Too much fun!
Mar. 18th, 2026 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneMy final trip to Phoenix to finish up my brother's affairs.
Two weeks ago Thursday (the 5th) I went to Phoenix solo (Russet had to work) to finish up my brother's estate business. I spent the previous night, Wednesday, in Lordsburg: I had two doctor appointments on Wednesday, the second in Las Cruces at 4pm, so there was no way I wanted to do the full almost 500 mile drive after that! I grabbed a bite and Russet and I did the non-crossword puzzles that we do every night, then I hit the road. Lordsburg seemed like a good stopping point.
You have not lived until you've spent the night in Lordsburg, New Mexico! Cultural center of the universe. Four truck stops, no waiting.
I got into Phoenix Thursday afternoon and went straight to where the truck and trailer were stored in Anthem, far north of town. I wanted to search the truck one last time, looking for a couple of things that might have been hidden. And once again, no joy. But in re-trying keys in locks, I did succeed in identifying two more keys in the trailer that was to be sold, along with the truck, on Friday. And I tried, once again with no success, to pick the lock on the back of the trailer. I started practicing lock picking back in December as I couldn't find a key for this one lock, and my skills are just not up to that point. I can handle basic Masters, that's about - most Master padlocks are pretty pathetic. This one - higher security and a very tough bolt and housing that's quite resistant to cutting.
I also learned that the truck battery was dead. The truck had been sitting for almost two full months (it started in January when I was last there), so this was not a surprise. I have one of those USB car battery jumpers that I bought and brought just for this purpose, but I couldn't get the hood open! So it'll have to wait for Monday.
Did some putzing about afterwards, hit Zia's Records and Tapes and bought 11 CDs. Fun stuff: three or four Jethro Tull that I didn't know I was missing, a T-Rex, some Porcupine Tree, and some Avenged Sevenfold. I also picked up an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer later in my trip. Had a good pizza and headed back to my friend's house for the night.
Friday was supposed to be selling the truck and trailer. We'd arranged the sale in January, but the woman wasn't going to have the money until March. I confirmed the date a couple of weeks earlier, but wires got crossed and they thought it was to be Monday. Not a big deal, I was able to take care of closing out my brother's banking and go over to my bank and get it deposited. Unfortunately my investment guy was working from home and I didn't get to see him, but I did get to meet my new banker as my previous one had taken maternity leave and didn't come back, preferring to devote himself to being a house husband and full-time game designer. Which, I have to admit, certainly has its attractions. My investment guy called me Monday and we got some things done, and now I own some stock in Apple and Berkshire-Hathaway! Which immediately started going down in value because someone started a war. Eh, whatever. It'll go back up later.
Saturday, we had people over to play some Flash Point Fire Rescue, a cooperative board game where everyone is a fire fighter in a different, specialized role. It is a fantastic game! You win by rescuing seven people from a burning building (many different maps available), you lose if four people die or if the building collapses. It can be a serious challenge! Highly recommended.
Sunday we did errands, and did something that I've been wanting to do: Micro Center! Phoenix just got a store, and I needed some things. Got a nice Corsair mechanical wired keyboard with numeric pad - I already have the smaller version sans keypad, a Raspberry Pi 5000+, and some smaller oddments.
Monday - Pretty much the whole day was taken up with selling the truck. We met at the DMV to transfer the titles for the truck and trailer, which mostly went pretty easy. She sent the money to me via PayPal, and the paperwork took the time that it takes. We then went up to the site where I'd stored it for final stuff. We got the hood open and jumped it, kept it running for quite a while to juice it up. The trailer has two tires per side, one tire on each side needed air. And I'd brought a portable compressor for that purpose! Sadly, it died. But there were two tire stores within half a mile of the U-Haul storage yard. We put a new temporary plate on the trailer, and eventually we headed out. AND I got to close the U-Haul account about a week or so before the next rent payment was due for March! The woman who bought it paid half of February's rent, which was good.
Tuesday I did my final round of plunder at Trader Joe's and World Market, then we had rehearsals for our forthcoming production of Frozen: The Musical in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). I'd brought my band laptop for just that purpose. I'm running the band - I run 12 instances of LOTRO on my laptop, which is powered by an Intel Ultra 9 CPU which is crazy powerful, and it works quite well. It's shaping up to be an amazing production! We're doing two performances in the middle of May.
