Journal: Still Moving

6th September, 2002: Rolling

An absolutely BEAUTIFUL morning! When I took off from Santa Rosa just before 6 o'clock AM, the sky was clear and black, lights on the hills and the stars very distinct. The sky has stayed very clear as I'm entering the Central Valley now, but at points I've been bouncing along right at the edge of the marine layer, fingers of fog, so it's like I'm grazing the interface between clear and foggy atmospheres all the way, pools of mist in low-lying depressions around Napa. As I come to Interstate 80 and Fairfield there's a cloud layer above the Central Valley, a number of layers, the sun is casting nimbus behind the clouds there. G'z, I wish I had better words for this... Very little haze, and the Air Quality Index for today is very good, should be, so I expect to have marvelous views as I cross the Valley and go up into the mountains. For the next-to-next-to-last time -- what's that, the antepeenultimate? -- journey.

Tomorrow I pick up the moving van, load the furniture, load the most valuable delicates into the Explorer and the RV. Saturday night or Sunday, drive the van up to the mountains, unload, drive back down Monday or Tuesday, get the RV and drive it up, and then we will be totally moved. And then following that is Wednesday, which is 9/11, 2002, fixup day and the anniversary. I suppose 9/11 will be a real good day not to be in any major city that could be a target...

The forecast is for sunny and cool weather, mid-70s today, low 70s in the foothills, windy and possible thundershowers in the foothills today so it could get exciting up there, supposed to be cool over the weekend, so this'll be about the first move we've done that hasn't been in a blazing heatwave. Amazing.

The sun shining thru the golden-outlined clouds seems to cast a glowing beacon-light on the route to Rio Vista and Jackson. It's a blue and gold morning, the luminous sky and clouds, the golden light and prairie here along the valley floor near Denverton. Very flat except to the south, Mount Diablo. And now I'm at a spot where I'm looking southwest to a city over there, I don't know if that's Oakland or San Francisco, yeah I'm looking at the Bay thru a little gap in the rolling hills here.

Digging the Music!

Unstoppable: Well! Now I am past Lockeford and Clements, near the San Joaquin-Amador county line, clouds are just ahead, the sun is just above them, so beautiful out here, the prairies are filled with dry grass and lots of little plants with yellow flowers, looks lower than mustard, or those could be mustards along there, anyway it gives a golden cast to the rolling prairies here. Absolutely gorgeous.

More music -- of course all the early Jefferson Airplane and Starship, aw heck, ALL the San Francisco psychedelia. And of course I'm still obligated to digitizing our 78 collection -- I think that can happen before too long... OK so what music is it I want to collect? 60s garage rock and late 60s psychedelia, and 3rd-world musics, and Electronica, and Techno, and old old novelty tunes, yeah. And maybe newer novelty tunes too. Find some things to obsess about, not just fart songs, heh heh. Yeah.

Meanwhile, things to do in the cruddy new house: I've been visualizing drilling holes in the walls from the office to connect to the 3 adjacent rooms, to be able to feed audio-video-data signals thru to devices in each room, because the office is where the INCON is, that's where the DSL hub will be. It's going to be feeding that end of the house. I'm thinking, uh see if there are any wall plates suitable for 1-inch conduit -- run 1-inch pipe or conduit thru the walls to run cables thru, and have faceplates at each end. Maybe even 1-1/4-inch conduit. I guess the thing to do would be to check hardware stores and see if any faceplates for large sizes are available, what the largest feasible one is, and/or how ones with smaller apertures can be drilled-out and fitted, so that they don't look like shit.

While I'm thinking about things to study, coursework, I may actually want to learn singing, take some singing lessons. I'll see if there are any online courses for singing. In fact, I should look at what free courseware is available online, see what the Web University has to offer, see if there's courseware for production of radio journalism.

I will want to purchase a power-line conditioner, to ensure that power fed to my music studio is free from glitches. I'll want a TV in the office or studio space, for basic channels -- and also, see if I can rig up one of the computers so that it has a 40-character DOS window whose output is redirected to a port that goes thru a converter to CGA-NTSC, to feed to the TV, so I can use the TV as a monitor. G'z. I know I have a CGA-NTSC converter somewhere -- don't know if I have a VGA-NTSC converter -- have to check on that. If I do, well, that'll be nice. (Or it could just go thru a serial port.)

[in Volcano]

Stock up on music of Tom Lehrer, and the Bobs, and the Fugs, collections of trance music.

