What was lost in Dilkon

Ruby, with dead battery, is somewhere under that shade…

Over the past few months, I was sent to program lighting at the Dilkon Regional Medical Center in Dilkon, AZ, within the Navajo reservation.  I do not have many day-job adventures that are both interesting, and in-bounds for open disclosure.

Through a combination of poor fortune and self-created folly, Dilkon proved to be expensive, with each of the expeditions being more expensive than the last.

Let’s pause here to clarify: I do not mean travel expenses. My company picks that up. And while the work was more troublesome than it needed to be, that was a product of the locale and personnel involved, and not generally instructive. Also, there were more than the three trips I am about to describe, but these were the major expeditions.

We have already described one adventure related to this job. This would turn out to be foreshadowing.

1^st Visit- January 2022

Navajo burger

There are two places I found to eat lunch in Dilkon, and by that I mean pick up the food and eat it in your car. The Navajo Nation was (and still is at this writing) 100% masks indoors, and indoor dining is out-of-the-question.  There is a food stand in a dirt lot that will sell you a Navajo burger, a double green-chile burger in a pita of some sort. Or you could go to the pizza place, and get a slice or pie of arguably the best pizza for 50 miles in any direction. (It is honestly decent if not outstanding pizza.

Having learned the day before that a Navajo burger will sit in my stomach like a boulder for three hours, I had gotten some pizza, driven back to the jobsite and ate my slices while listening the NPR station I could kinda-get out there on the car radio. When I finished, I tossed my crusts to the stray, or at least unleashed dogs waiting for that, and went back in to work.

I came back out at the end of the day to discover my battery dead. I then discovered that I had not gotten back (or replaced) the jumper cables I had loaned to my child.

Happily, one of the electricians hadn’t left yet. After failing to jump the car with his cables, we ruled the battery dead. Dilkon has a grocery store, and two convenience stores, none of which carry jumper cables, much less car batteries.

Good fortune balanced poor fortune when it turned out the electrician passed through Winslow, where my hotel was, on his way back to north of Flagstaff somewhere.

His daily commute was close to 90 minutes. I added twenty more at the auto parts store (just down the road from my hotel) where I purchased the second most expensive battery on the shelf (cheap parts die with simple radio play in deeply rural parking lots) and a set of jumper cables.

He added five more minutes picking me up in the pre-dawn gloom the next morning.

It’s forty minutes from Winslow to Dilkon, during which I learned a a lot about this man’s family problems and his relationship to Jesus, none of which is fodder for this space. I also learned that people in and around Dilkon have been driving as far New Mexico for simple medical services.

So, it’s nice to be part of a project that is clearly necessary. We have surprisingly few of those.

 2^nd Visit – Late February – early March 2022

On my way back from Two Rivers (next to last post – I’ve been busy) the power steering died in the truck.

Verity – new to me.

While I bought Verity as a back-up vehicle, Oliver, my child, has been using it as a primary vehicle to and forth from Phoenix College and related young adult adventures. Oliver lacks the size and skill to manage a pick-up truck without power steering.

Warned that it could be a while before I had the time or money to fixt the truck, Oliver convinced one of their young adult friends to fix it – at my expense, but not at a lot of expense.

The repair happened while I was in Dilkon.

Then as Oliver drove the newly nimble Verity about the oil light came on. Knowing the oil had been recently changed, Oliver chose to ignore it and keep driving – until Verity threw a rod.

Throwing a rod is generally fatal to twenty-year-old pick-ups.

Verity + Rattletrap

Yet times are strange. I bought that thing for about $5k – pre-pandemic. The replacement cost for a similar vehicle now would be something like $7-8k as I understand the market now. The part-time mechanic (who likely destroyed the thing in the first place) has offered to replace the engine at cost. He thinks that could be below $3k. I am not so certain. I have tasked Oliver with that research, and that is ongoing.

Bongo at Homolovi

Meanwhile , Lyft charges appear randomly on one of my credit cards.

There was a mid-February visit during which I visited the Homolovi State Park.

It went without further disaster.

3^rd Visit 23-24 March 2022

UnObtanium at Pirate Fest

This visit took place two days before Unobtanium was to appear at the Las Vegas Pirate Fest. My tow vehicle is dead in my backyard, and while Ruby has a towing hitch (that I had installed) the Subaru Forester is not a good towing vehicle. Las Vegas is 350 miles and four good climbs from Phoenix.

My first thought was to rent a van. Inventory inside the van, tent and gear in Rattle-trap. But no one, I mean no one, rents a van with a tow hitch.

