Brad just called me from my unpacking work to see a roadrunner in the shrub just about a foot from our window. We’ve seen tons of these birds running down the road, but I’ve never seen one close up. They are really huge and beautifully marked. (Ours was a little browner and a bit fatter than the one in the linked picture.)

We’ve had a productive weekend. On Friday, we arrived at our new home at Mountain Shadows, which is about a mile or so from our property. We were hoping that our moving truck would arrive on Sat., but when I called the office they said that everyone had gone home and that the truck was not expected to arrive Sat. We spent Fri. getting mail, getting some supplies, and doing some preliminary unpacking.

At about noon on Sat., Charles our mover called. He was in Phoenix! He said they’d probably unload the stuff for storage (the bigger part of the shipment) that night and the house (an hour and a half away from the storage facility) the next morning. At about 4:00, we met at the storage unit to unload. As before, the movers were really great and very happy to accommodate my arrangement ideas so that we could have easy access to stuff we might need. We work with a lot of people that we don’t think much of, but these movers were really the best. By about 6:30, it was dark and getting very cold, and they were done.

Charles said, “So we’ll follow you, ok?” Huh? I thought we were doing the house in the morning. I was worried about how long they’d been driving and that it might be difficult to navigate the back roads and unload in the dark. But after talking it through, we decided to proceed. By 9:00, everything was unloaded. It was really pretty easy. We offered the guest room to the movers for the night, but they declined, electing instead to press on back to Phoenix. We were glad we didn’t have to do the same. Exhausted, we had dinner (creamy pesto tortellini and salad) and went to bed.

By morning, the cold Brad has been getting kicked into high gear, so we took it easy Sunday. I spent most of the day unpacking boxes, washing dishes, and doing laundry. (We did take a quick trip to the property to move a few things and to “de-horn” the property. The previous owner had put deer antlers up on various fence posts, very disgusting. We also saw our resident great horned owl in our front tree, and I drove the new truck on the back roads for the first time. It was very easy.)

We are considering a bit of out-of-the-box rearranging of the house we are staying in. (It is furnished, and we are hoping to make it work as both house and office for a year or so until we’re done building.) There is a large front room that has large floor-to-ceiling windows and gets wonderful light. It has a couch, two humongous easy chairs, a TV, and a few tables. Adjacent to that is a smaller room, open to both the front room and the kitchen. We were planning to use that smaller room as the office. After thinking about it, though, we’re considering making the front room the office and the smaller room the living room. We spend most of our day time in the office anyway and need more space for office-related things. The smaller room would be much cozier for evenings, and we aren’t really easy chair kind of folks. Tomorrow, we’ll move stuff around and see how it goes. Stay tuned.

We are in Portal — this time to stay.

Our move went well. The movers were great. Curiously, our mover Charles has actually been to the Portal area before. Prior to this, we’d never even talked to anyone who had heard of Portal. As Charles told us, he’s been a lot of places.

And departing LA was quite easy. I was a little surprised not to be tearful at leaving either our home or office (where we’ve been for about 8 years). It really seemed time to go, and we were excited about the change.

After leaving LA, we spent a couple nights with Brad’s mom. After a very long day of moving on Mon., a home cooked dinner she made was much appreciated.

On Wed., we set off early at about 5:30am to try to get to Portal before dark. We drove a different way, this time on the 8 through Yuma, joining back up with the 10 before Tucson. The drive was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it better would have been driving together in the same car.

We had some hopes of getting to the San Simon post office to collect our mail before it closed on Wed., but the combination of the time change and the fact that the post office closed at 4 made that impossible. We got some groceries before heading down to Portal. By the time we got to the 80, it was dark, but we were very excited to be heading into the valley that will be home.

When we got to the Quailway Cottage (the guest house we stayed at before and which we’ll stay at for two days before moving into Mountain Shadows on Fri.), it was about 7:30. To celebrate New Years Eve, we cracked open a bottle of champagne and ate appetizers. For the first time in 30 years or so, I did not stay awake until midnight.

Waking up to the new year in our new home was laden with symbolism and good cheer. We made breakfast and alternated watching the Rose Parade and the amazing array of birds out our door before heading over to the property. It was a stunning day, sunny and in the 60s. We drove out toward Horseshoe Canyon (down Sunrise past our property) to explore. On the way, we saw a large javelina. Surprisingly, he seemed to be alone.

On the property, we unloaded our various ladders and tools and checked out the new fence. It looks really great.

The land right now is how I like it best with huge expanses of golden grass. We hiked around for a while and took some pictures before going to mail the check for the fence. I also took my first ride in the truck standing in the bed holding on to the rack. Great way to get a big view. I can’t wait to take some movies this way.

Driving down 80, we saw two large coyotes crossing the road. They looked very healthy with thick, bushy coats. Later in the night, returning to Quailway in the dark, we heard what sounded like 50 or more coyotes yipping and howling. It was an amazing sound. The perfect new song for the new year in our new home.

(Picture of our land taken from the water tower platform)

Our move date was scheduled so late that we ended up having most everything done a couple days in advance, so we decided to wrap it up and take our last weekend in LA to do some fun tourist type activities.

Friday night we had a fancy dinner out on the Queen Mary. After dinner, we had a drink at the art deco Observation Bar on the ship.

Then on Saturday, we went to Disneyland and California Adventure. Neither of us had been in a long time. We had a great time, despite how cold it was. It was very nice to not think about moving or any of the related challenges for a whole day.

We’ve also seen a few movies. Milk was great. The Day the Earth Stood Still wasn’t.

And all week, we’ve been celebrating the holidays with the 12 days of sushi. We love sushi and will miss our weekly Wed. night sushi outings. (It is the one thing I have had no success with making myself.) We’ve gone to all our favorite sushi restaurants this week…Naples Sushi, Tsunami, Koi.

