Sunbaked. That’s my thoughts on the front office management type people anyway. Hey man I get it, one of the reasons I moved here was to kick back & chill a little bit. But then I didn’t make a whole bunch of promises and then not live up to them. Suffice to say it took us 3 days, including our first day here, and multiple reminders from both of us to get a new lock put on our front door.
And you know what? STILL only one of the 2 keys he handed us works.
But whatever, at least one does and we’re pretty much together all the time right now anyway. There are 3 Home Depots in a 10 mile radius, I’ll go cut a new key later.
So instead of freaking out about the key thing we decided to freak out about the moving truck. But that was only after we realized that even central air will just not cut it when you’ve got a 40 yard walk from the back of the truck, over hot sand/rocks and up 16 steps to your back door with all your worldly possessions having to come in that way.
Our first order of business was to drop off the trailer so I waited and typed up most of the proceeding story while Matt was gone doing that. You know, because someone had to be here to guard all our crap since we couldn’t lock the door. He got back & at about we headed out to unpack.
We had both turned the color of a beet, drank about 12 gallons of water each and proceeded to overheat by oh about . And that was after multiple breaks. We called it for the afternoon, decided to start unpacking some stuff and also decided we should set up the sofa and the other bed just in case we couldn’t get to Ikea until the following day for our king bed.
Times & dates are a bit fuzzy now but I’m pretty sure the Dish Network guy showed up a half hour early and got out before Matt went to return the trailer and Matt got in touch with the cable company to find that they had shown up a day early to install our internet connection. They rescheduled for Sunday.
We headed back out to the truck about 8:00 that night after the sun went down and managed to unload a bit more. Beat and crispy we fell into our bed (a real one at least) at about . We decided shifts of then would likely get the truck empty by the evening of the 4th. With the truck due back on the 5th we kind of didn’t really have a choice anyway.
The next day we did our morning shift then headed out to Ikea, set to be back before the internet install, and acquired our splurge purchase, something we’d been saving up for since deciding to move -- the king sized bed.
If you know Ikea then you know everything is flat packed in boxes ready to be assembled at home. Well one of the boxes for the bed weighed 163 pounds. It said so right on the box. Picture that, in heat, up those stairs between the two of us already run ragged. I laughed at the thought & Matt determined he’d open the box and bring it up piecemeal.
But that was before whisperings of dust storms, monsoons, haboobs. We flick over to the local weather channel and see the enormous cloud coming right for us and both get that shot of ‘like HELL I’m sleeping in a double when we have a king in the truck!’ adrenaline and by some miracle become super heroes to carry all parts of the bed up the stairs. Then we get to the mattress and feel the 40mph gusts, find out they could be up to 70 and decide we don’t want to sail away.
Defeated for the evening we close up the truck with our new mattress inside and Matt starts putting the frame together while I start unpacking.
Now let me tell you a little bit about this dust storm they call a haboob. First of all, the name makes me giggle. Secondly, the weatherman on TV was calling it epic. Finally, apparently after all was said and done the thing was a mile high and even native Phoenicians were having a hard time recalling ever having seen something so massive. And we were here to witness it. Of course we were. I keep warning everyone here to expect the 1000 year snow storm this winter. You’re welcome Phoenix
It came right over our complex. We were sitting with bated breath. We watched the lightning in the distance and I even snapped pictures of the cloud. Then it got here and we were like ‘that’s it?’. We never even had a flicker on our satellite dish, never lost power and the thing just looked like a thick fog outside.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have wanted to be walking or driving in the thing and I actually could taste the dust that crept in through teeny crevices, but overall it was nothing compared to a nor’easter that dumps 24” of snow in mere hours. At least the dust goes away after 20 minutes and other than a car wash you don’t have to really do anything about it.
The next day we finished all the truck unloading, we dropped the thing on the 5th right on the dot of on time and proceeded to begin unpacking.
Then we pulled out the luggage and packed up again because on Friday night we were heading up to Apache Lake
5 comments:
I like to say that people here in NM have suffered heat stroke too many times. They can't drive the speed limit. Which makes absolutely no sense. The roads are almost never wet, snowy or anything else. Is it hard to drive on dry pavement? Customer service (like cashiers) are slower than frozen molasses. 15 seconds to get a pack of toilet paper over the scanner is ridunculous. I like living here, but some people should have spent more time in the shade.
hehe... haboob. I thought you made it up.
Awesome, and now you are Phoenicians!
Love, Mum
HAHA! The gods sent you a haboob as a welcome present to Phoenix! Do you know in the six years I lived there, we never had one of those? Plenty of monsoons, but no haboob. I'm telling you, special present from the gods. :)
Not sure what it is about rental management, they always make promises but often don’t follow through on them. Maybe they get that way after dealing with renters that are always complaining about little things like a leaking roof, or a stopped up drain or termites eating through the woodwork. And they always promise you a set of keys ... A SET, meaning more than one but usually if you receive more than one key only 1 will actually open the lock. What’s up with that ? In our rental days we always ended up getting a couple of keys made ourselves as after waiting weeks for management to come through on the promised keys we’d finally just give up ... which I think is their plan in the first place.
Perhaps the haboob was an omen of sweeping changes, a clean slate, a new start. :)
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