U-Haul, however, will rent a pick-up with a tow hitch – even for an out-of-state run. So I thought I had done that.

I burn back home from Dilkon, slide into U-Haul minutes before closing, and discover they have not the pick-up I had confirmed and paid for.

I towed Rattletrap to Las Vegas in a 12’ box truck, which had plenty of capacity but over-all cost me $800 I’ll never get back. Impoverished and emboldened by that experience I then towed that same rig with Ruby, my Subaru Forester, on the shorter and flatter run to Lake Havasu City for the London Bridge Ren Faire.

Ruby+Rattletrap at LBRF

The listed towing capacity of a 2015 Subaru Forester is 1500#. I don’t know how much Rattletrap plus the Unobtanium tent and inventory actually weigh, but Ruby can tow it as long as we stay under 75 mph.

Traversing I-10 westbound at or near the posted limit does not improve the scenic value of the journey.

FTR – London Bridge RF actually takes place on the shadeless, packed dirt expanse of the county rodeo grounds.

The big bell tent held up just fine.

UnObtanium at London Bridge RF complete with tent.

When the smoke cleared:

• The Dilkon Medical Center is still not open (medical facilities dawdle forever before opening) by my lighting is complete.
• Ruby survived her Reservation country and towing adventures.
• If you don’t count the U-Haul fee, UnObtanium made money at both events.
  • We plan to return to both next year.
• And Verity still sits in my backyard, with her new roof rack still in place. If you want or need a 2001 Dodge Dakota with a blown engine, make me an offer.

Now we know.

A few quick lessons from real numbers

First: Go Action Fun Time next Tuesday May 4, 2021. It will be weird, but it will have nothing to do with Star Wars. I will post Discord and Owlbear info in this space when I know them, and we are close enough that they will not expire.

Now traffic:

Given the amount I drive, and how little of that driving occurs under the speed limit, it is amazing that I am not an expert regarding the ins and outs of traffic court. But, as reality plays out, I have not had a ticket since 2001, when paying over the phone wa weird, and paper checks were still sort of normal.

If, hypothetically, you were to receive a traffic citation in Yuma County AZ, [see last post] it is cheaper and easier just to pay the ticket than to try a go to traffic school. Let’s say, for discussion, the cost of just paying the ticket was given by the AZ Highway Patrol as $247.

But according to one of the hundreds of traffic schools, this would be the cost of taking the class:

Calculate Total Cost

Violation Date	Before 04/01/21	As of 04/01/21
Course Fee	$27.95	$27.95
Processing Fee	$10.00	$10.00
State Fee	$24.00	$24.00*
State Surcharge	$45.00	$45.00
Court Fee	$160.00	$160.00
Total Cost	$266.95	$266.95

The only advantage to going through this exercise is to keep the points off of your license.

If you’re in your fifties, and haven’t had a ticket in 20 years, as I have, there is no effect on your insurance rates.

So I paid the bastards, or rather their 3^rd party internet service, and felt shame.

Now, business:

Pirates rarely got rich.

For UnObtanium Bazaar, the Las Vegas Pirate Fest represented a best case scenario for gauging the economics of vending. We had reasonable fees (Cheryl is local to Las Vegas), and a huge gate and, as it turns out, a great location across from the turkey legs.

So we did well. We made more money on the Saturday than we had made in the entirety of any previous festival.

Even so, our gross for the weekend was still well under my bi-weekly salary check. So we aren’t about to quit our jobs for this.

That said, our worst case scenario, being London Bridge Renn Faire (Small market over Easter weekend during a heatwave) still made us some money.

So the hobby reliably pays for itself and a little more. Good enough.

Proposed artwork – but damn!

I actually have some editorial deadlines.

I have until May to finish my editorial review of Taliesin’s Last Apprentice – the sequel to Beanstalk and Beyond.

It has a tentative release date of November.

I am also under deadline for a Tooth and Talon sequel that will really serve as a monster manual for Go Action Fun Time.  That is words and art.

So I gotta go.

If you need something more to learn from the interwebs, I have been enjoying Our Fake History.

Home

Now we know.

Some scattered notes between festivals

Some short doses of things we have learned over the past couple of weeks, mostly without context. But first, we are between events. So…

UnObtanium Bazaar will be at the Las Vegas Pirate Fest this weekend!

And Cheryl will be dancing with Shifting Sands.

