Settling In

It's taking a little time to get settled into life in Phoenix. The place is much like LA in terms of traffic, attitudes, and hungry, monster-like, engulfing of surrounding communities into one large rambling mega-city. It's hard to tell where one ends and another begins, but one thing becomes certain, the closer you get to Phoenix, proper, the more congested things get.

Cameron scored a part-time job doing small engine/appliance repair in an area that, as far as the map was concerned, was a nice 15 minute ride from home. Well... in the afternoon/evening-say around the hours of between 3 and 5 o'clock-it's actually closer to an hour from home. I experienced it first-hand yesterday when I paid him a visit to deliver a stool I found for him to sit on while he works. The business he's at is in a shopping center area so, in addition to the regular rush-hour traffic, there's the shopping traffic, as well. Luckily, I chatted it up with a guy at the pizza place next door and found out a way around the brunt of the snarl of traffic. It saved us about a half hour of travel time.

My job hunting results have not been so fruitful. Many, many applications/resumes have been put out there, but not so much interest. There have been a couple of phone interviews that put me on a waiting list until the next round of hiring occurs, though I have no idea when that will be-don't call us, we'll call you. To make it more difficult, most of the internet postings request no phone calls. OK...how am I supposed to follow-up? It's frustrating, but there are 2 job fairs next week, one at the school Cameron is attending, the other through Career Builder (one of the major employment listing services used in the area). Ah, a chance for some face time!

The high temperatures were a hard slam to the body for the first week. Going from the 80's of Albuquerque to the 105+ of Phoenix made it difficult to get motivated to do much. The last few days have cooled off a little-99 to 101-so it hasn't been quite so intense. The evenings are cooling down, now, too. Thank goodness for air conditioning!

The apartment complex we're in is huge! I don't remember how many building or units, but each building is 3 stories high, we're on the second floor. There have been quite a few things that need fixing and the maintenance guys are fantastic. Out of curiosity I asked one of them how old the complex is and they said it's 30 years old. No wonder there's so much to repair. The management is systematically refurbishing the place and bringing it up to current code. Our place has a great floor plan, but there are structural things about it that make me wonder if I'll wind up in the downstairs apartment one of these days. Small sags in the floor, here and there, and the amazing ability of little 12-pound Tuesday, running across the the livingroom floor, making the whole place shake, definitely makes one wonder. So...I spoke with one of the guys that is doing the refurbishing project and when I told him about the floors he strongly recommended that I inform the maintenance person. He said it's amazing what people have been living with and not reporting and the only way to get it fixed is to notify management. Very true, luckily, the woman in charge of maintenance is very understanding and offers immediate solutions. This conversation ocurred after office hours so I'll talk with her on Monday. It'll be interesting to see what transpires as a result.

Speaking of Tuesday, she's still having a hard time with taking walks around this place. First, there's the stairs. Her poor little legs can handle about 2, maybe 3, trips up and down and she's done. If I take her out more than 3 times, I can plan on carrying her up the stairs to come home. The other big problem is that there is no size limit on the dogs that live here. She's so afraid of anything much bigger than she is that if she even sees a large dog in the distance, she does an about-face and makes a bee-line in the opposite direction. That makes for anxious walks and many delays in "taking care of business". There's, also, lots of people around here so there's a lot of distractions and sudden noises to add to the situation. I'm sure she'll eventually get used to it, though.

We haven't taken any motorcycle trips yet-too hot for me. I'll go out one of these days and take a few pictures of the complex so you can see what it's like. They've done a wonderful job on the outside of it, I thought is was a pretty new development when we first got here. From our bedroom, looking out the big sliding door, it looks like we're in a treehouse. There's a large eucalyptus tree outside and we're at the midpoint of the branches. It gives a nice shady feel to the place. I put the hummingbird feeder up, but so far haven't had any guests. Perhaps I should put up a "free food" sign! I'm going to pass on the regular feeder while we're here. It would be pandemonium on the balcony with doves and pigeons trying to eat and the cats jumping up on the wall to get at them. Not a good situation!

Well, that's about it for now. We're continuing to do this one step at a time, so we'll see what the coming week has to offer.