The first four days

En route, American Airlines Flight 0054, 01 March

Naturally, I got a case of the runs just before GBS came to pick me up this morning. I have no idea what caused it, since I've only eaten once a day for the last two days, I've been so busy. I'm also seated almost halfway between the two heads on this plane, so making a dash for it is going to be hard to do.

What I couldn't find: a second pair of distance specs, my Shure earphones

What I already miss: my Bose noiseblockers

What's almost as good: The Altec-Lansing earphones I got with the iPod speaker system. They have an earpiece that fits over the outside of your ear and keeps the speaker positioned correctly. Not bad.

The plane has video sound but no music programme. Thank God for iPod.

What I did right: small tote bag that fits inside backpack with all the small items I will need on the plane itself. Saves rooting through the entire backpack for everything.

I feel awful. The wind was blowing everything hell bent for leather last night. Between that and the fear I wouldn't wake up to the alarm, I was up every hour from midnight to 4:00, then lay there until 4:30 and thought, the hell with it. I got up, had my shower, and was ready to go by the time GBS showed up. I don't think I forgot anything -- nothing will rot in the fridge, for instance, although a couple of plants might die. I thought about leaving a note for the construction workers to water the only two I want, but the rest of them are so dead I think it would make them laugh.

I have a power point on my seat! (Well, I mean AT this seat.)

Oh hell, they just announced the movie. I was afraid of this. They had two great movies last month but this one is called "The Martian Child." I think I"ll pass.

3 March

I never like the movies planes show, and if they do have one I want to see, they're only showing it going in the other direction from the way I am (usually if it will change before my return flight). Then they show 45 minutes or more of complete garbage before the movie actually starts, and then it starts with no fanfare. If you can sit through the BS then you see the start of the movie. If you opt out of the BS, you look up and the movie is already 15 minutes in. I saw an episode of "How I Met Your Mother" with so many of the bad words censored out that you could hardly follow the plot. Why bother? Anyway, I opted out of "The Martian Child" but it looked like it might have been interesting after all, so I'll probably rent it at some point. I wanted to see "Alvin and the Chipmunks" but the BS beforehand was so profoundly awful that I gave up and went to sleep.

The wheelchair pusher in Chicago was an nice kid from Poland. I had forgotten to get any $5 bills before I left so I only gave him $2 and felt bad about it. It had been a short turnaround between flights and he worked like a dog to get me there, even though we had a wheelchair queue in Customs for about ten minutes -- it's the first time I've seen more then two other wheelchairs at all, and there were about 15 of us backed up. Then the American security was far tighter than the English and they made us wait again while they found someone to inspect the wheelchair itself to make sure I hadn't stuffed it full of gelignite while no one was looking. But he got me to the gate with time to spare, bless him.

The trip from Chicago to LA was so uneventful I slept through most of it. I did do some comparisons between travelers in Manchester and Chicago, specifically and to wit: how many women are wearing jeans. Normally I don't travel in jeans but for some reason I did this time. The difference was striking. In Manchester, the only women wearing denims were wearing them boot cut and with stilletos, fashion-forward. There were only two women who wore them as I did and both of them had glasses and no makeup, as I did. In Chicago, I only saw one woman wearing what I would consider "slacks" -- women who weren't wearing jeans were wearing track suits. I'm sorry, after about three washings, track suits all look scummy.

The wheelchair pusher in LAX was from Ethiopia. Amazing man. He said he had a degree in Mechanical Engineering from a German university. I said, "And you're pushing wheelchairs??" He smiled and said that he had brought his whole family over and they needed to eat; he couldn't afford the classes required to take the exams that would qualify him to work here. But he was working towards it and it would happen someday. He thought America was great because you could work as many jobs as you wanted. I thought he was kidding till he said that in some countries you could only work 8 hours and that was it. I never met anyone who thought it was wonderful that you could work as many as four jobs. One thing that bothered me was that he said all his jobs were part-time. I asked if he got benefits like health insurance, and he shrugged, no. I said, "But you're a dad. You should have health insurance." He didn't want to say anything bad but I could tell it bothered him. At the end of the ride, I happily handed him $5 (I had change from buying a sandwich on the plane) and wished him well. Good luck, fella.

