Got my modem finally so we have broadband internet again. Also got my TiVo hooked up to the network so now were back to modern TV again. We took a quick trip to Ikea at lunchtime and I picked up a stand to put my TV on, while Sally got a couple of CD/DVD stands to go either side of the bookcase.

Haven’t used TiVo in a year because we had the comcast box, but they’ve made some major improvements, especially in the startup process. You finally can use the internet to initialize the box instead of having to use a phone landline - I mean, who has those anymore?

Anyway, I took a few lame photos of our place all empty when we first moved, so here they are (below). I’ll add some more in a later entry when we’ve got our furniture sorted out (soon, honest!)

Ground level is a 2 car garage. Tandem parking, but it’s not too much of an issue right now. Lots of space for storage at the back there and on the right under the stairs.

View of the kitchen from the lounge.

View of the lounge from the kitchen. Notice the fireplace & small balcony at the end.

View out of the kitchen window - the swimming pool, fountain and gym (right). The 12 seat movie theater is just off to the right (out of shot), and the jacuzzi is just off to the left (again, out of shot).

Computer table built right into the kitchen has sure been getting a lot of use already :-)

Mo deals with the heat in her usual ladylike fashion

Our furniture arrived just after 9 am this morning and we were surprised to see it was the same 2 guys that picked up all of our stuff in Portland OR. The temperature was going to hit 116 today again so they were eager to get going, in fact they had already delivered someone else’s furniture at 5 am that morning!

We hung around outside while they unloaded the truck, picking off certain items that we wanted to dump in the garage and offering advice on which room boxes had to go to. It was so hot out that even we were drinking ice water like there was no tomorrow - I can’t imagine how those 2 guys could move a whole house full of furniture so fast, they were great.

While we were hanging around outside, a second delivery van pulled up down the street from us. It was from a rival moving company called ”Starving Students” - nice name. We watched them back up to a garage, obviously not realizing that there was an overhanging balcony on the first floor, so suddenly we hear a loud CRASH followed by the tinkle of glass hitting the sidewalk - kept us all very entertained for 5 minutes :-)

Also while we were out there our neighbor needed to get out so the delivery guys moved their truck for her. An hour later we realized why she needed to get out: her husband had band practice in his garage all afternoon and man did they suck! Sounds like they’re trying to play 50’s rock & roll, but the bass player only knows german oom-pah-pah music. It went on for hours. Next week I’ll play some techno music really loud and drown them out.

We started unpacking before noon and basically worked until about 8.30 pm. Surprisingly we probably have about 85% of it unpacked already, which was way more than I thought we’d get done in 1/2 a day. We were completely exhausted at the end of it all though, and starving so we showered, got dressed up a bit and sauntered off to the nearby California Pizza Kitchen for beer/cocktails and my favorite - Thai Chicken Pizza - hmmm delicious.

The living room is looking pretty good now, still a few boxes of things to open though and we do need a stand to put the TV on. Sally hasn’t put any of her books onto shelves yet, but that wont take long.

The bedroom is mostly done. The bed is remade in a new cool way - we are using the 2 foot deep window sill as our headboard, which gives us lots of room to put lights, clocks, iPod speakers etc behind the bed. The only major thing we need to sort out is now in here is Sally’s shoes, she has a collection that Imelda Marcos would be envious of. I see a trip back to Ikea in our future...

The kitchen is basically all unpacked, and the last thing to do in the garage is to assemble some shelves I’ve got so that we can store stuff down there. Not sure how much we’ll leave down there though as it gets REALLY HOT during the day.

It’s starting to feel a lot more like home...

In other news, we made the mistake of watching the local news today, which basically is all about one story: I guess Phoenix has a serial killer and a serial shooter roaming around right now - yikes! The Guardian Angels just got involved in patrolling the streets at night so lets hope that helps. I don’t know much of the details yet but will fill you in as we learn more...