And somehow I managed to lose my right hearing aid! I don't know how or where, but it vanished. It would have been so much better had it been my left, as my left ear is much worse than my right, so I expect to have bad hearing on that side. I have my older hearing aids at home, so it wasn't a huge problem: don't have much need of them while I'm driving! I can turn up the stereo in the car while listening to whatever. (I found a spare which is working fine, and as it happened, on Wednesday the 18th I already had an appointment with my audiologist to order a new pair - every three years insurance pays for most of a new set!)
Wednesday I had a bunch of errands to do: a bit more plunder of some last minute needs that Russet texted me, and I had to go to my brother's bank again - at least not the one in the north valley! They had sent him a payment refund, but in his name! I called the woman whom I'd dealt with in closing his account, and she said that I just needed to go into a branch and they can do paperwork to get the check re-issued in my name and mailed to me. While it wasn't quite an easy and straightforward process, we did get it done. Then it was off to Starbucks for mega-caffeine, and on the road.
I didn't get on the freeway until 2:30pm or so, which is a rather late start, but I was off for the rest of the week so it really didn't matter. Monday night I had eaten at a fantastic German restaurant in the north (but not far north) valley called Edelweisse, had a wonderful meal and had leftovers, so I didn't need to stop for food, just pause at a rest area. I love cold leftovers, so this was easy and zero additional cost!
I was rested. I was caffeinated. And I had a terrible time driving home! I ended up stopping like four times for short naps, on the order of about 15-30 minutes each, before I got home at about 2:30am! (1:30 Arizona time - daylight savings kicked in). It was like caffeine was doing absolutely nothing for me, which was really weird. I wasn't doing any caffeine aside from iced tea while in Phoenix, so this was particularly strange. But I was never so tired that I was a danger to myself or others.
The one event of the trip was when I got off the freeway in Lordsburg to go to a truck stop. I didn't know if they'd finished repairing the bridge on the east side of town (it was destroyed a few months ago when a semi truck hauling a large excavator slammed into it - something happened with the back hoe arm and it had risen up, hitting the bridge, breaking many of the pre-stressed steel cables that supported the bridge! They had to totally tear it down and rebuild it.) ANYWAY, I get off the bridge, it's around 10pm or so IIRC, and a cop immediately lights up and pulls me over!
I didn't think I'd done anything particularly wrong, I couldn't have been going particularly fast, so nothing to do but wait. He comes up and tells me I have a headlight out! Well, that was a bit of a relief. I get out, and sure enough, right headlight is dark. I turn on the brights, that's okay. He writes me a warning/repair order (no fine, no points), I go on my way to the truck stop. Surprisingly I actually had a replacement bulb in my car, but the right headlight is buried behind the air intake filter box, and I just can't get at it. And there's a second problem: the front running light is also out on the right side. But then I figure out a clever solution! I can run my fog lights as sort of auxiliary headlights! I get more road illumination, and other people will be able to see me better. And that's what I did for the remainder of the drive home, and have been doing since. Saturday I go to Las Cruces to Firestone and I'm getting both the headlight and the running light replaced, though maybe I can do the running light myself before then. I also have a couple of other things to have done to my car.
I still have a few things to do to wrap up everything with my brother. Final tax return - which will be interesting because I don't think he's been filing in a long time, order a tombstone for his grave - SIX MONTH WAIT!, and I never did get around to having an obituary notice run in the paper.
When I closed his cell phone account, I opened an account myself and had the number transferred to an old iPhone 8 that I have for just voice and text, to see if he had any friends calling him. All it received in two months was spam and scam calls and texts. I shut that off a couple of weeks ago before March was going to be billed. I have his phone - a fairly nice Samsung S22, and I don't know what to do with it! He locked it down pretty tight, including the USB port! At some point I'm going to contact some hackers to see if they can physically get into it and copy out the memory to see if he has any photos that didn't copy to his Google drive, which I've already downloaded, then I'll talk to Samsung and see if it's possible to get it reset back to factory default. Always useful to have another backup phone around, even if it's an Android and I'm an iPhone guy.
Two weeks ago Thursday (the 5th) I went to Phoenix solo (Russet had to work) to finish up my brother's estate business. I spent the previous night, Wednesday, in Lordsburg: I had two doctor appointments on Wednesday, the second in Las Cruces at 4pm, so there was no way I wanted to do the full almost 500 mile drive after that! I grabbed a bite and Russet and I did the non-crossword puzzles that we do every night, then I hit the road. Lordsburg seemed like a good stopping point.