My reserved Hertz Ford Focus got upgraded to a Rav 4. There must have been a competition on since he pressured me a bit to upgrade and said, "But you have so much luggage!" Actually, I was traveling pretty light, for me: the giant Kiva backpack and only one suitcase. But I gave in and let him upgrade me. It's a great car, other than the fact that I have to drag my foot over the high sill -- it's just a bit too tall for me. But it's zippy and nimble and, like the Prius I had last time, has the feeling it could pivot on one back wheel. I'm a Hertz Gold #1 Express member, but when Amex made the reservation and then keyed in my number, the rate jumped, so they took it back out again. For that reason, I went up to the regular counter instead of going to the Express or #1 Club desk, and got served faster than I've ever been served when I took a car back and had to talk to the Customer Service people at the other desk. Hertz LAX boggles my mind. You can show up at midnight, which I've done twice, and stand around for the best part of an hour before anyone talks to you. Get there at 6:00 on Saturday night and you're whipped right through the line. AND the clerk took one look at my cane and volunteered to go get the car for me. Sure!

I brought my TomTom specifically to find the 105 freeway from the Hertz lot; I get lost every time. I switched to the USA map and waited for it to find a signal while I checked the mirrors and lights and miscellaneous switches. Seven minutes later it still didn't have a signal, so I thought it was broken. I had printed out directions from Hertz's kiosks as a lark, and ended up having to use those. I missed every turn and had to go back to it -- why doesn't LA invest in lighted street signs in the LAX vicinity!!? -- and as I was sitting at the signal prior to getting on the on ramp, suddenly my TomTom says, "Turn left." Well, hell, NOW you wake up, when I've found what I needed and don't need you any more. And at the 105 / 605 split, where the 105 ends, he did it again to me -- the 605 exits both go off to the right, then the two lanes going north break off and swing over to the left. He kept saying, "Bear right, and stay right." What he meant was, "Bear right, stay left but in the right-hand lane." Or something. I ended up making a tour of that neighborhood before finally finding an onramp north again because I got him so confused he stopped talking to me.

I got home in pretty good nick, John was there, and I basically dumped my stuff in the guest room and nearly had a heart attack when I turned around to face a life-size oil painting of Yours Truly. My mother had done it from a photo but I had never seen it before. I think it might qualify for MOBA as one eye is distinctly higher than the other, and my hair is kind of a muddy brick color. John got quite a laugh. Anyway, I talked to him for an hour or two, and then decided my head was going to fall off if I didn't go to bed immediately. I think it was only about 9:30 or 10:00. II didn't even shower or anything; just dropped into bed and was out like the proverbial light. What woke me up was Charlie. I'm in the guest room, which is normally the cat's room. Charlie's normal wake-up time is 3:00 AM. She was okay beating her toy mice around, but John had left a box under the window, and the third time she got up on that and started whanging the cord for the metal blinds, I opened the door and told her to go find Daddy. I didn't see her again. (I have to leave the door open for her if she's out, because her litter pan and water dish are in there.) Although I know she was on the bed with me at one point, she didn't sleep up against me like my two do, and I have to say I missed Muffin being up at my shoulder.

The house had a new furnace installed a year or so ago, and for some reason John feels the need to leave the central fan running all the time, day and night. There's no "low" speed, so the blast from the fan was in my face all night long. When I finally got conscious at 3:00, I went over and closed the vent to my room, and after that (and letting the cat out) I got some nice ZZZ's. [I have to say that this idiosyncrasy of his has managed one thing I never thought would happen in this house: I suffer from cold. Wherever I sit is in the blast from the vent in whatever room I'm in, and although the thermometer says 68 degrees F, the wind chill makes it closer to 60. Today he let me turn it off when he went to work but it was still after noon (and the thermometer read 71) until I felt comfortable. That's very strange; 68 is normally a perfect temperature for me. Could I be getting old?]

Sunday, John's "rent-a-wife" showed up. His friend Leslye is a paralegal and is being paid by our "family funds" to help him sort paperwork on the weekends. It's a hell of a drive for her, as she lives in Redlands, but I have to say that when she's in the house, she's working the entire time. She'll chat, but only if she's also doing something to earn her pay. We all went to breakfast at Mimi's, where I had one of their "buttermilk spice" muffins hot out of the oven (I was burned when I tried to pull it apart) and a Monterey omelette. Okay, I almost have my California omelette fix now, except that this one didn't have artichokes. I neeeed a Santa Cruz omelette: avocado, artichokes, jack cheese, garlic, onions, tomatoes, wrapped in about a dozen eggs, and sourdough toast on the side, ideally with Knott's boysenberry jam.

