September desert trip

We made it out to the desert and had a swell time. Despite having to switch gears because of extreme heat (it was 100° plus all weekend) - I had to rent a place rather than stay at our place, and we couldn’t do any of the outdoorsy things I wanted so I had to scramble for alternate plans - we enjoyed it.

The main focus of the trip was to attend the Night Sky Festival which I’d bought tickets to months ago. Unfortunately we missed most of it because we got there so late - we arrived Saturday afternoon and missed all the lectures, so all we got to do was look through telescopes at the observatory, which, while mildly interesting, probably wasn’t worth it. It was a lot of stumbling around in the dark to wait on long lines to see the same blurry image of Saturn or Jupiter over and over. Theo was exhausted and bored. Again, if we’d planned better and spent more time at it it might have been worth it, but I doubt I’d spring for it again. 

The reason we were late on Saturday and didn’t come in Friday night as was originally planned was we had to pick up this 1800s cowboy tub from am eBay seller in Rancho Cucamonga Saturday morning. I’ve wanted one of these since I saw one at the Rose Bowl some months ago - they’re super light (30 lbs) so can be easily stored and then dragged out to the middle of the desert, filled with water, and then you can enjoy a cool or warm bath out in the open, dump it out, and drag it back to storage. I figure it’s the only way to have a bathtub out there without worrying about it getting stolen or vandalized. So we picked that up in a Bass Pros parking lot and ferried it to our shipping container. 

Sunday we went for brunch at the Palms and had the serendipitous experience of meeting a woman who’s YouTube videos we’ve been following - she’s another neighbor, just north of us, and a) was the woman we saw walk by our place on our cameras on our wedding day, b) also has a contractor boyfriend we may be able to hire, and c) had all kinds of useful tips for us about power and water and heating, the most interesting being she recently bought a drill to dig a well and is looking to dig wells for friends. I got her number.

We had a blast teaching the kids to play pool at the Palms. Pool was a huge part of my misspent youth - I spent a couple of summers playing 9 ball with Chinese gangs at Tekk Billiards on Christopher St in NY when I was 15 & 16 - so the idea of getting the kids into it is very cool. Bobby was a natural. 

Then we went to an artist’s pop up mini golf course in which you could paint an abandoned house after - despite the extreme heat, it was a blast. I painted a Bowie portrait (the same one that’s on my phone case). 

Later we checked out a local bowling alley - old school and cheap - and as we drove out the following day, we finally visited a musician friend who lives out there and did what we want to do, rehab an old shack for living purposes. He showed us his whole set up for solar and water and sewer. While we can’t do all the things he did - he’s hooked up to city water and has septic - we got some good tips. 

We came back from the desert with a renewed sense of purpose and a surprising return to our original concept after weighing other options; I’m glad we’re of like minds about this stuff. At the moment I am considering a return to a wood burning stove for heating, and a traditional wooden outhouse rather than having the bathroom in the container. Now that we know that the place is not, in fact, rife with criminals trying to steal our stuff (while that element is for sure there and something to be wary of, five months of security cameras tells me pretty much nobody goes out there), I’m less worried about having a small break-in-able bathroom than I used to be. And the H is ok with an old school pit toilet if it’s not in a container with other things stored in it that could get contaminated. So, now we just have to get that going somehow! I feel like we could conceivably build it ourselves - it’s just a tiny shed - it’s the digging the pit I’m concerned about. Maybe we can recruit this new guy to do it for us. 

I’m on the hunt for a vintage parlor stove like the one my friend has used for the last couple of years to heat his place. I’m worried about fires and carbon monoxide poisoning - but the lady we met also heats her place with wood, and has had no issues. I also spent a long Connecticut winter in a house heated entirely by a single wood burning stove and was toasty all season and none of us died of carbon monoxide. So maybe I’m being overly cautious. Some detectors placed strategically is probably the way to go. 

The woman we met at the Palms said everyone comes out here thinking they can throw a cheap place together in weeks and just be done, but that it never works out like that; it always takes years, and that’s to be expected. Makes me feel a little better about what a roller coaster this place has been. I’m ok with a long-term project, especially if we can still use it in the meantime. 

We finally got some quality family time, which reminds me of why I wanted this place - without it, the H would literally work around the clock seven days a week. His insane schedule has always been a huge bone of contention for me, and it falls under the same category as managing his adhd - how much of this is just inevitable (he has to make money and in his industry this is the only way) and how much of it is his “fault” (allowing himself to be exploited, not being efficient, being addicted to hard work). It’s easy for me to sit here with my cush setup and judge others for their shitty work situations - and nearly everyone I know has issues with coworkers, bosses, company policies, etc etc - when I’ve been the boss since I was 26 and can no longer conceive of a time when my destiny was under someone else’s control. The fact is, people are really struggling out there, and he’s one of them. He’s basically working two full time jobs just to make a basic existence, running himself ragged so that when he is around he’s exhausted and stressed. But when I force him to take these trips - and he’s always apprehensive about not getting to work all weekend - you can see this whole other side to him. And I know he’s grateful (during my crunch time, I’m always glad I have a family to give me something else to focus on. I used to be annoyed by the distraction, but now I realize it’s important for my mental health). I’m aiming for one, maybe two trips out there next month, and one in November. Have not heard from our neighbor contractor so I’ll try him again this week. But he might be back by then. 