Oh yeah, and as I might have mentioned before its monsoon season here. We had the TV on while we were unpacking and all of a sudden it started cutting out of the scheduled programs to warn people on the edge of town that there was the potential for a tornado building up in their area! I guess it never happened after all, but I didn’t think we had tornados out here! Glad we didn’t choose to live in a trailer park after all...

And finally we had some footage on the news from Portland OR - I guess the Hillsboro Air Show was on (which takes place near where I used to work for Intel) and a plane lost control and crashed into a nearby house! Luckily no-one was in the house at the time, but the pilot died. Sad to hear about Portland under those circumstances...

So it’s our first weekend here in PHX, which I’m assuming is pronounced “fix” ‘cause it’s going to get kinda rude otherwise. Oddly, Portland was PDX so no big change there to deal with. We’re still without furniture etc. and trying to entertain ourselves as best we can. Yesterday Sally announced that she was tired of shopping and wanted to “go somewhere”. I pointed out that we’d just spent 3 incredibly long days “going somewhere” and our butts are still shaped like car seats from it! Touché :-)

So what does that leave us? Well I don’t know yet ‘cause I’m doing my usual 5 am blog entry. I’m pushing for Ikea down in Tempe because a) we need a light for the bedroom and a few other bits & pieces b) they have lots of comfy chairs and we currently have none c) you can kill 4 hours just trying to find your way out of Ikea once you’ve walked in the door! I checked out their web-page where they proudly boast that the warehouse is 342k sq.ft on 23 acres - crazy.

Random thoughts: What am I really missing right now? Basically a place to sit, and my TV/TiVo. Yes we have the built-in kitchen TV, but its like 9” across at best, a far cry from my 42” plasma. I’m missing TiVo because it means you can ignore the TV for a while then watch all your favorite shows whenever you want to. Currently we’ve gone cheap on the cable and just got the most basic package going which only has 12 channels, one of which is a channel guide, and 2 of which are in spanish, which admittedly is aiding my efforts to learn to speak spanish and enjoy more bouncy chiquitas. Anyway, that means there is really only 9 channels, and 90% of the time there is NOTHING on, especially now the World Cup is over (congrats Italy, you did great!). Wish I’d brought some DVD’s to watch on my Mac. At least there’s always Amanda Congdon on Rocketboom. Oh wait she got fired - Doh!

Evening footnote: Man that Ikea is big, we got there around 11 am and finally got out of there at 4 pm! Wow. I actually did pretty good and just bought a chair for the kitchen computer table. It kinda goes with the kitchen pretty nicely I think, and at last I have somewhere to sit.

Its around 6 am. All our furniture should be arriving today, which I cant wait for as the only way to “comfortably” use my Mac so far has been to kneel on my pillow on the kitchen floor - and I am definitely not as young as I used to be. On the plus side though I’m not as old as I will be.

The internet modem installer dude didn’t arrive at all yesterday (so much for “between 9 am and 5 pm” - thanks dude) so I’m still stuck without any real connectivity which blows. Hopefully he’ll show up today too so I can start fixing some bugs at work and more importantly, earning some money instead of hemorrhaging it like a Tarentino arterial spray. When I moved from Manchester to Portland all I had was 1 suitcase, that was a lot cheaper move!

12 pm: Hmmm, all our plans just got FUBAR’d. Firstly I talk to Ygnition (the cable/internet provider), turns out they mailed me a modem - from Seattle! So it wont be here till the 18th which is next Tuesday. Ironically, the modem is currently sat in a shipping depot in Portland OR which I take as conclusive proof that there is a God and he has a lousy sense of humour. Then I got a call from SWIFT (the movers) who were meant to be arriving today but now they wont be here till sunday, so we’ve got another 2 days without any furniture at all. Sally is really pissed, mostly because she only has next week to get everything sorted out before she starts work. I’m a bit more “C’est la vie” about it - my attitude is if you want something doing right you have to do it yourself, and the minute you get other people to do anything for you (like haul all your furniture across 3 states for example) you just have to accept that it’s not happening on your schedule anymore :-(

So we drove into Scottsdale (about 10 minutes away) and watched “Pirates Of The Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest” instead, which was OK, and seemed to temporarily cheer Sally up. It was so freezing cold in the theater though that we actually ventured outside afterwards into the 116º heat for 10 minutes, just to warm up again! It was great. Man I love living here already...