You have not lived until you've spent the night in Lordsburg, New Mexico! Cultural center of the universe. Four truck stops, no waiting.
I got into Phoenix Thursday afternoon and went straight to where the truck and trailer were stored in Anthem, far north of town. I wanted to search the truck one last time, looking for a couple of things that might have been hidden. And once again, no joy. But in re-trying keys in locks, I did succeed in identifying two more keys in the trailer that was to be sold, along with the truck, on Friday. And I tried, once again with no success, to pick the lock on the back of the trailer. I started practicing lock picking back in December as I couldn't find a key for this one lock, and my skills are just not up to that point. I can handle basic Masters, that's about - most Master padlocks are pretty pathetic. This one - higher security and a very tough bolt and housing that's quite resistant to cutting.
I also learned that the truck battery was dead. The truck had been sitting for almost two full months (it started in January when I was last there), so this was not a surprise. I have one of those USB car battery jumpers that I bought and brought just for this purpose, but I couldn't get the hood open! So it'll have to wait for Monday.
Did some putzing about afterwards, hit Zia's Records and Tapes and bought 11 CDs. Fun stuff: three or four Jethro Tull that I didn't know I was missing, a T-Rex, some Porcupine Tree, and some Avenged Sevenfold. I also picked up an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer later in my trip. Had a good pizza and headed back to my friend's house for the night.
Friday was supposed to be selling the truck and trailer. We'd arranged the sale in January, but the woman wasn't going to have the money until March. I confirmed the date a couple of weeks earlier, but wires got crossed and they thought it was to be Monday. Not a big deal, I was able to take care of closing out my brother's banking and go over to my bank and get it deposited. Unfortunately my investment guy was working from home and I didn't get to see him, but I did get to meet my new banker as my previous one had taken maternity leave and didn't come back, preferring to devote himself to being a house husband and full-time game designer. Which, I have to admit, certainly has its attractions. My investment guy called me Monday and we got some things done, and now I own some stock in Apple and Berkshire-Hathaway! Which immediately started going down in value because someone started a war. Eh, whatever. It'll go back up later.
Saturday, we had people over to play some Flash Point Fire Rescue, a cooperative board game where everyone is a fire fighter in a different, specialized role. It is a fantastic game! You win by rescuing seven people from a burning building (many different maps available), you lose if four people die or if the building collapses. It can be a serious challenge! Highly recommended.
Sunday we did errands, and did something that I've been wanting to do: Micro Center! Phoenix just got a store, and I needed some things. Got a nice Corsair mechanical wired keyboard with numeric pad - I already have the smaller version sans keypad, a Raspberry Pi 5000+, and some smaller oddments.
Monday - Pretty much the whole day was taken up with selling the truck. We met at the DMV to transfer the titles for the truck and trailer, which mostly went pretty easy. She sent the money to me via PayPal, and the paperwork took the time that it takes. We then went up to the site where I'd stored it for final stuff. We got the hood open and jumped it, kept it running for quite a while to juice it up. The trailer has two tires per side, one tire on each side needed air. And I'd brought a portable compressor for that purpose! Sadly, it died. But there were two tire stores within half a mile of the U-Haul storage yard. We put a new temporary plate on the trailer, and eventually we headed out. AND I got to close the U-Haul account about a week or so before the next rent payment was due for March! The woman who bought it paid half of February's rent, which was good.
Tuesday I did my final round of plunder at Trader Joe's and World Market, then we had rehearsals for our forthcoming production of Frozen: The Musical in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). I'd brought my band laptop for just that purpose. I'm running the band - I run 12 instances of LOTRO on my laptop, which is powered by an Intel Ultra 9 CPU which is crazy powerful, and it works quite well. It's shaping up to be an amazing production! We're doing two performances in the middle of May.
And somehow I managed to lose my right hearing aid! I don't know how or where, but it vanished. It would have been so much better had it been my left, as my left ear is much worse than my right, so I expect to have bad hearing on that side. I have my older hearing aids at home, so it wasn't a huge problem: don't have much need of them while I'm driving! I can turn up the stereo in the car while listening to whatever. (I found a spare which is working fine, and as it happened, on Wednesday the 18th I already had an appointment with my audiologist to order a new pair - every three years insurance pays for most of a new set!)
