Category: Diary (Page 21 of 38)

Today we finalised plans to visit Seattle in the middle of July. We’ll see our good friends Walt and Sherri, and catch the opening night of the Classic Yes 2002 tour at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.

While L was online booking the National airline tickets, I was on Ticketmaster.com ordering the Yes/Paramount Theatre ones. As you may have read, our last adventure with Ticketmaster wasn’t good (the tickets never arrived in the mail; the customer service people said show up anyway with the email confirmation; then at the venue they said we’re not in their records.)

This time I selected the ticketfast(tm) option. A .PDF was emailed to me, and I printed them out on the inkjet. I now have the actual, legal tickets sitting on my desk. Very cool… no waiting. The Internet rocks!

The planets were simply beautiful in the early evening sky tonight. At 8:00pm I suggested to L that she come out and take a look. Jupiter was highest, then a little triangle cluster of Mars, Saturn, and Venus, with Mercury somewhat closer to the horizon. Aparently the triangle gets even closer tomorrow night, but who knows? It might be cloudy.

Karma came out and watched with us. The neighbourhood went on with whatever it does at that time of night, but I was in a little bubble of astro-joy.

Here’s a phrase that came to my mind today (I believe Derek sent me a reference to the band Slipknot, saying that that he didn’t believe it could be a serious group. They are.)

“There is no satire so outrageous that someone somewhere won’t think it a seriously good idea.”

I don’t think this is an original thought, because I rarely have those, but I couldn’t find an Internet reference attributing anything like it to anyone else.

So there’s the challenge for the month.

The wind picked up late last night and hasn’t stopped all day. Our three trees still seem rooted, although the one outside my office window looks like it needs to be re-staked – again.

Unlike most cities, where wind is good because it clears the air of all the smog, in Vegas the wind picks up the dust and hurls it into the air, making the sky go beige. I swept outside our front door this weekend, and now it’s coated with red dust again.

When I went out to check the mail, I noticed all the mountains had disappeared entirely. The sky was grey above my head, and pinky-beige down near the horizon, which had kind of moved closer, as if the earth’s curvature had increased.

I got a buzz out of pretending that I was walking around on the surface of a terraformed Martian landscape – which would probably look very similar.

(April 16 Update: Turns out this was a record wind storm, causing much disruption down in the valley.)

Yesterday we had a Home Depot experience, because the backflow vacuum preventer valve thingy was leaking. Not good. When Fernando the Plumber was here, he described the steps needed to fix the leak, and it sounded like something I could do.

Turned out that in addition to a length of PVC pipe, PCV cement, couplings, and a replacement brass shutoff valve, we also needed a 12″ crescent wrench.

The job itself was reasonably straightforward, although I did need to shut of the water to the house and remove more of the brass fitting (i.e. all of it) than I wanted to in order to unscrew the faulty part, which was stuck so tight that if I had forced it it would have broken the PVC pipe.

This morning I finished the job by wrapping the backflow valve pipes in insulation material, taping it all down with Duct Tape, and put the fake rock back over them.

Then we drove out to Summerlin to visit the Bagel Cafe to restock on that most vital of foods, but we were too late, only odd unattractive flavors left in the available selection. A six-pack of rye ones will have to do.

A quick stop at Trader Joe’s for dried apricots, slivered almonds and ginger beer, followed by another quick stop at an unfinished furniture place recommended by E. It turns out they have the same brand of shelves that we previously ordered online, and although the prices are about the same, it works out more cost efficient to get them here locally. Hooray! Although we love the internet commerce wave, we do try and support our local vendors – when they can actually vend the stuff we want.

We dropped in to Stan and Jeanne’s to return a casserole dish and fix a computer file problem, and I fell asleep in the afternoon sun  for a couple of hours. Very restful, in a kind of heavy, Sunday afternoon stupourish kind of way.

Mum rang up tonight and confirmed what I had suspected after a terse email from Dad earlier in the day: my grandmother died this afternoon.

Grandma V had been living in a managed care facility for the last couple of years, on the whole experiencing a good quality of life, with occasional bouts of depression, confusion and mischief, from what Mum has related to me from time to time.

Mum said that she’d been doing poorly for several weeks – among other things, she’d forgotten all her nouns, but could use adjectives fine! Just last week she started eating again and got her nouns back, and reached the notable age of 94 years.

She had a heart attack last night, stablised for a bit, but died this afternoon in her sleep at about 3:00pm NZ time, of a pulmonary endema or some related complication.

Some of the family were in town anyway for a get-together to celebrate her 94th birthday, so my Aunt Wendy, Mum, and my sister Vivienne were able to be there with her.

Now is the point at which I am supposed to write something profound and touching, drawing on my memories of her, but frankly, I don’t think I’m going to be able succeed. Let’s see… 

She taught me (and Walter) piano for 4 or 5 years, and I have this vague feeling I was a difficult pupil, which I kind of regret now. I know she heard some of the music Walter and I have produced in recent years, and I hope she knew she could take some credit in building up a foundation of technique that we both take for granted now.