Ventured out to the pool in the evening but it was packed out with families, kids & inflatable things - what the? This is my pool now! Sally pointed out that it’s friday night so of course more people would be relaxing, kicking back. Is it really friday already? Man this week has flown by. I’m going to have to switch to swimming in the mornings if I want to get some serious laps done...

Holy crap, were in the middle of the largest shopping area I’ve ever seen. We ventured out for an hour to find my bank and get a check cut for the movers tomorrow, and couldn’t believe all the stuff around here. In the map above, our place is the green arrow on the left, at the corner of N 16th & E Highland Ave, and if you look above us on E Camelback Rd, there’s at least 6 malls all within the next 8 blocks, or 0.3 miles. And they are all pretty up-market malls with Crate & Barrel, Kenneth Cole, etc in them. Send more cash!!!

We’ve got a Trader Joes and an Albertsons within a couple of blocks, and Costco, Safeway & Target within a mile. This is like having downtown Portland, Janzen Beach, Bridgeport Village, and Washington Square all within walking distance. The weird thing though is how quiet our place is, even out in the pool last night we couldn’t hear any noise at all. And don’t even get me started on the amount of restaurants around here, I’m going to have to spend 4 hours swimming laps in the pool every day just to counteract all the good food!

So basically yes traffic sucks but it’s not such a big deal when you don’t have to drive anywhere. Lets hope I can find a job somewhere around here when the telecommuting dries up...

Where are we at move-wise? Well we’re here obviously but our furniture doesn’t arrive till tomorrow (friday) so we basically have an inflatable bed and our 2 Macs. Our cable TV seems to be working today (did I mention there’s a small TV built into the kitchen? And a computer table too?), but no modem has arrived yet so no real internet connectivity. I got the very helpful “We’ll be there sometime between 9 am ~ 5 pm” treatment. There is a wifi hotspot by the pool that I can intermittently get but not with a lot of strength - definitely a sign that I need that new Mac laptop - if only Reno at work had let me “borrow” his :-)

Weather status: Its a balmy 113 today and 115 is forecast for tomorrow. I feel so sorry for our movers, hopefully they’ll get here in the morning when its cooler. Weirdly though it doesn’t feel too terrible out, you definitely don’t want to stay out in it for long, and you definitely don’t want to do anything vaguely physical (like breathing or moving) but it’s not as unpleasant as it sounds. This guy Zach that I was chatting to in the pool last night said its really only this hot here for 2 months - July & August, then cools down again pretty quickly in September. Our place has full on climate control across every floor and you can program it to change the temperature at different times of the day, like a little cooler at night-time for sleeping kinda thing.

Evening update: We went out again for a drive around 8 pm, just to check out the local area. Ended up stopping at one of the smaller malls, it was all open air which was nice as the temperature had dropped to around 100º by that point. They had all my favorite stores right next to each other - California Pizza Kitchen, Apple Store, Borders, Pottery Barn and a ton of other things we didn’t bother exploring. We did find the Phoenix equivalent of Portland’s “Willamette Week” though, there’s actually two of them - the ”Phoenix New Times” (www.PhoenixNewTimes.com) and “Get Out” (www.GetOutAZ.com). Now we now what is going on.

Speaking of which, it looks like everything is off an hour here from what we are used to in Portland. Stores open & close an hour earlier, TV programs are an hour earlier (we switched the mini kitchen TV on last night for CSI, just in time to catch the end of it because it started at 8 pm instead of 9 pm). I guess with it getting dark so early, people are on a different schedule. I’ve been waking up around 5 am every morning ‘cause it’s so bright outside by that point - now you know how I’m getting all this blogging done, it’s in the 3 hours before Sally wakes up ;-)

We found it - yay! We arrived around 4 pm, signed endless papers, took the tour, and eventually parked the cars in our 2 car garage and entered the town-home. Our new place is awesome.

