We get up and take a shower. Uh-oh – the carpet is wet. Surely all this dampness wasn’t just run-off? No, the underlay is soaking. Um… there’s a leak in the shower drain somwhere?

After an urgent call is placed to the builder customer care number, we discover another problem. The front bedroom is also suffering from a very wet carpet. This was definitely not apparent the last time we were here for our walkthrough. Looking closely at the baseboard we could see extensive water damage, suggesting a slow leak of perhaps a week’s duration. The damage goes out the door and continues into the hallway.

There is a very real possibility that the Eagle Sentry contractors caused some accidental damage while they installed the network wiring in the walls. I unscrew one of the jack plates and could clearly see a steady drip coming from somewhere above – about one drip per second. Arghh. This could get very messy. Last thing we need is two different parties accusing each other of causing the problem, while our problem remains unfixed.

At this point, we get a phone call from Heidi at the plumbing subcontractors, saying that they’ve been contacted by the builders, and that someone could be with us tomorrow, and could we avoid using the shower until then?

I explain that we have encountered additional problems since talking to the builder customer care people, and at that point Heidi says that she’ll change the appointment so that someone can get here today.

Ruben the plumber arrives. He finds the problem with the shower – it’s a missing gasket, apparently – but he purses lips at the front bedroom. “This is bad”, he mutters. “You really needed us”. He takes out his drywall saw and cuts a whole in the wall a certain distance above the jack plate. The hole is right at a junction in the water pipe – and it’s leaking all right. Lisa and I sigh in relief – this is not caused by the wiring installation.

Ruben places a call in to their “water extraction” subcontractors, to arrange for some blowers to be set up to, well, extract the water. In other words, They blow a lot of air around to evaporate the water and dry the carpet. 

Brett the builder’s Development Manager shows up. Here’s the deal: They’ll replace the entire affected area of carpet, no trouble. Item of interest #1: Our particular carpet pattern isn’t in stock and won’t be milled until April 15. So what they will do is after the carpet is dry, they’ll replace the underlay, tack down the existing carpet – so we can move in as if normal – and then, when replacement carpet is available, they’ll move all our furniture out, and replace the carpet. Item of interest #2: Because the carpet is being re-milled, the “dye-out” will be different, and therefore, in order to make the carpet match, they will replace the carpet in all four bedrooms, the hall, and the living room. (The three bedrooms are a contiguous lay of carpet, as is the master bedroom and living room, y’see.)

Over my #$%^& dead body, I say. We’ll sign anything release you like, we don’t care if the color doesn’t match. You’ve laid the carpet three times already in this house, it’s PERFECT, we like the color, you’re not changing it in rooms that don’t need it. 

We have to work next week, explains Lisa. These rooms are our home offices, we have to be set up and working. Just replace the carpet in the front room and hallway, and the master bedroom suite. Leave our offices and living room alone. 

Brett explains that he only wants us to be happy, so I think he’ll go along with this plan. We’ll see if the carpet is different in color. It can’t be too much different, otherwise why the heck do people bother going to Dupont to see samples?

My knee was a bit stiff this morning.

After we packed the car with importancy items (like vacuum cleaner, cleaning utensils, bedding, laptops, telephones, important papers and a change of clothes) I sat out in the warm sun with an empty house behind me and waited for our landlords to show up so that we could give them the keys and get on the road. They finally showed up, inspected the house briefly, and we left them there, stopping at Starbucks for a breakfast of coffee and croissant, before getting on the freeway at around 9:15am, heading out across the Richmond Bridge, down 580, through the Altamont Pass and out of the Bay Area.

We drive for about three hours, and have Lunch at Red Robin somewhere off SH5 near Coalinga and Fresno. 

Lisa drives for a bit – my knee is really beginning to hurt. We take turns every few hours.

A Joshua Tree in 1994

Through the Mojave desert, just past Edwards Air Force Base, I had to ask Lisa to stop the car and let me take a picture, on the exact same spot that I took a picture on my first trip to the States in 1994, when we drove to San Francisco, going the opposite way after visiting Lisa’s dad in Las Vegas. It’s hard to describe, but there’s this Joshua tree by the road, and there’s these hills behind it, and I had this bet with myself that I’d be able to recognise the place and take another photo of it. 

The same tree in 2001

We arrived at Barstow in time for dinner, which for me was a chance to have breakfast. Best breakfast I ever had – or was it just hunger?

We arrived in Vegas around 9:30, finally driving into our garage at around 10:00pm. 