After brunch they did some shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I went to tour the new Whittwood Mall and find a drugstore so I could get some deodorant and hand cream. The Santa Anas have been making a slight but noticeable appearance; the temperatures are in the high 60's / low 70's but it's dry as bone, and my hands are turning to parchment. And of course the one thing I managed to forget was B.O. juice. The mall has been completely renovated, and by that I mean that the only building still recognizable to me was the old Broadway building on the near end. It became an Emporium (I think; I know they were related for a number of years) then went through a number of changes, including being abandoned for a few years.... anyway, it is now a Sears store, answering my question as to whether or not Sears still had any stores at all. The rest of the mall looks like it was completely torn down and rebuilt. The Sav-On drugstore I was looking for isn't there any more, so I ended up exiting the mall and driving around until I found a CVS a couple blocks away.

Got back home and sort of helped out desultorily. I went out to the garage and sorted through about 50% of the things for the garage sale, nailing down some books I wanted to keep, and pulling out a few things I thought other people might be interested in. I found an entire box of old Mac Plus software, and a few feet away, balancing a couple of boxes above it, was my old Mac Plus. I thought that was long gone. Sometime this week I will have John move some of the stuff so I can retrieve it and turn it into an aquarium. And maybe someone in AMUG would like the software. I'm sure the disks are dead but the manuals might be worth a laugh. But I also found one of my fairy-tale books from my childhood, and some really nice hardbacks, and one or two things I would like to have in England. Some stuff I would like to see on eBay if I were going to be here longer, but I guess we just don't have the time for it.

John and I went to dinner about 8;30 (after Leslye had gone home) and we ended up at the Black Angus near Mimi's, where we'd had breakfast. Our waiter was Nick, the most stereotypical young Hitler-youth American for miles. (Well he was brunette.) Clean-cut, stood up straight, said "You got it!" whenever he was asked for something, and when he said his name was Nick but we could call him anything, I had to bite my tongue on the response. He was obviously not ready for such cynicism. My pasta Alfredo was great, the red wine was wonderful, but John's mushroom-and-bleu filet mignon showed up without the cheese, and when we pointed it out to Asshole.... um, I mean Nick.... he just brought back a little container of bleu cheese crumbles. Not quite the same as having that bleu cheese slick melted onto the steak, but I guess it tasted okay. On our way out, I noticed a CVS drugstore right next door. I had thought the drugstore would be in the mall proper, not up against Whittier Boulevard, and missed it completely earlier in the day.

I left the door open to my room last night and slept much better. Charlie stayed with John the majority of the night, and the wind wasn't blowing in my face. John came in from visiting a friend about midnight and I never heard a thing. One thing about that fan, it blocks any noise. It really roars but I'm used to sleeping with a radio on and my central heating wheezing and banging all night long, so I sleep through it pretty well. One thing I did notice was something John had warned me about. The central fan on the furnace runs all the time when it's just moving air around, but when it needs to turn on the heat, it shuts off and way deep in the furnace there's a deep turbine hum that winds up and runs until the furnace actually ignites and is running, and then the central fan turns on again. Very odd.

Today I discovered that John is not a morning person. He snarled "Do you always ask this many questions?!" when I was trying to find the coffee fixings and decide whether to heat up the coffee from yesterday or make fresh and asking him if he wanted any so I would know how much to make. I said, "I'll take it that's a 'yes' on 'do you want coffee'..." and only got another snarl. 8-)

I have spent my day basically sorting through Mom's recipe collection. I haven't found the Christmas cookies I was hoping to find; years ago I asked her for the recipes and she admitted she may have thrown them out the last time she sorted through them. Talk about anal-retentive. This woman didn't just have the usual headers for recipes, like "side dishes," -- she was down to filing them BY VEGETABLE: "avocado", "mushroom", "tomato." Since at the end she couldn't remember which recipes she had and which she didn't, she duplicated a lot. I have found handwritten recipes right next to the magazine version of exactly the same thing. And the record is finding six copies of that classic green bean casserole with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup and French's French-Fried Onions. I also found the usual assortment of crazy-old-lady hoarding. Stashed in with the pile of unsorted, unfiled recipes were more address labels (she would send $5 to every organization who put something through the door; through all my visits I swear I've thrown out ten pounds of address labels) and books of stamps. And of course the hundreds of carefully-folded plastic grocery sacks. When my eyeballs couldn't take sorting recipes any more (type was a lot smaller in 1956) I would wander over and clear out another cupboard of its plastic bags, foam trays from packaged meat, plastic cups that originally held sour cream and yogurt, glass jars with no lid, lids without jars, and Tupperware that was so old it was greasy, although whether from just normal kitchen grease buildup or plastic disintegration was undetermined. The sad/funny thing is that I can hear her talking to me; her ghost hovers over my shoulder, as it did the last time I was here. I can hear her snap, "Why isn't that in the file with the rest of the tomato soup recipes?!" and when I leave off to do something else for a while, she complains about the mess I've left behind. I'm near tears a lot; in a way I'm grieving for her already. I think I mentioned this the last time I was here: the Navajos believe that when a person dies, what's good in them goes to heaven but all the bad stays around as an evil ghost, or chindi. I think Mom's chindi is the only thing left in her body now, because the rest of her is here in the house with me.