Our hotel meeting wasn’t bad but wasn’t great. I accomplished the goal of being assigned a new contact person, which I knew wouldn’t be an issue. But the extra charges will stay, and the $10,000 bill will be north of $20,000, in fact, since as I suspected, the initial bill I got was missing a bunch of stuff. I kind of knew it was too good to be true, but I’m still pretty gutted. Consensus among my hotel venue renting friends is that the industry is just terrible right now - hotels are scrambling to make up for lost revenue, and they don’t give a fuck. The GM even said most of the contracts they have now they would never agree to in this environment…which says to me when it’s time to renew in a couple of years, I could be in for a rude awakening. We pointed out the failures on their end - the many ceiling leaks, the downed systems, things that in the past would have earned me an apology and credits off my bill - and they were like, “yeah”. And…that was it. So I think at this point I should just count my blessings, raise my prices, and hope I can clear 1000+ people every year, because that’s what it’s going to take to make an even basic living from now on. 

Settling in

The last week has been pretty much me just sleeping. I forget how much the event takes out of me. Even if I feel “fine”, I find myself compelled to go back to bed after dropping the kids at school, sleep until eleven, still need a nap in the afternoon, and am still tired at night. This could also be just a) habit, b) being 50, or c) covid. It’s probably a mix of a and b, though.

I feel myself with a profound sense of satisfaction about how things went, still. After all that’s transpired in the last three years, it’s sort of hard to believe that we pulled this off. We came back, hardly missing a beat, and it felt like we’d never even been shut down. That was exactly the results I’d wanted but didn’t dare wish for. And I wasn’t left in the red. Huh.

Right now I’m straddling finishing up and planning for next year, plus planning our family life as we approach another holiday trifecta - what the kids want to be for Halloween (Bobby has become obsessed with Kermit the frog and wants to be him for Halloween, but sadly all available Kermit costumes are either for toddlers or adults), how to structure our Death Valley thanksgiving trip (mostly figuring out food, knowing as I do now that options are extremely limited in the area). And then Christmas break - can we afford a trip to Florida? I don’t know yet. 

Mainly, my thoughts are on the cabin. I figure we need to get it wired up if we’re going to be able to stay there at all this winter, so I feel some sense of urgency about that - winter temperatures at night are extreme, so we need to be able to plug in a space heater of sorts, and we can only do that with solar power. The H told me he can’t install panels himself, so I’m not sure where to go from here. I texted our contractor neighbor yesterday just checking in to see when he’d be back in town - originally the plan was November or December - but he hasn’t written back yet. What if we never hear from him again?? We’d be so screwed. I’m so desperate to get this place basically livable, but there’s so much that has to happen before that - first, power, then a water system of some kind so we can have a toilet and shower, then insulation, walls, flooring, windows, a porch. If our contractor comes back and has time for us it can happen fairly quickly at the end of this year or beginning of next…if not, well, it could be a long time coming. But regardless of next weekend’s high temps, we’re headed out there on Saturday, and will go check out a friend’s solar set up, and go to the astronomy festival, and have brunch at The Palms, and everything will be dandy. I ordered myself a custom “Rancho Saudade” key chain for keys to the place since that’s the only thing I personally can make happen right now; it gives me some small (silly) feeling of control. 

Soon it’ll be time to apply for kids’ schools again to earn points to hopefully make it into Eagle Rock jr high. Now that I understand the system I know what to do - apply for the most impossible schools and get points for not making it in. I do wish I had started this earlier - I think at this late stage Bobby doesn’t have a big chance of making it into their gifted program; but it’s not impossible, either. Either way he can still attend the school with an intradistrict permit. So many kids have vanished from LAUSD that it’s possible he won’t have as much competition to get in when he applies for real next year. 

For now both kids appear to be doing well at school - Theo’s teacher is a lot more intense than his was last year; I have to sign off on his 30 minute reading and homework each night, and his class work every week. I’m interested to see how the parent teacher conference goes in November. 