Wednesday I had a bunch of errands to do: a bit more plunder of some last minute needs that Russet texted me, and I had to go to my brother's bank again - at least not the one in the north valley! They had sent him a payment refund, but in his name! I called the woman whom I'd dealt with in closing his account, and she said that I just needed to go into a branch and they can do paperwork to get the check re-issued in my name and mailed to me. While it wasn't quite an easy and straightforward process, we did get it done. Then it was off to Starbucks for mega-caffeine, and on the road.
I didn't get on the freeway until 2:30pm or so, which is a rather late start, but I was off for the rest of the week so it really didn't matter. Monday night I had eaten at a fantastic German restaurant in the north (but not far north) valley called Edelweisse, had a wonderful meal and had leftovers, so I didn't need to stop for food, just pause at a rest area. I love cold leftovers, so this was easy and zero additional cost!
I was rested. I was caffeinated. And I had a terrible time driving home! I ended up stopping like four times for short naps, on the order of about 15-30 minutes each, before I got home at about 2:30am! (1:30 Arizona time - daylight savings kicked in). It was like caffeine was doing absolutely nothing for me, which was really weird. I wasn't doing any caffeine aside from iced tea while in Phoenix, so this was particularly strange. But I was never so tired that I was a danger to myself or others.
The one event of the trip was when I got off the freeway in Lordsburg to go to a truck stop. I didn't know if they'd finished repairing the bridge on the east side of town (it was destroyed a few months ago when a semi truck hauling a large excavator slammed into it - something happened with the back hoe arm and it had risen up, hitting the bridge, breaking many of the pre-stressed steel cables that supported the bridge! They had to totally tear it down and rebuild it.) ANYWAY, I get off the bridge, it's around 10pm or so IIRC, and a cop immediately lights up and pulls me over!
I didn't think I'd done anything particularly wrong, I couldn't have been going particularly fast, so nothing to do but wait. He comes up and tells me I have a headlight out! Well, that was a bit of a relief. I get out, and sure enough, right headlight is dark. I turn on the brights, that's okay. He writes me a warning/repair order (no fine, no points), I go on my way to the truck stop. Surprisingly I actually had a replacement bulb in my car, but the right headlight is buried behind the air intake filter box, and I just can't get at it. And there's a second problem: the front running light is also out on the right side. But then I figure out a clever solution! I can run my fog lights as sort of auxiliary headlights! I get more road illumination, and other people will be able to see me better. And that's what I did for the remainder of the drive home, and have been doing since. Saturday I go to Las Cruces to Firestone and I'm getting both the headlight and the running light replaced, though maybe I can do the running light myself before then. I also have a couple of other things to have done to my car.
I still have a few things to do to wrap up everything with my brother. Final tax return - which will be interesting because I don't think he's been filing in a long time, order a tombstone for his grave - SIX MONTH WAIT!, and I never did get around to having an obituary notice run in the paper.
When I closed his cell phone account, I opened an account myself and had the number transferred to an old iPhone 8 that I have for just voice and text, to see if he had any friends calling him. All it received in two months was spam and scam calls and texts. I shut that off a couple of weeks ago before March was going to be billed. I have his phone - a fairly nice Samsung S22, and I don't know what to do with it! He locked it down pretty tight, including the USB port! At some point I'm going to contact some hackers to see if they can physically get into it and copy out the memory to see if he has any photos that didn't copy to his Google drive, which I've already downloaded, then I'll talk to Samsung and see if it's possible to get it reset back to factory default. Always useful to have another backup phone around, even if it's an Android and I'm an iPhone guy.
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Date: 2026-03-19 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-19 06:01 pm (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: 2026-03-19 02:55 pm (UTC)Donald lost 1 hearing aid on a walk in Alaska. We knew approximately where he dropped it, but never could find it.
Could your body have been low on water/fluid on the drive home? I find that dehydration often slows me way down.
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Date: 2026-03-19 06:02 pm (UTC)Hmmm. Don't think I was dehydrated. I travel with three bottles of water and had about a normal amount of refilling to do when I got home.
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Date: 2026-03-19 04:24 pm (UTC)What a trip, no wonder you were tired!
Thank goodness insurance covers hearing aids.
