dsandler.org

Wow, this security-system installation is taking forever. Seriously. Like, almost three hours now. Don’t get me wrong; the technician is totally stand-up, it’s just that it’s a really involved thing. Wiring, programming, dealing with the local emergency services, &c. Tedious!

Get this: the cable should be good to go in a few minutes, but the phones will take 5-10 business days because this street hasn’t been hooked up to the neighborhood trunk. I’ll have Internet service before telephone service. Welcome to the 21st century!

Oh, uh, yeah. We’re here! No time to blog—too much to unpack. More later.

Santa Fe. Cats are eating better tonight; I suppose they’re getting accustomed to this chaos we’re subjecting them to daily.

Then again, they are still hiding under the furniture.

Some more neat pictures today, including a couple of wide-angles from the AZ side of the Hoover Dam.

D: They sure don’t make public works like they used to.
E: Or, at all.

Ugh. We are exhausted. I don’t know which was worse about sleeping at the apartment last night: the hard floor, or the miserable cold? As usual, the heater was unable to keep the apartment above 65°, but I only held one blanket in reserve for us. Brr.

And, on our very last morning, just as we were about to leave, we were screwed one last time by our car-juggling neighbors. We had just put the cats in the car, too, when our neighbors started solving the Towers of Hanoi with their noisy old jeep and a brand-new Mercedes (another family member—just moved in!). Totally freaked the cats out; great way to start a long trip.

But, like Mr. John says, this train don’t stop there anymore.

After arriving in Vegas, E and I got to hang out with my brother and his fiancée a little. (We took in a stirring rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” by the fountains at the Bellagio. E remarks that the fountains effectively let them have fireworks four times an hour, year-round!)

A very, very sleepy end to trip 2, day one.

Hello, from a totally empty apartment.

Well, not totally. But only very small pockets of resistance stand in the way. Soon every last scrap of my life in this apartment will be gone.

The cats don’t much like it, either. They patrol from room to room, wondering where everything went—and why.

I’m cleaning the rest of the food out of the fridge, and for some reason it’s very sad. Maybe it’s just that everything is very sad today, but there’s something that’s getting to me about throwing away mostly-full jars of salsa and unused packets of Carnation Instant Breakfast.

Erin: “It’s kind of astonishing how easy it is to withdraw your ‘entire life savings.’”