The last time I saw her was just before L and I left for the States and we were helping her out with hearing aid batteries, and seeing her off at the airport as she flew down to Christchurch to visit her brother Kelvin. I said my goodbyes to her then, I think I knew I wouldn’t see her again.

Today our new kitchen sink was installed by a plumber called Fernando, a very pleasant guy. The standard default sink that came with the house had a number of agravating things about it – including a faucet thingy that kept loosening up after a day no matter how much you tightened it. So, we gave our house a present for its first birthday.

We went to see “Resident Evil” this afternoon. OK, it’s a silly movie, but we kind of liked it. We chose a movie theatre down near the airport because Derek’s girlfriend Teresa was arriving on a flight later in the evening.

Did the movie suck? Not if you’re looking for a fairly mindless and plotless action flick. With Zombies. If that’s not really your kind of thing, then I don’t recommend it.

When we got out of the theatre it was dark outside, and we had a couple of hours before Teresa’s flight got in – it had been delayed, which we knew about already.

So, off to dinner at a nearby PF Chang’s China Bistro, located somewhere on Paradise Rd. Now, Paradise Rd is the road that you turn on to from Tropicana Blvd when heading for the airport – a route that we have taken on more than one occasion! Now, I knew that PF Changs wasn’t on that segment of Paradise Rd, so therefore, it must be in the other direction. So, blissfully driving East on Tropicana, it was with great gusto I turned right on to Paradise Rd, only to remeber somewhat late that Paradise Rd is One Way. In the Other Direction.

Now, you have to understand that the main route to the airport tends to be quite busy at the best of times, so doing this at about 8 o’clock in the evening probably wasn’t the best idea. Luckily the other drivers on the road were very nice about it and let me know I was going the wrong way by leaning on their horns.

There are many things in life scarier than driving the wrong way down a one-way street, but I don’t want to experience them any time soon. Obviously, throwing the car into reverse wasn’t going to annoy anyone behind me until we got back to the corner of Tropicana, and when we did, luckily traffic was very light and we didn’t hit anyone, and we were able to keep going along Tropicana, heading for the ‘Strip (Las Vegas Blvd).

So we got to the restaurant in a kind of roundabout way instead of the non-existent direct route.

PF Changs (http://www.pfchangs.com) are a chain of chinese restaurants that appear to be more ambitious and upmarket than your typical neighbourhood chinese takeout, in both decor and menu. There was a 30 minute wait before we could be seated but we spent the delay outside in the cool night air, clutching the buzzer/pager they gave us and perusing the menu. All the usual dishes are there, plus some additional ones. The dishes we ordered were subtley different in taste and presentation from what I expected from a chinese restaurant. I’d go there again. We ate briskly so as to be out in time to drive to the airport and pick up Teresa.

Her plane arrived promptly and we drove home, uneventfully thank goodness.

Today was Picking Up Derek day.

After work we drove to AAA to finalise a change in an insurance policy – we’re changing companies thanks to a recommendation from our AAA account rep, will save a little money. The office is located on the corner of Rampart and Lake Mead, so that’s right around the corner from Stan and Jeannes. Our Bank is there too, where we’ve had an account basically since Lisa moved to New Zealand. Every time I see it I have a chuckle about how things work out. Now it’s practically our local branch…

We introduced ourselves to a place called “Smoothie King”, located nearby, because we had some time to kill and it was either that or walk across the road to Jitters for coffee. For various reasons, one of which is because we hadn’t ever tried a smoothie before, we checked out the ‘King.

They seemed to focus on “meal replacement” and “carb content” more than your local refreshment venue, but the various flavours were interesting: Kind of like Pineapple Peach Mango Banana Grapefruit, and that would be only one option. Thankfully there was one combination which featured mainly coffee so we chose that one. Verdict: Pretty good – and filling. We did not feel as though we’d missed lunch after that.

We stopped off at Stan and Jeannes and dropped off the cassette tapes we’d made of some of their albums, and then drove downtown to visit the Record Exchange shops to see if they wanted the LPs. They didn’t, and after dropping them at the thrift shop we still had a lot of time to kill, so we checked out comic stores, and The Guitar Center. These stores are all very close by the airport, which is convenient.

Derek’s flight was due at around 9:50pm so at around 8 we drove to Leo’s Deli for a bite to eat. But problem: The deli closed at 7. What were to do? Conveniently for us, Leo’s Deli is located in a block of shops that includes two other restaurant/takeout joints, one of which looked interesting: A Thai place.

Nothing like Tom Yum soup and cold beef salad for getting the tastebuds all excited. And Thai Iced coffee.

After some chasing around at the airport, we found Derek, who seemed tired but in good spirits, and took him home.

This evening I went out the back and checked out the stars. Orion was hovering in the South-West sky, with Jupiter and Saturn above. The Moon was still a crescent, floating between Saturn and Mars, with Venus way down on the horizon, about to dip behind the mountains.

Somewhere out there above the Western horizon in the constellation Aries is Comet Ikeya-Zhang which I am reliably informed has now achieved naked-eye brightness. Unfortunately I could not see it. Admittedly the twilight glow was making everything except Venus hard to pick out, and experts say the comet will brighten still more in the coming weeks.

I’ll keep you posted.