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Date: 2026-03-19 06:05 pm (UTC)It's what they call a toy tote, the lock is on the tail ramp where you'd drive an ATV or motorcycle into the back of the trailer, which is probably not a big deal for the woman who bought it. A skilled locksmith can pick it, just not within my grasp. I do enjoy picking locks, though! It's kind of a fun thing to do. A bit tricky as my right thumb doesn't work very well and you typically use your off-thumb for tensioning the lock.
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Date: 2026-03-19 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-19 07:41 pm (UTC)It's potentially a useful skill, it's technical, and quite rewarding when you're successful and the lock pops open! Nice little dopamine hit. But you have to be careful, some states - like Texas - are real nasty if you get caught with lock picks on you. A lot of states are pretty cool with lock sporting (which is what amateur lock-picking), but some are not. And the things you learn are pretty amazing!
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Date: 2026-03-20 04:22 pm (UTC)Lighten up Texas! ;-)
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Date: 2026-03-19 10:13 pm (UTC)You have been BUSY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That town as 4 truck stops? :o :o :o
I had a car one time, drove to work one night and a headlight went out.
I think it was a weekend, so no place to get it fixed.
Headed to work the next night and the other bloody headlight went out, so I had no choice but to drive with the brights. :o
When I hit the deer with my current car, it took out the right headlight, but the fog light was still okay, and I think I got almost as much light from that as a headlight would have given me. LOL..........
Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2026-03-20 01:44 am (UTC)Yep. Lordsburg has two at the East I-10 exit, and two at the West I-10 exit. A McDonald's in the middle, and maybe a Burger King - dunno if that is still open. The truck stops have a variety of fast foods: Arby's, a Subway, a pizza place, and I think a Denny's. Like I said, cultural center of the universe!
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Date: 2026-03-20 05:46 am (UTC)But only if the BK is still open. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Date: 2026-03-20 06:16 pm (UTC)Trust me, you don't want to live there! I don't think they have a grocery store, much less a movie theater.
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Date: 2026-03-20 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-20 02:01 am (UTC)Frozen: The Musical in Lord of the Rings Online
I cannot even begin to imagine what this... mashup?... entails!
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Date: 2026-03-20 04:00 am (UTC)I have a 16 musician band. I'm also the house band for BTC.
BTC started doing little performances with bands, and that turned into a group of them performing Grease. I did the same thing with Mamma Mia. Then the game expanded, adding "premium kin houses", which has what's called decorating hooks, and BTC bought the largest one available to use as a playhouse! We can place doors, walls, floors, chairs, fireplaces, tables, trees, all sorts of stuff into hooks. And the hooks can be moved in three dimensions - so we can have the stage slightly higher than the level of the audience! And we have benches for the audience to sit on. We have a set crew that changes things as needed between scenes, we also have a 'curtain' that we raise and lower as needed. Actors go off-stage, and we sort of have an orchestra pit - my band is actually directly beneath the stage!
Here's a recording of my band's latest festival performance at the Monsters of the Rock Festival, where I performed an hour of Electric Light Orchestra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ZJXUPA8rw
Here's the trailer for our most recent production, Fiddler on the Roof, from last December, which will give you a good feel for what a show looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgnFpj2E3Y&t=2s
And this is the YouTube page for BTC, with the full videos to Fiddler and Pink Floyd's The Wall, among other productions:
https://www.youtube.com/@LOTROBTC/videos
It's pretty cool! We work VERY hard at this with full rehearsals weekly and side rehearsals more often. We just had a full Act 1 run-through from start to finish for the first time, which apparently worked pretty well - I wasn't able to attend. Frozen is coming along pretty well, it's going to be a heck of a show when we get it done!
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Date: 2026-03-20 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-20 09:25 pm (UTC)Thanks, I appreciate that. Sorry we missed the chat last night: Russet worked Wednesday night, and I forgot. I'm just glad that I was able to get most everything done in four months! There wasn't really a lot to do, it was just cumbersome because of the distance involved.
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Date: 2026-03-20 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-21 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-22 05:22 am (UTC)I did! Now just tax return and tomb stone.
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Date: 2026-03-24 05:49 pm (UTC)(For the record, I've already made sure that my executor knows the code to unlock my phone. Not that there's anything interesting on the phone, it's just a checkbox on the to-do list.)