We came home last night from a rare date night to find Bobby sitting up with the baby sitter making origami weapons at 1:30 AM. This child needs no sleep. It’s bizarre. I mean I was a night owl at his age but I doubt at 10 I could have stayed up that late and not even be tired. Another way he and Theo are so different. Bobby eats like a bird, never sleeps, can zone out on something for hours; Theo needs his sleep, eats like a champ, and is easily bored. You wonder how much of this is natural and how much is them playing off of each other as siblings. 

Hopefully I will start to feel more normal in the coming weeks - I am determined to stop sleeping all day come Monday, and we finally have the two times delayed hotel meeting on Thursday which means I can pay my hotel bill and be done with that, which means I can put this event to bed finally. Then it’s time to plan next year. Oy. 

Done and done

My event has been over for nearly a week now and I’m still not quite able to sift through the FB posts and tags…it’s so much these days as everyone feels obligated to write long thank you posts after every event…but the TL/DR version is, the event went on, it was great, and was everything I had hoped for. 

While I went in expecting a bit of a mess, it actually wasn’t - for the most part, the competitors were on their game; nobody got injured; the contests were not a mess of old sign ups from 2020 - pretty much everyone who signed up did actually compete; there were a few flight delays but everyone made it in time; nobody canceled due to covid; vaccine requirements became a non-issue as we looked the other way on boosters and no unvaccinated people showed up demanding entrance; maybe 10% of people wore masks, almost no one consistently, and yet here we are the Friday after and not one of the people in my circles who hadn’t caught it yet have tested positive, and only one guy mentioned he did on FB and he didn’t even say he’d been at the event. How is this possible? I’m still holding my breath a bit for any positives coming in over the weekend…but at this point, if you’re first having symptoms a full week after the event, odds are you caught it somewhere else during the week. I think I was correct in that a large percentage of people at the event had decent immunity from recent infections or boosters, so the odds of covid circling enough to cause a massive outbreak were slim to none. I’m just glad my close friends, all of whom are over 50, so far are negative. I would feel really guilty if any of them got very sick since they were there to support me personally. But they also were the more vigilant mask wearers, so there you go. 

The event had exactly the joyous reunion feel I had wanted for last year and never got. I doubt we’ll be able to replicate the positive feelings and joy we had this year, since (hopefully) we won’t have another time when we’ve been shut down for years again anytime soon. I really have no complaints on how things went. On our end, smooth as silk.

On the hotel’s end, not so much. I absolutely hated our combative, defensive new contact person, as did all of my staff, and am going to ask for her to be removed from our account if I can ever get her superior to have a chat with me about that and all the extra charges they’re threatening this year. The contact person stressed me out so bad that by Saturday morning I made the decision that for my mental health I need to just not talk to her anymore about anything. There were multiple pipe leaks from the ceiling throughout the weekend - a massive one the day we were due to arrive right where our merchandise table was supposed to go, one in our storage room thankfully not on any of our stuff, and one collected in garbage cans outside our vendor room for the entire weekend. I get the feeling the hotel itself is really falling apart, which worries me. The hotel’s computer system was down all day Friday so no one could check into their rooms, the bars’ credit card systems were down so no one could buy a drink (and these bars are one of the extra charges I’m being threatened with), they shut down the bathroom for cleaning right in the middle of one of our main dances for an hour one night, they turned off the AC to fix a leak early in the morning and then never turned it back on, etc etc. It’s funny how we as this tiny operation can come back after two years with nary a hitch and yet this giant corporation has so many hiccups. All of this will be discussed when this meeting ever happens. 

This week has been about recovering and paying people - despite being surprised with a sound and flooring bill that was nearly double what I was originally quoted, which was a rude awakening Monday night - it actually looks like I might just be ok financially. I don’t know for sure yet - the hotel bill is a massive wild card. But I heard from the California grant today, asking for some more paperwork from me; it’s the first communication I’ve had since they told me I was ineligible back in April or whenever that was. I feel like that grant could be imminent, finally. If that happens and the hotel bill isn’t more than $20,000 I could be ok. I just returned my EIDL loan finally - and much to my horror discovered I owe an additional $12,000 in interest. So it cost me $12,000 to have that loan sit there. Sigh. I wish I’d just returned it when I got the big federal grant, but I had no way of predicting all this back then. Oh well, lesson learned. That’ll set me back a bit but it’s not catastrophic. 

Having the boys at the event was actually somewhat enjoyable - the H had them watch the more entertaining contests, and I sincerely felt like they were interested in all this. They’re still humming some of the songs. A highlight for me was sitting with Bobby on stage and talking about the music and just enjoying the moment. It’s funny to think of these kids finally getting to see what I do for a living and really get it; that all this time during the shut down, this is what I’ve been talking about. It’s funny to see myself through their eyes. I don’t know what, if any, role this event will have in their lives going forward. But it’s good to know from now on they can be there with us and at least get a taste of the thing I’ve devoted my life to.