last night we had our first home cooked dinner in our new tract home on Dove Mountain. Our very first dinner was about a month ago, a week or so after we closed the purchase. That was take-out pizza so it doesn't count as home cooked, but it was with family which made the gathering particularly special.

CS Road. We know which house is ours because its garage door opens when we press the remote.

Two days ago, Delivery Doctors brought over our heavy furniture, including our bed. I like the mover's name. It's a local moving company with the slogan, "We deliver everything except babies." We had brought over some frozen Bolognese sauce leftover from San Simeon, so last night Shari made some salad, we boiled some pasta and heated the sauce. Presto! Spaghetti Bolognese! A crossover dinner at CS (our abbreviation for our new street, Chaparral Sage).

Delivery Doctors carrying Shari's elliptical.
Backing up that truck in our driveway was no small feat.

Moving is complicated, confusing, discombobulating, exhausting, stressful, unpredictable and expensive. If the new house is a new build, triple the foregoing. The intended benefits from the move are there, but in the process, one has severe doubts. Simple pleasures, like a home cooked meal, even a crossover one, are significant milestones.

Among other expenses, moving costs calories. Every day for the last five weeks we have been driving one or both cars packed with boxes and small furniture the twenty-five miles from San Simeon to the End of the Universe on Dove Mountain Blvd. That's about a forty-five minute drive one way, which is about what our drive from Whidbey Island to Seattle used to take, assuming no ferry line or traffic (highly unlikely). Or, for those familiar with Seattle, the time it takes to drive from First Hill to South Lake Union.

Over three days we packed a fifteen foot rental truck twice. My god how Shari and Stephen labored to help! Then it was time for Delivery Doctors to do the heavy lifting.

Tom's new profession.
Phase I, getting the CS house habitable.

All that packing and carrying burns calories. Each day I stepped on our bathroom scale, I found I had lost yet another pound. Turns out, moving can be a good way to lose weight. My suspicion was confirmed by the three young men from Delivery Doctors who efficiently and energetically lifted refrigerator, couch, elliptical, stacked washer-dryer, beds, dining tables, and the rest of our heavy items, stuffed and tied them inside a truck too big to negotiate our driveway, then unpacked and positioned them inside our new home. Each of the three is muscular and trim. One admitted he eats seven meals a day

I expect to regain some weight but it may take a good many weeks. There is lots of stuff to move before we move into Phase III, getting San Simeon ready for sale. Phase I was getting CS habitable, a never ending process that takes either a lifetime or another move. In this case, the initial adaptations were garage floor coating, painting some spaces so they don't look institutional, installing window coverings, and a new fridge. Phase II is the move. Phase III by itself will be daunting. We will need a dumpster or two just to get rid of downed branches on our little acre from monsoon winds, an aspect of why we are motivated to make this move: too much to maintain.

Still, eating a spaghetti dinner at home is a step on the endless journey towards normalcy — and probably, towards gaining some weight.