Sure enough, there was a UPS box waiting on doorstep. It was the package from Cakewalk software. I wonder how long it had sat there?

Frank the shipping company truck driver rang us three times during the course of the morning to get driving directions to our house in Terra Linda. He obviously wasn’t from the Bay Area, as he ended up taking the wrong bridge and driving through San Francisco. I didn’t think the instructions were that tricky, but I guess if you are driving a moving truck and you’re in the wrong lane and you don’t see signs in advance enough, then you’re pretty much committed to driving in a straight line.

At around 9:30 the packing company people showed up to pack our remaining items – basically artwork and fragile items that we would rather get packed by experienced packers in special boxes. They were impressed that we had in fact packed everything else up ourselves on time. Apparently it is common for them to find people still madly packing, having discovered that it doesn’t pay to be  optimistic about the amount of time needed to pack. They left a pile of documents for the trucking guys (they still hadn’t arrived yet) and left us contemplating our boxes.

About 11:00 AM the guys from United showed up in an enormous truck, much bigger than the one that our stuff arrived in two years ago. They couldn’t figure out how to turn around in our short cul-de-sac, and after going backwards and forwards a couple of times up and down the street, they backed out to the cross street and then see-sawed around and came in backwards. Frank and his assistant Justin were efficient and capable, labeling everything with their own sequence of inventory numbers, and expertly packing our belongings into the truck like a jigsaw puzzle. It took about 6 hours to get everything out of the house, assembled in stages in front of the house, then packed into the truck.

I can now say that I have seen all our possessions take up roughly 1000 cubic feet in a rectangular volume. 

While I was using a comb on teasing the carpet pile back to a semblance of normalcy from where our furniture had rested for a couple of years, I did something to my right knee. I was kneeling, with my legs kind of splayed out to one side (tush on floor instead of heels), leaning forward, when something went “pop” and I felt a twinge, kind of like pinging your funny bone. I got up and waggled my leg around a bit, trying to pop it back to normal or something, but it didn’t seem to want to go. It wasn’t painful or uncomfortable, so I didn’t worry too much about it, and continued refreshing the carpet pile – only never using that particular body position again.

This evening after we’d made our farewells to Frank and Justin (making sure they had directions to the house in Las Vegas), we went out for one last meal at our friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurant (Royal Mandarin) and came home again, making up a bed on the floor with blankets and rugs.

Lisa did a mammoth cleaning effort on the kitchen floor, and I vacuumed.

I had packed some of our DVDs in my laptop case and I surprised Lisa by bringing them out and we selected “The Matrix” to watch. Having a DVD drive in a laptop is kind of cool sometimes.

We fell asleep before we finished the movie.

…and that isn’t even counting the 76 un-numbered items like desks and chairs and artwork. I honestly don’t remember much about this day, except everything that wasn’t already in a box, went into a box. This included the TVs and kitchen stuff.

While we were packing, we had several cars pull up and examine the house from the outside, and one person actually knocked on the door and said she was sorry, she didn’t know there was anyone here. Evidently our wonderful landlords cannot wait to get new tenants. They could have waited a week before putting an ad in the paper, surely?

Today we intend to pack everything but the kitchen. Tomorrow the kitchen. Then the truck arrives on Monday. We will spend the night in the empty house, and drive to Vegas on Tuesay 3 April.

Today I was informed via an email that the upgrade to my music sequencing package (Cakewalk’s “Sonar”) has shipped and is expected to be delivered to our Las Vegas address on April 2. At this point, we expect to be there late on the evening of the 3rd. This is very ironic, considering that I did everything I could to ensure the package would arrive at a time and place where I expected to be. I anticipated that there would be a delay between ordering and delivery; I waited until the last possible day of the special price reduction deal before I ordered the upgrade; used the Nevada address on my order, etc. 

I tried contacting UPS and getting them to hold the package for me in Nevada, but they couldn’t do it until the package was actually at the Nevada depot – which as yet, it wasn’t. If I had time I intended to check the tracking web page regularly and call in a hold delivery request at the right point in the package’s journey.

Last day of work today, for a couple of weeks. Inevitably, we found out today that our department is to be reorg’d again.

Tonight we rented the Wonder Boys DVD, which was very good. This movie was released twice in the theatres here, and both times I get the feeling it didn’t do so well, despite great reviews. I can see why, it is a hard movie to promote, but nonetheless it is a lot of fun.