[driving again]

Get to Dennis Bernstein's FLASHPOINTS website for today, 6th of September 2002, his interview with Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, get the transcription of what Ritter says of there being no evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that if the Bush regime goes with a war on Iraq for regime change, they will cause the US to lose the 'war on terror'. And then post that on InTheShadows. Yeah, post that, but when? I might not be wired-up for a few more days.

Ah well, back to the music. I'll want to keep an eye out for old ukelele and steel-guitar and other old Hawaiian music. And keep an eye out for Web radio stations and the like playing modern electronic and computer music. And then besides collecting music, there's always MAKING music.

Doing The Music - Some Notes - click here

The Move: DONE!

Monday, September 9th 2002, new home.

Thru some intensely arduous labor [mumble] what day is this? I think it's Monday. Uh yeah. Anyway, we got the van Saturday morning, yeah that's right, Saturday morning, after we'd been, I did another couple of trips last week on Tuesday and Friday, bringing up loads in the Explorer. So then Saturday we loaded and loaded - that was 17 hours work I believe, total. And yesterday, Sunday, it was another immensely long day, 13, 14 hours, which included at the end of the day, driving from Santa Rosa to Volcano in this huge truck.

Today I tried to maneuver it to an easy place to unload it and that did not work out. So everything that had to come into the house has been hauled up the front steps, an immense amount of stuff. And we worked, oh how many hours today? Only about ten, maybe, with a couple of little breaks. We have 2/3s or 3/4s of the van unloaded. Our timeline is: tomorrow, another 4 hours or so to finish unloading, then drop the van off in Red Corral, then drive back down to Santa Rosa in the Explorer, pick up the RV and drive back up here. And finally tomorrow night, Tuesday the 10th, just before 9/11, we will be fully ensconced in the new place. And the following day, Wednesday is when the first of the fixup crews come to try to fix things around here. Yeah, good luck, there's a lot of stuff to fix.

So this will have us by the end of tomorrow fully resident here, but of course the effort is not yet over. We still have to unpack everything that we've unloaded, buy more bookcases, showcases, furniture. Stick everything in its appointed place. That'll take a while. When this near-final effort is over, we will be just about ready to collapse of course.

What can I say about these last few days, exhausting as they were? Well, the heat wasn't super intense. It was hot enough, but nothing like the three-digit farenheit temperatures we've gone thru in previous moves. Driving in multiple vehicles simultaneously, it certainly helps to coordinate - walkie-talkies were really useful on the drive yesterday. Last night. Although the walkie-talkies engendered the saying of strange things like, "Uh Yo Mo, heads up! Make a left turn in two miles, over." Oh yeah, that's just so exciting. Well.

Awash in Blood!

THE FINAL MOVE!

Tuesday, September 10th 2002, moving.

I think I made a note to do this a little while back, but do this again anyway - look up TOURO University, T-O-U-R-O, find out what the hell it's doing in Vallejo, California.

It's now Tuesday evening, the 10th of September 2002, Vallejo. En route on the last journey of hauling belongings from Sonoma County to Amador County. This is finally IT! We have done the Big Move with the Big Truck, and I've done all the Little Moves with the Explorer. Now I'm do the Final Move here in the RV, and the Explorer as chase car. That phase is over. We're no longer moving, no longer residing in Sonoma County. What a concept! We've only been there for, what, 23 years?

This is a pretty evening here, just before sundown. The sky could be better, Air Quality Index isn't too great today, temperature was pretty hot earlier today. But now with the sun behind us, ah. There are water along the Highway 37 causeway, full of egrets and other waterfowl, water's very blue, tide fairly low. Yeah, it's a good evening to be getting away and starting the next phase of life, um hmm.

So, the next things to look for are: more structures for our property, a garage or something. I'm looking right now at a billboard: BetterBuiltBuildings.Com - storage for all sorts of vehicles. Might check them out on the Web, We might see if we can incorporate my Labyrinth plan into a ready-built building, or maybe just do the labyrinth in stones in the ground...

Wow, we sure stop at this Arco gas station in Rio Vista a lot. Bother.

At Home: EMBEDDED!