Naturally, as I have some time to do this whole blog thing, there's no wideband signal. Until John gets the house wired up with the splitter, we steal it from the neighbors, but it's never a strong signal and now appears to have disappeared entirely. My thing to do when it comes back tonight is to find the email from Allied Van Lines' International Office in Chicago, and talk to the rep who is in charge of my stuff. I don't know how much time they need but John would appreciate it if they could come collect a lot of the things I want sometime tomorrow morning, if not sooner. The love seat and Victorian regulator will be joining my things in storage in San Leandro. I was hoping to set all my stuff aside somewhere until we finished the job and then just have Allied make one big pickup, but I guess John would rather have them come and get it as we find it so that he has more room to sort through both his and Mom's stuff for the garage sales. I need to see how Alllied wants to handle it; John suggested that maybe they could store it all locally if we took it over there, and then they could crate it up and send it to San Leandro when it was all over. This chunk of it will be coming out of my pocket instead of Lockheed's, but the writing is on the wall for our contract in England and I expect to be back, one way or another, in five years or so. But we'll see. I've said that before and I'm still there.

John says that legally he can only hold two garage sales per year, so ideally he'll do one after I leave this time and hold off on the next one till my home leave in October. On the other hand, he says nobody really enforces that unless you start holding them every weekend. So I'll try to go through things like a crazy woman so he has enough to hold garage sales without doing too much sorting of Mom's stuff till I return.

Well, back to the recipes. I'm almost done. And I realized way too late that what I should have done was dump the entire collection into a box and mail it back, and have a recipe sorting party with my friends who cook. A lot of these recipes date from the 60's and 70's, and I even found a couple of mimeographed sheets from a class she took in Cleveland 2, Ohio, where they moved from in 1952. (The "2" was a postal zone, the forerunner of the zip code.) I saved one or two of those but the rest are in the trash. Too late. I'm keeping all the little Southern California Edison and Saxon cookbooks, because I collect those anyway, but I'm throwing out the Cooks Illustrateds because I have those already myself.

But I'll tell you, it makes me think -- again -- that I need to buy into an assisted living place sooner rather than later. My memory is already pretty bad and I still have 30 years to go, if my parents are any indicators. I can see all these hoarding tendencies in me, and that will only get worse.

Back to the sorting. Come on, Mom, your break is over.

4 March

Today has been a lazy day. I've kinda sorted stuff inside and out, and went to Marie Callendars for lunch. Mom always said the one by Whittier Hospital wasn't as good as the one by Presbyterian Hospital (is there something going on there, they're all across the street from emergency rooms?), and today she was right. Although I showed up just as the last of the lunch crowd was leaving, they still managed to (a) lose my order, (b) serve my Chinese Chicken salad without one ingredient (mandarin oranges), and when I asked about it, it turned out they were out of them but didn't think to inform the waitress. She didn't do a very good job of iced tea refilling, and then she undercharged me for the pie I ordered. When I brought that to her attention, she thanked me for my honesty and brought me a new bill, which had an OVERCHARGE for the pie which was on sale. I gave up and just beat feet, not realizing till later that I had based the tip on the entire bill, including the pie. I'll go back for lunch tomorrow and see if she treats me like a princess.

Right now I'm outside, borrowing the wi-fi and running down the Macbook battery. It's been super gorgeous weather with the promise of the same to the end of the week.

I spoke with Nor-Cal Moving today. They're the people in San Leandro who have my long-term storage goods. They can pick up anything from Whittier as they do regular runs to the LA area. The bad news is that their minimum charge is based on a minimum of 2000 pounds. I guess I'll be keeping Mom's hutch cupboard as well as the love seat and wall clock, since it won't cost me any more to send it up there! The per-month charge will be more, but it's only $4 per 100 pounds, not a deal breaker. I told the guy I'd have to think about it. His #1 guy will be here on Thursday but I said that was way too early to get 2000 pounds together. He said John could act as my agent in the event we left it till the last minute or later. At least he knows I'm here and that I will probably send some stuff pretty quick. I'm happy to hear that it sounds like they hire their own people, not some stiffs off a street corner somewhere.

My friend Lloyd will be coming to visit Sunday night to Tuesday night. Should be fun. I want to take her to Disneyland but I don't really have the stamina for that any more (and especially not for the prices they charge nowadays). Don't know what to do about that.

Anyway... back to the job!