We had to go shopping for a few necessary food items, because we’d managed to eat all the food in the house a little earlier than we’d planned. Still three more days in this house to go!

Lisa got a haircut today, and I went along and got my hair cut as well. No more ponytail.

Long hair is apparently no longer supported on this platform.

There are some who might say, it never was.

I have set my laptop up on the island in the middle of the kitchen whilst installation men run through the house installing things. In order of appearance, we have:

• Roland, from Eagle Sentry, to install the security system – pet-immune motion sensors and window and door contacts, two keypads (one at garage entry and one at front door);
• Eddie and Jesse, from Eagle Sentry, to perform wall fish operations at six locations, installing 4 cat5 lines into every room except the bathrooms and living room, and installing a wiring closet into our hall cupboard, with a coaxial cable link for broadband internet access.
• Shirley, from Costco, to measure up our bare windows for a quote for later installation of 2″ wood blinds (it turned out that she didn’t do measuring; another guy would have to come and do this);
• Unnamed Guy, from Greystone Homes, to install the tub enclosure that they forgot from our options list;
• Jeff, from Toucan Landscaping, to look at our section of desert mud and block wall, to discuss possible ways of enhancing our back yard experience;

And, not here yet but expected:

• John, from Bulwark Pest Control, to squirt some organic spider/scorpion deterrent into our walls and surroundings.

So far, it looks like we’re spending the entire day here.

Roland has just shown us how to use the new security system. It’s pretty cool, it even monitors the point where our phone lines come into our house to prevent line tampering. We’re going to have to set up a “bypass” on that zone while we are way to allow the Sprint people to connect our additional three lines.

On the way out we were just testing our new security system in preparation for leaving when the phone rang. It was the guy that Shirley had asked to measure our windows. Since we really, really, wanted to get this done before we left for a week, we arranged to meet him at the house the next morning, early, before our flight back to San Francisco.

The guy’s name turns out to be John Steadman, and he is a really nice guy who briskly and methodically measures up the windows, chatting to us as he does so. Apparently, after the blinds are manufactured, he will be installing them for us, and we’re looking forward to that.

The flight back to SF was uneventful, as a flight only can be when you don’t have a cat under the seat in front of you. I did manage to spill my drink in my lap though. Doh!

We arranged to meet Dominic from Eagle Sentry and Jeff from Toucan Landscaping at the house in the morning. Even though we don’t have keys and don’t officially own the place yet, we figure that it’d be ok to wander around the back yard. Incidently, the “back yard” is a rectangular patch of dirt and rocks surrounded by a grey concrete block wall.

It turned out that Jeff couldn’t make it and so we arranged to meet Dominic at his office later in the day instead. Eagle Sentry are located close to the airport, so we figured we could visit the cats on the same trip.

As we walked into the sales office to borrow their phone, we were alerted by Donna the salesperson that the Title company were currently on the phone and needed to talk to us! This was a coincidence… it turned out that one of the pages we had initialed was incorrect or invalid (“bad document” was written across the page) and could we come down and redo that particular page? We agreed to do so immediately.

After that, we spend some time driving around Las Vegas. We stopped at a kind of plant nursery/museum, a place where all the different kinds of plants that grow in the desert climate are laid out for you to admire. (See http://www.lvvwd.com/conservation/ddg/ddg.html.)There are some experimental sections where plants are “on trial” to see how they survive. It was very interesting, and we saw lots of plants and herbs and things that we would quite like in our own back yard.

We did get to drop in on the cats in their little yellow prison cells, and they were doing fine. A little grumpy, a little reticent to admit to owning us, but safe and well.

We also dropped in to the offices of Eagle Sentry, and filled out some paperwork so that their installation guys could show up at the house on Friday.

The following day we did our final walkthrough, and signed on the bottom line of the acceptance form, and then expected to get our keys. But wait – the money takes some time to be transferred from the back to the title company (or something like that) and we can’t get our house keys or in fact, we can’t start work on the house and store stuff until the money is transferred and everyone is happy.

We postpone the pest control appointment until tomorrow (boy, Friday is really filling up) and go shopping for a couple of additional items of furniture.

Our house walkthrough was with a guy called Dale, who took us through the various built-in appliances such as the water softener and the range, etc. There were a few minor problems, but most things got fixed there and then.

Then we drove down to the offices of the Nevada Title Company to sign and initial an enormous pile of final documents and hand over our cashier’s cheque for (more money than I’ve ever held in my hand before).