Tomorrow, the movers come.

Autotrader is great. We have bought and/or sold 3 cars in the last few weeks on Autotrader. Each time it was quick, easy, and cost effective.

We have a move date! The truck will be here Mon., Dec. 29.

Well, we may be as close as three days from moving trucks being here. Or maybe not. We don’t know. No one can tell us a move date. Glad we went with a big professional moving company. Oh well.

It’s amazing how difficult some of this stuff is. You’d think no one ever moved across state lines before. Our stress level is high.

On the plus side, we actually have phones in Portal. If you call our new number, 520-558-0180, you will actually get K12 Handhelds voice mail.

Well, another week is gone, and we are now about a week away from the moving trucks arriving. Our anxieties are mounting, but it is good to know that in a couple weeks, this phase will be over.

Challenges:

• We still don’t have a firm move date. With our move just a week away and many thing hinging on when the moving trucks come, this is difficult.
• We are going through another round of nightmares related to getting health insurance. If we thought CA was bad, it is nothing compared to AZ, where apparently the insurance companies can “rate you up” almost without limit due to pre-exisitng conditions. A policy which cost us about $500 a month here in CA was quoted at first $2,000+ and then $4,000+ in AZ. It is unbelievable. (Same company, same policy. CA regulation triumphs again.) Needless to say, we won’t be having the level of coverage we have had in the past. Yes, Virginia, there is a national health insurance crisis.
• Still no phones. Hopefully, Monday.

Successes:

• We finally got the deed to our property. (It’s been almost 3 months since we closed, and I was starting to worry. We were told the delay was due to election-related activities at the county office.)
• We are doing very well with packing. We have sold, donated, and got rid of lots of stuff and have packed most of the rest. Packing everything by the end of next week does not seem daunting.
• All the car situations are resolved. Santa also got Brad a new stereo for the truck with sat radio. This will be very nice for the drive and for Portal, which I am thinking does not get regular radio. (We are addicted to NPR.)
• The fencing of our property has commenced.

Depending on our move date, we are likely going to spend a couple day’s at Brad’s mom’s after Christmas before we drive to Portal. We are planning to relax and maybe see some movies. Then we’ll drive out and spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day at a guest house in Portal before moving into our new rental house sometime between Jan. 2 and 5.

Everyone I know seems to be shoveling snow this week.

Even here at the beach, it’s been cold. Yesterday, it didn’t get out of the 40s. This morning, we could see snow on the mountains from our house on the beach.

Interestingly, in Portal yesterday, it was in the mid 60s.

We had a productive, short trip to Portal this week, accomplishing three main things:

1. Moving all our books
2. Getting a storage space
3. Meeting with our architect

On Wed., while I was coming home from NC, Brad rented a truck and loaded all of our book inventory from work, our personal book collection, and some files. It was a total of about 3000 pounds of books. I got home around midnight Wed. night. We had planned to leave early the next morning, but I ended up having to stop by the office, and we didn’t leave until about 8:30.

It was a long, uneventful drive in the truck. We hit traffic in Phoenix and didn’t get to Willcox, where we’d be spending the night, until about 8:30 at night.

The next morning we got up early for a busy day. We started at the storage facility in Willcox at 7am. The space we’d planned on renting looked good, plenty big and easy to get an 18-wheeler moving truck into with our furniture.

From there, we drove a little over an hour to Portal. As usual, when we made the turn onto 80 and started seeing the mountains, I began to relax.

We got onto the property and started to work on our storage container before the architect was scheduled to get there at 11. We swept it out and started painting. It was a little slow going, and Brad was wondering if we’d have time to finish everything we wanted before dark.

Our architect, Judy, got to the property right on schedule. We really liked her. We talked about various issues, like the placement of the second slab, room layout, windows, etc. She is going to bring some good experience and perspectives to the project. She also knows a couple who is doing their house in American Clay and may be able to get us included in a “plastering party” to help and see how it works. I felt really good after meeting Judy and signing the contract to officially begin the design process.

Some interesting notes about Judy: She grew up around Willcox and Douglas and knows the area. Her family is from Ohio, and she even follows the Browns. (Go Browns!) She has done some volunteer design projects overseas, including working in Kenya.

Back to the storage container, we resumed painting. I also started rearranging the many cartons of books to begin unloading. Once we started unloading the books and stacking them in the container, it went quicker than we thought. Having everything well organized helped a lot. By 2:30, we were pretty much done.

Then we headed off to Bill and Chris’ to put up the mailbox. That didn’t work out as well. First of all, Bill had spent all night driving a family member from California and didn’t seem to be expecting us. Then Brad told me that he’d mentioned that we needed a locking mailbox, which the one we had was not. (I don’t even think they were selling locking mailboxes in CA. I’m not sure, but we decided to just put up the one we’d brought for now and replace it later. I felt depressed about the whole thing.) THe actual process of installing the mailbox was more involved than we’d imagined. We had brought a 4×4 post and planned to borrow a post-hole digger from Bill and put it in. What Bill actually did was to drill a large hole with his tractor and augur, drop the post in, and then cement it in place. The cementing process was interesting — he dumped a bag of dry cement in the hole, put in the post, filled the hole with water, and used a long metal rod to help the water penetrate. We were grateful for the help and now have a mailbox in place, even if it isn’t the ultimate one that will be there.

We got back up to Willcox around 7 or so, showered, and headed to the railroad car restaurant where we’d eaten before. (I couldn’t take one more truck stop meal.) We had a nice dinner and were asleep before 9. Brad woke up at about 3 and couldn’t sleep anymore so we got an early start back home.

Fourteen hundred or so miles later, we are home.