Hot, Bike, House

It’s hot!  It’s early this year.  Ice break on the Rillito (what the locals call breaking 100 degrees) will be tomorrow.  It’s not so bad in the house, it stays cool without air conditioning pretty much until the sun hits the west side of the house.  The RV a/c is struggling to keep up.  We’re both sitting in the bedroom because the sun is on the front of the bus and it’s a smaller room with its own a/c. 

Thursday we rode the bikes up the Santa Cruz River trail.  This is the ongoing Caterpillar regional headquarters work.  This area is just huge.  I really want to know why they need this much space.

That’s the building on the right side.  They are welding steel beams together, that has to be really uncomfortable.

When we got to Grant, there was a trail closed sign.  So we crossed over to the other side and eventually saw this.  On the other side of the west trail there is another gulch, or wash, or something.  This guy would back down into the wash, and would then bring forth dirt, which is being deposited in the Santa Cruz River.  One wonders why.

There is also this in the same area.  Maybe next year we will know what is being done here.

We have a dining table!  No more standing up for lunch.  The chairs have been in storage for ten years, but the cushion material does not appear to have deteriorated.  That giant hunk of wood on the right is a mahogany server that I bought while living in North Carolina.  Its current purpose is to take up space on that wall, and to house the pre-WWII Noritake china I kept.

This was very important.  The mountain bikes will not be going to Seattle, there’s really no where to ride them and they’re a pain to deal with in the RV park.  They’re off their tires, and the truck can get by them, and we can close the garage door.  For awhile we’d been talking about getting one of those canopies that goes up in the back, it’s easier to get the bikes in and out with the increased height.  Good thing we did not, we have about two inches clearance under the garage door.

This is bad.  This is really bad.  See the very cute critter sitting on the rock lower right?  Round tailed ground squirrel.  They’re colony animals, they live in burrows which they dig.  For some reason I did not expect to see them in a neighborhood when there is so much open desert around them.  We’ll be filling any holes we find in the ground in the yard.  This is our neighbor’s yard.

The next furniture delivery is May 12 – there will be an end table for the living room.  After that we need one dresser and then we are done.  That will probably have to wait until fall.  I was out on Wayfair and o.co looking at dressers that were not inexpensive.  You must assemble them.  I’m not talking attaching the legs, no – they send you boxes of little parts.  You must assemble drawers and attach the drawer rails and the whole nine yards.  I can get that much aggravation from Ikea for much less money.  I will say that the piece we bought to house the photo albums was just a bear.  The cross pieces are supported by little dowels that really could be 50% longer.  We’d move on to the next vertical support, only to find the wretched thing was disassembling itself where we had just finished.  It required a hammer and some cursing, but we eventually prevailed.

Tomorrow we are putting up bird block to keep the doves from sitting on a cross member that spans the joists on roof of the outdoor living area.  They sit up there and poop.  It’s amazing how many trips to Lowes home ownership entails.  It’s been ten years!  When did a three way light bulb become a $5 item?  I’m shocked!