13 September 2002, at home.

Went on a shopping spree ha ha at WalMart late this afternoon, then at the best Chinese restaurant in the county. It was great except that I got the explosive drizzlies not long after. And I'm reading FAST FOOD NATION, the chapter about what goes into fast foods, and essentially into all ground foods, Well actually, part of it is, what goes into all meats. Any me we get could be from diseased, infected animals, and any ground meat could have fecal matter in it. and all sorts of really nasty microbes. I think that I'm going to adopt a policy of at least not eating any, when dining out, not eating any ground meats at all, and probably avoiding all meats that aren't certifiably, well organic, I dunno, what does 'organic' mean? Is it really a mark of raising the food in a way to be of most benefit to the consumer?

Next subject: [mumble] this bedroom here, it's going to be the music room, sheet music and books and all that, materials on recording, guitars hanging from the walls, my recording equipment in here, I need a small mixer, and the right computer for doing music processing, THAT I already have, but I need to get a small mixer. [mumble] in here, I'm going to need adequate shelving for the recording and processing equipment, and for the synthesizers. Can't use these small folding shelves I have in here now, they're just not wide enough to accommodate the synths. I'll find out for sure when I unpack those boxes of gear, I'll probably have to build structures out of PVC pipe to hold those... no, PVC looks pretty shitty, that white gets real tawdry with use. ABS, all black? Maybe... Maybe I'll have to use PVC and paint it brown to make it look like redwood, ha ha. Yeah, redwood, the possibility would be to build shelves with metal frames and plastic shelving, racks I should say. It'll still be a problem being cosmetically tolerable. I'll just have to look around at materials.

Music Manifestoes - click here

PLANNING: Back In Marin

23 September 2002, NorthBay driving.

We had planned on visiting some Indian events this past weekend, but decided it would be just too hot for that, so we didn't actually leave Volcano until yesterday evening, Sunday evening. The main excitement on the way down was hitting a trash can in the middle of the freeway, just over the Petaluma River bridge on highway 37. We dragged the thing scraping along beneath us for a ways until I managed to pull off at the first offramp, found it was a large plastic garbage can. Hopefully it hasn't done any damage. This the first time I can think of that I've hit something on the freeway, yah. Don't want to repeat that...

Just now, came over the ridge dropping into the Petaluma Valley, a sere dry day here, sure looks like autumn in Northern California, very dry...

I've been formulating some plans in case the layoff is fairly immediate. Install more shelves and such at the house. Take a week off on the Mendocino coast. Go back to the house, finish installation, interior and exterior. Shelving books etc inside, landscaping at least to a certain extent, stabilizing it on the outside.

And then of course San Francisco for Jodeana's wedding Hollowe'en, and after that maybe a trip up north thru the Valley -- I think Marsha and Bruce are flying up to Mom's around Thanksgiving, maybe before then, I'll have to doublecheck on the time for that, see if we can get up there. Or if Maureen hasn't been laid off yet, I may go up by myself. Otherwise yeah, a trip north, and in fact maybe look to stop at RV dealers along the way in northern California, southern Oregon, see about replacing what we have.

Check out family holiday schedule. Depending on other variables, maybe spend Thanksgiving week down in Death Valley for the 49er encampment. And then depending on wind and weaher, and family schedules, either spend Christmastime around Amador County, or head down towards Santa Fe, Taos - Christmas is supposed to be spectacular. Possibly spend the winter in southern climes; we talked about seeing Santa Barbara. In fact the route south could be a Mission Tour, finally, a full mission tour of California.

Get down to San Diego, see the sights around there. Weave back and forth around southern California - Elsinore, Hemet, the Inland Empire, Anza-Borrego, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms again, the southern deserts, Sonoran desert, Yuma, across southern Arizona, Ajo, those petroglyphs, Organ Pipe Cactus Monument, Tucson, Nogales, Bisbee, Douglas, all around there. Chiracahua Monument, to Gila Cliff Dwellings, southern Rio Grande Valley, Jornada del Muerte, up to Soccoro, Albuquerque, up to Santa Fe and Taos for Christmas. That's one plan, see hows that works out.

Meanwhile going north on the Cotati Grade right now, sure glad I'm going north, southbound traffic is jammed. It's been jammed off'n'on all the way up. Sure glad I'm not stuck in that stuff.

And if Maureen doesn't get laid off, well then, stay in Amador County until the end of the year at least, probably. Complete the home installation, as it were, inside and outside. Build networks, build a micro recording studio, start working on that list of thinks I can do up there, the list I haven't transcribed yet...

Awash in Smoke!

Moving etc Updates - click here