Feb 29, 2020; Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports

I’ll admit it: I groaned when My Beloved Suns traded Ricky Rubio for Chris Paul. After all, in the shortened 2020 season Rubio was averaging more assists than Paul (who then playing for the Thunder) while scoring only 3 fewer PPG on a Suns team that really didn’t need him to score anymore.  And they went 8-0 in the Bubble with Rubio running the point.

The difference is defense and a culture of defense. Rubio is a good defender, but not the legend that Chris Paul is (6 time steals leader, 9 time All-Defensive team).  And while Rubio was an established veteran who had won championships in Europe, he did not have the credibility or personality to herd a bunch of young wildcats into playing team defense.

Chris Paul is on those boys All The Time, and they are responding.  Sometimes I wonder if Monty Williams’s true role is to attend meeting with management and do the paperwork.

You still feel for Rubio – who was doing a good job, and looking forward to a near-certain playoff run with the Suns this year, instead of maybe playing into the playoffs with his final destination, the Minnesota Timberwolves. But then I reflect that he’s still a millionaire, and the Suns are legit contenders now.

The little mountain range that separates Yuma from the rest of the damn desert is called the Fortuna Foothills. The Border Patrol no longer regularly operates the checkpoint going east into the pass, but it has become a favorite haunt of the Arizona Highway Patrol.

The speed limit on the winding, splitting I-8 through that portion is 55. Not 65.

Just east of the pass there is a safety pull-out and the Az state trooper will be happy to follow you into it, if, for some reason, you are pulled over coming down the pass.

Sometimes its good to be 54, with papers in order.

There are a ridiculous number of online traffic schools listed with azdrive.com.

I got my first vaccination shot. The day after, I came down with what passes – for me- as COVID symptoms: achy with no temperature, but likely elevated blood pressure. (I did not check). This might have been compounded by my thinking “Nah, my arm doesn’t hurt enough to stop me from finishing this yard work”.  Two hours later I’m putting away the tools because it has become clear I will not have the energy to do anything else. I was laid up the rest of the day.

I have to bury that story in my blog instead of telling it on Facebook, because I don’t want to hear about from the crazies. Two days after the shot, I was able to go to work, and the only pain I have is clearly from yardwork.

Over on Are We Lost Yet?, I learned how steep Picacho Peak really is.

After next weekend, I do not have a scheduled author or UnObtanium event until July. You know what that means…

Go Action Fun Time! Every other week.

Also, I am officially in the editing phase of Taliesin’s Last Apprentice (the sequel to the Beanstalk and Beyond) and we are hoping for a November release date.

Now we know.

Achieving a long-term dream tests my Buddhist resolve

I have wanted a functioning hot tub for a long time.  I have one now, and that has created some strange complications.  Most of this post will be about that. But first – some announcements:

Unobtanium Bazaar will appear in a limited form at –

And then appear in the full form at London Bridge Renaissance Fest:

AND then Las Vegas Pirate Fest – which is kind of our homecoming event:

Note the new time/space coordinates.

I have 10 8 proof copies of the Go Action Fun Time Core Rules (1E Deluxe) in my possession. There are some color errors on the cover, and I will have to correct those before I go to a larger print run.

An actual printed book!

Meanwhile, you can get one of these copies, signed, and potentially highly collectable years from now, from me, for the low-low price of convincing me that you will playtest this system as an Executive Producer (that’s what we call game masters).

I am also going to try to run some episodes over Discord every other Tuesday night.

I’d run them on weekends, but I am not reliably in town on weekends. For example, I am posting this from Las Vegas.

One more fact I learned this week that I don’t want to bury in the hot tub saga: You cannot buy a 2^nd party window motor for a Subaru Forester. It has to come from Subaru, who will only sell you the full assembly for the better part of $300. A similar part for my 2001 Dodge Dakota costs between $50-70.

The New Hot Tub

I have always enjoyed hot tubs, but I became obsessed with them, at least at a background level, as my back began to lock up from arthritis. There have been some attempts to create one with humble means in the past.

This was better than standing dry in the yard, but…

One of the benefits of my current job, compared to my 25 years in live event production, is that I am not expected to load and unload trucks on a daily basis. Consequently, my back has improved.  I still feel stiff and sore from time to time, but it is no longer the daily menace it was in my final years of full-time show-biz. 

At the same time, from a change in both occupation and marital status, my disposable income has increased. Perversely, my need for a hot tub has decreased in proportion to my ability to acquire one.

If you read the last post, you know I got one anyway.

Some of the delay was the fantasy that I could resuscitate the extant hot tub on the property I now occupy. The more I looked into this, the more expensive this became. It had sat idle for some ten years before copper thieves took the wires and made it inoperable for another ten years. For the cost of replacing everything that would need to be replaced, I could install a new in-ground hot tub.

