My Picture Summary Of 2003
Sedona, Arizona
Figuring out that there were too many things to be allergic too in Hawaii, we headed to the mainland in January, destination Sedona, Arizona.
The idea that it is dry part of the year compared to having some rain almost every day would be good. On the trip there we found a really nice Sedona-esq house near town, but still mostly private on a street called Juniper Trail. The ironic part about this in later years was finding that one of tim’s major allergies are, yes, juniper/cedar.
After setting up to buy the new house, we flew back to hawaii to finish up, pack up and ship. The furniture went into shipping crates and the jeep was sold and the Prius and my pickup got shipped to Oakland, California. We moved back to the Mainland on 3/3/3.
The cars arrived before the furniture, so I flew up to Oakland, to take a personal road-trip back down to Sedona. It was the week of the start of the Iraq war, and as leaving San Francisco, the police were lined up near the bay bridge because there was going to be a protest.
I drove extra miles and headed somewhat in the wrong direction across nevada on HWY 50, where is was a lonely highway. I was on a pill that the was prescribed to help me to relax that I started when I quit drinking in October and I was getting pretty zoney. I decided to cut back across from ely nevada to vegas to visit Randy Rowland, then continued to the new home in Sedona.
The furniture arrived, some broken up by the movers in hawaii so it would fit into crates, and others covered with exhaust soot from the truck that was first transporting it that had broken down and delayed it. The new house was fine, we were getting unpacked but I wasn’t settling well. I was feeling very out of body, not really knowing where I was even though I could see where I was.
I was preparing to go back to my mainland doctor I hadn’t seen in two years and getting the prescription bottles together with all the after shingles pills and all, and when I read the ‘relaxer’ bottle, something finally clicked in my head. It was the wrong medicine. I looked it up and it was for seizure control. instead of Loraza… it was cLonaza… the pharmacist when filling it couldn’t read the doctors writing correctly, which he had said, because he though the milligrams were written wrong because it didn’t come in that dose… so back at my pre-hawaii doctor, I told him of the pill I was taking and he said, “you must feel horrible, if you feel anything at all”…. it took a few weeks to get it out of my system.
Back in Sedona, there was an ad in the paper for a vacant land for sale on Oak Creek! We always wanted to be on a creek, so we had to check it out. What a beautiful setting, this lot, in between a log cabin on one lot, and bigger house on the other with mature trees in between. A woman came out of the cabin and said she and her husband owned the old cabin and the house, and they wanted to buy the lot but the owner of it was refusing to sell it to them.
We looked at the their big house (they were mormon and build it themselves, the decor showed but it was build extremely well, on oversized piers in case of flood) and then looked at the old cabin. We came up with a deal with them that we would by the lot, then we would split it and buy the cabin, making both lots bigger instead of having to build a house. It closed at the beginning of the 4th of july weekend, and they were away. When they returned, they had decided that they didn’t want to sell the cabin, but they would sell the bigger house. We didn’t want the trouble of it, but we ended up getting it anyways.
The rest of the year was trying to get the house in shape since it had bad wallpaper to take down and deck nails popping up. The heat pump had giving out so we put in a Geothermal system in a way it had never been done, water cooled in the irrigation ditch.
In November, we decided to take an Amtrak to California to be there for thanks giving, but we could only catch it in the middle of Utah at Green River at 5 pm, we left early that morning and drove, toured around arches national park near moab, utah. then got to green river where there was nothing but a closed amtrak shed with a phone. We called and the train was delayed due to a walmart truck rolled down a hill and dumped over on the tracks a few states east, and the train would be in about 1 AM. There is nothing in green river, so we said we’d get on in colorado, and we back tracked the train route to grand junction, where we could actually get food. The train came in there about midnight, and didn’t even get to green river til 3 AM. The sierras that would have been best viewed from the train ended up being in the dark, and they supposedly ran out of food and only served beef stew from the can instead of restaurant service. The train got into Oakland at 4 am instead of the 5pm the day before. It was an awful trip, other that getting to visit friends in San Fran.
It got really cold in December back in sedona, but finally the GeoTermal system went in and worked great, and at the end of the year, family from pheonix and new found family from the mid west came to visit to end the year off!
