Except for a few weeks several years ago when a friend needed a place to stay in Ottawa, I haven't had to share accommodations with anybody since a certain little brunette moved west more than a decade ago. Every day in this house I'm reminded of why I haven't had a room mate. The two girls living here are quite nice, but not without problems. One of them has complained frequently, though politely, about the noise made when people close the bathroom door. "It's very echo-y in here. It wakes me up at night" When the toilet is flushed it makes a racket like the toilet on an airliner, but she has never complained once about that, just the incredibly faint bump of a door closing. Diane, Beth, and I, have been taking great pains to close the door as s-l-o-w-l-y and as q-u-i-e-t-l-y as possible, to the point of ridiculous. We tip-toe around the place and whisper to each other even during the middle of the day when we're the only ones home. Yet on Sunday morning Nancy stopped on her way out to mention the noise yet again, and the 3 of us just sat in the living room, speechless, I can't imagine it being physically possible for the door to be closed any more quietly. When we got home from jumping that day and Nancy was out, Diane ran to the bathroom and repeatedly slammed the door as hard as she could. She came back up the hall with a great big grin on her face. "There! Take That!"
We share a bathroom with Paige, the other tenant She has more personal care products scattered about the bathroom than you will find in some drug stores. There isn't a square inch of level surface that doesn't have multiple bottles of multiple brands of makeup, shampoo, skin care products, Q-Tips, etc., stacked upon it. When I go in to shower in the morning the only place to put my shaving kit down is on the lid of the toilet. I'm sure she'd have stuff piled on that as well if she didn't have to lift it to pee.
And every single lock in the house is locked 24 hours a day. The yard is surrounded by a five foot tall chain link fence that also has a lock. Once you get through that one, the front door has a deadbolt and key in knob lock that are also always used. Nancy once locked the door behind her when she went out get something from her car, returning in less then 10 seconds. When I want to take the bike out of the garage, I unlock the deadbolt to the garage, then the key in knob lock, cross the garage, retract the barrel bolt locking the garage door closed, recross the garage to activate the door opener, wheel the bike outside, re-cross the garage to the switch for the opener, and once it's closed, it's back across the garage to throw the bolt on the door. Then I exit the garage back into the house, locking the deadbolt and key in knob lock behind me, grab my helmet and jacket, go to the front door, retract the deadbolt and unlock the key in knob lock, step through, lock the two of them behind me, unlock the gate ("How stupid is that? Does she think a crack head can't hop a fence? They practice it all the time being chased by Cops!" said Diane), and lock the gate behind me. Finally, I'm outside. At least I've found a way to defeat the lock on the gate. A slight push on the post moves it over the one quarter inch required to allow the bolt to clear and the gate to open, saving me having to screw around with that one. But if the crack heads figure that out, they'll probably be swarming around the house like zombies since they won't have to hop over the fence anymore.
Diane and I got up early today to climb Picacho Peak before she had to catch her flight. It normally takes 4 hours, we made the round trip in two hours and fifteen minutes. It's a saddle shaped mountain near Eloy that was used as a landmark by wagon trains coming west. It's rated as extremely difficult, with steel cables fastened to the rock in places so you can pull yourself up, and in some places so you don't fall off the sheer cliffs. We overtook a lot of people on the climb up and the climb down, but nobody passed us. Broken Neck? What broken neck? There has been a steady stream of people coming up to me since I arrived to offer sympathy over the accident, and to inquire about my recovery. All I can say is get the hell out of my way, I've got my life back, and I'm going to live it!
Paige lost her brand new Go Pro Black limited edition video camera exiting from the plane yesterday. Those things are worth 400 bucks. She hit her helmet on the top of the door and it tore off. We were on the load, and I happened to be wearing my Contour Plus 2 video camera, which incorporates GPS tracking. It gives you graphs on the side showing speed, altitude, distance covered, and time, and shows your actual course over the ground on a Google map. Her boyfriend and I plotted the exact point over the ground where she lost it, then used the track our 4-way made in freefall while being pushed by the wind to calculate the distance covered by the slower falling camera (2 minutes 30 seconds, she's not the first person to have one knocked off their head at 12,500 feet above ground), and came up with the likely landing area. Paige and her boyfriend were leaving to look for it when I had to take Diane to the airport. The camera was back at the house before I was. Like the bench that Remi clobbered the day before, the camera is just fine.
Beth will be returning on the weekend to join me for 3 days of 16 and 32-way sequential's with Mark Kirkby, and Gary Beyer, founding and now returned members of Arizona Airspeed, the team that has won more US National and world titles than other team in the history of the sport. I hope I'm not in over my head.
Diane returned to minus 37 degree temperatures in Winnipeg. We had to run the air conditioner in the car on the way into Phoenix, she's in for a bit of a shock at the other end. The house seems empty and echo-y without the girls around. Maybe I'll start the bike up inside the garage, that should fill the silence nicely. I'm sure Nancy won't mind.
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