Ground level is the entry way and garage, which has LOTS of storage space, perfect for bikes/kayaks, etc.

Main level is a long open room with a large kitchen on the east side and wood-burning fireplace & balcony on the west side.

Top level is 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

The exterior walls are about 2 feet thick to keep the heat out, which means that around the kitchen and bedroom windows you get a 2 foot window bench to sit at. These are particularly nice on the east side (kitchen and guest bedroom) because they’re overlooking the pool / jacuzzi / fountain / gym / 12 seat cinema!

We headed out to the pool around 8.30 pm and it was still around 90 degrees out. The water was really warm too after being in the sun all day. We got talking to a couple of people down there and before we realized it, it was 11.30 pm. Floating there in the warm salty water, staring at the stars, I realized this move was so worth it and we had made the right decision.

Mo status: A-OK. She hid behind the toilet for a while but slowly started exploring. Once she found the guest bedroom window seat looking over the pool, she was hypnotized and has seemed totally fine ever since.

5 am: I wake up, hear the bed springs creak, assume Sally rolled over or something and fall back to sleep.

9 am: We wake up, do all the normal morning ritual stuff, and its only after 10 minutes or so that we realize Mo has disappeared. Completely.

We call her but no reply, we turn the entire room upside down but she is nowhere to be seen. We look under the bed but its actually boxed in, there’s no way to get under the bed. We lift the mattress up to check but no she’s definitely not there. Were way too tired to deal with this intelligently so we for breakfast instead.

When we get back to the room we search it from top to bottom again but still no Mo. I remember the 5 am creaking and decide that somehow, Mo is inside the bed. Sure enough, we lift up the one bit of mattress that is exposed and find a hole. So we lift up the whole mattress and suddenly a big lump appears in the bottom of it that starts meowing at us. We get her out without any further damage to the bed or the cat and stick her back in her crate.

We hit the road around 11 am and it’s a long boring drive through the desert filled only with fun signs like “Turn off A/C next 10 miles to avoid over-heating” and “State Prison. Do not pick up hitch-hikers” - well duh.

We hit Phoenix around 3 pm and traffic was pretty light on the outskirts but as soon as we got closer in the freeway slowed to a crawl. Luckily I had my GPS with me and I’d already put a marker where our apartment was so we abandoned our maps/directions, dropped off the freeway and took the side streets to our new home...

Total Drive Time so far: 23 hours.

Mo status: Mo is definitely not happy being locked up anymore. Jodie, the girl in our apartment office offers her some water, but Mo just wants out by this point.

Honestly this was the day that I was dreading. First we had a long, boring drive that followed I5 for pretty much the whole length of California, then at the end of it we had to go east on the I205 across the north side of L.A.

Had a few errands to do first thing in the morning, so by the time we'd finished them and got the cars loaded up with our remaining junk, and hit the road it was 11 am. We drove all day until 8 pm and made all the way down I5 to just north of Sacramento, stopping only briefly at Cottage Grove McDonalds (where we bumped into Sallys ex-neighbor Larry!) for lunch, Ashland for gas & the incredibly beautiful Lake Shasta (above) for dinner.Portland was really grey and miserable when we left and had been raining overnight - a nice reminder of why we were leaving. We had to go 200 miles south before we saw the first patch of blue sky poking through a break in the clouds, but by the time we got into Medford / Ashland it was beautiful for the rest of the trip.

We figured we had to do at least 450 miles each day to stay on track, so we tried to go longer the first day to save time later and ended up doing just over 500 miles.

Total Drive Time so far: 8 hours.

Mo status: She's surprisingly good, eventually getting out of her carrying crate and exploring the new surroundings of the hotel room we spent the night in.