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Road: Out the Door

Yes, we finally made it. We're on the road.

Literally. We're on 101 right now as I type (don't worry, Vivi's driving :-), about 45 minutes north of Santa Barbara. We were back in Venice a day to really get our stuff together, leave the apartment in a good state, and pare down some of the piles of crap we had originally loaded into the car. Today we head to Santa Cruz, where my sister Gabrielle just moved back a few days ago. It'll be nice to have her in the neighborhood again (much closer than Gainesville, Florida), and to celebrate, we're going to crash at her place in the middle of moving-in chaos!

Sadly, we still won't get to use our new tent, though the oh-so-comfy sleeping bags will get their inaugural unfurling (hopefully these bags won't get stolen like the last ones did). But don't worry, Herr Tent, we'll have you up soon enough, as we head to Seattle.

Santa Cruz was the first place I visited in California, back in 1990, right after I graduated high school and still lived in, yes, Springfield, Missouri. What a mind-blowing experience it was then. Now, California is just a part of who I am, and it's occurred to me that there are fewer and fewer other places that I'll be willing to live in. I'm too used to its crazy melange of cultures and ideas. Alas that the country is moving toward Texas (not even Austin, but Midland) and not California.

Gabrielle grew up in Midland, by the way. She can tell you all about it. It's lovely.

Well, it's my turn to drive soon, so I'd better finish up. To keep you busy, we took lots of pictures of old Indian petroglyphs that we saw Friday out near Elaine's place.

Miles: 445

Road: Prologue (The Desert)

We're off on our road trip finally. Sort of.

Elaine's Oasis

We did leave, but truth be told we'll be stopping back home again in a couple of days to finish up some stuff and get our shit together a bit more. So call this a trial run.

Anyway, we're out in the desert at our friend Elaine's place. It's a great home in the high desert that she's done wonders with, complete with an irrigated organic garden, fearless wildlife, and incredible night skies.

We'll be hanging here awhile, eating, drinking, and staying out of the baking sun. We may even help Elaine drywall. Who knows.

Miles: 135

Bum

(Still...catching...up)

It's official. I'm a bum now. Worse, a beach bum. I like it.

Two weeks ago Friday I said sayonara to Evolution Robotics (well, full-time, at least) and being gainfully (?) employed. I have nothing to do until late August, when school starts.

It's incredible. While some days I do make the heroic effort and Get Stuff Done, mostly I just do what I feel like. Imagine that.

At first I went on a reading binge. Light and easy Sci Fi. I chomped 1400 pages or so in the first week, knocking off The Cat Who Walked Through Walls (amusing, though my enjoyment was ruined by the "ha ha" ending), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (can you believe I hadn't read it? I'm so much hipper now, knowing where that Radiohead song title came from), and the Foundation Trilogy (rereading, now those are what I call good books).

Then I went into programming, doing those projects I never had time for. I finished my English parser using the Earley algorithm, arbitrary CFG, and lexicon. And the past few days, I did a rough cut of a music loop sequencer (TODO: write about these in i/o).

And I've been running and biking on the beach. And cooking a bit. And drinking nice bits of wine and beer. And sunbathing, when the June Gloom breaks. And, get this, I've only been in a car three times in the past two weeks. About five to ten minutes each time. Ahhhhhhhh.

Oh, and I finally stitched together the 360 degree pan of my old seat at work (And Gimped. A lot. Can you find the evidence? I think you can!) JPEG and Quicktime VR for your amusement.

Now back to bumming.

You've read the book. You've seen the movie.
Now, experience the Quicktime VR of...
Tom's Chair.

How Not To Move

(This is a bit old, but we're still catching up).

Originally, we said we'd get movers.

Then, we thought, we can get Vivian's brother Marlon and his friend Geraldo to help us. They're big strong guys, and with them it will be a cinch. And Marlon said, "Sure," though Geraldo had to work that day.

But we weren't fazed. We can do it, we said to ourselves.

Well, as already detailed, we were out of town up until two days before the move. And we hadn't been, uh, very disciplined before our trip with packing, which is to say we had a lot left to do. Let's say that the night before, we up rather late packing, and even then, we weren't close to being done.

Our truck rental was the Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend. Marlon and I started loading the truck around 9am, while Vivian was, yes, starting to pack the kitchen. By about noon, we had the truck packed full of our shit.

It takes about an hour to go the 55 miles from Fullerton to Venice, so after woofing down lunch, it was 1:30 or so. Marlon had to leave at 3pm.

Now, our new apartment is half way up a big hill, and being a street full of apartments and near the beach, there is little parking. With a bit of maneuvering and hand waving from Marlon and Vivian, I managed to parallel park the U-Haul Beast. Except it was left 6 inches in front of the car behind it, not exactly prime for pulling out the ramp.

Take two. Let's move it further up the hill (to the red zone), where there's more space to get the ramp out. Ok. We lifted up the hatch, or tried to lift up the hatch, and realized that all of our crap had fallen over during that brilliant dance on the side of the hill.

So we moved up to the top of the hill where it was flat, and while I held up the bookshelf that was holding up the washer and dryer that were holding up the filing cabinet, tables, and other bookshelf, Vivian and Marlon extracted enough items to set things aright.

And then we wheeled the washer and dryer 200 feet down the hill to our place, and carried the couch and dresser down that same hill.

You're thinking, wait, don't you have an alley that you could have just pulled up in? Yes, you're right, except the walkway from the alley is barely 3 feet wide, so anything that isn't terribly skinny is a no go.

Marlon left after we had the big wide stuff carted in. Now it was Vivi and I, to unload the entire damn truck. Oh, and, by the way, the truck was due at 3pm, too. Back in Fullerton.

I called Scott.

Scott became our hero. Arriving in a motorcycled blur, he came and rescued us, much as the Yanks rescued the Western Front in WWI (whenever Scott is involved, a war reference is inevitable).

And thus, by five or so, we were done. Sort of. We still had to return the truck; they were closed at 7:30 when we dropped it off. Oops. Apparently the old maxim holds: Easier to ask forgiveness than...

(I should mention in the hour that Scott was here, we saw: a bicyclist get arrested, a man in a full purple zoot suit, and a woman wearing a fuzzy camouflage dress, pushing a baby carriage. Ah, Venice).

Wow, what a long day. Tough move, eh? Ho ho. That was just Day One.

Then came Day Two. We packed and we packed. And loaded our cars. Another twelve-hour day. Dumping off more shit in our tiny place at midnight...

And then, Day Three. More packing. Can we fit it all in two more car loads? Oh, wait, we have to clean the old place, too. Did you get the fridge? And on.

And actually, we didn't really finish even then. While I went back to work on Tuesday to be a zombie, Vivian made yet another visit back to Fullerton, to get rid of stuff for Goodwill, and load up the remaining stuff in the car. Well most of it. She had to go back again on Thursday, but finally we finished.

Sort of. Where the hell are we going to put all this crap???