I’m doing well, but not that well, particularly since I do not actually own the property.

So, I looked into an above-ground solution, and found, to my delight, that inflatable hot tubs – which used to be a joke – are actually somewhat respectable. Someone, Coleman perhaps, figured out that if you take the same plastic they use for inflatable rafts, you can create a reasonably durable hot tub at a third of the price of a fiberglass one.

So I bought one of those for about $600 all in. So far. It took three weeks to ship.

Still this one.

Fine. I needed to fill in the old hot tub anyway. I had gravel at hand to do most of the work, and then level it off with sand to get a level surface.  Forty wheelbarrows of gavel and 22 bags of sand later, I thought I had accomplished the deed.

One project led to another, and in that process I had my garage door and my back gate open when I went inside to do some other damn thing. Thieves rushed in helped themselves to some low-hanging fruit: my bike, and some tools.  It gets worse: I took two trips to come back with all the sand, and on my second trip, the thieves, likely the same ones, discovered I had dummy locked the back gate, and helped themselves to my propane tanks and my propane firepit. They also took the lock.

This will test your Buddhist resolve to not get worked up over possessions. But I have new locks now.

The hot tub arrives, and I manage to secure it before any porch pirates come for it.

I set up my new treasure in the back yard, and there’s a problem. The Intex hot tub has to be on the same level and immediately adjacent to the heat/pump/control unit. Because there are no hoses – only ports.

But it also now occurs to me that there is nothing except a four foot fence and new locks that would prevent yard pirates from making off with the pump.

However, I currently have an empty bedroom.

And that’s where it sits, until some refugee has need for that bedroom.

There are several advantages to the indoor hot tub: cheaper to heat, simple to keep clean, controlled access. But I cannot turn away the inevitable refugee explaining that I know you have no place to go, but right now I can climb into my hot tub naked…

So the day is coming when the hot tub goes outside. The level problem can be solved with another thousand pounds of sand. I’m not sure about securing the pump, but I have time to figure that out.

Meanwhile, I enjoy the tub, but I am not yet convinced it was worth the struggle. The money – sure – it has seemed thus far a good purchase. But I feel like a found a good strategy to fight the war before last.

A grab bag of uncomfortable truths

I have some small observations to share, but first a reminder that I am still the Gaming Coordinator for Leprecon 47, and if you want to run a game – now only late Sunday afternoon – I am the guy to contact.

Also Las Vegas Pirate Fest has changed both date and venue:

At press-time their website had not been updated to these new coordinates

I will be there as part of UnObtanium. This means it will not be overlapping the London Bridge Ren Faire, which we will also be at. There was a plan involving time travel – but now we don’t have to…

Uncomfortable Truths in no particular order:

The team that gets the fewest DUI’s the week prior almost always wins the Superbowl.

I am not going to rehabilitate the derelict hot tub in my yard for less than the cost of a new one.

Relatedly – I am not a long-term resident at this address. (I am technically still house-sitting).

So I bought a portable hot tub with my year-end bonus.

This one.

I am walking proof that you can carry COVID without running fever.

Operation Warp Speed may be the Trump administration’s greatest achievement, and might have gotten him re-elected if he hadn’t buried it with administrative neglect of the rest of the pandemic, and compounded that with political malfeasance.

BUT-BUT-BUT

If a Democratic President had done this the Republicans would be comparing it to socialism.

The drive back and forth to Las Vegas does not improve with repetition.

The cohort that won’t wear a mask because they won’t live in fear is the same cohort that are afraid to go into a library without a gun because homeless people.

I remember now why I try to avoid serving on non-profit committees -particularly for local cons. I’d be more specific, but this is still a going concern, and I do have some sense of organizational loyalty.

You can’t convince anyone into anything long term. They have to get there themselves. Even if you martial  all of your powers of logic and charm, the decision will always be temporary. Sales-folk get away with this, because they only need the spell to last until you pay.

For anything longer term, all you can do is make your case, and hope they are ready to take that path.

This is the first thing of any length I have written in seven days.

But I’m caught up on a lot of other things.

And I have a hot tub coming.

Now we know.

The recursive nature of goals

There are goals and then there are goals. There are the larger, universal goals of a happier,, more generally successful life, and there are the smaller, more concrete goals contrived to mark the way to the larger goals such as mow the lawn, or eat healthier or put on pants. At what point does pursuing a goal become the goal, rather than the means to achieve a larger goal?

Maybe at the point where you start asking these questions.

I finally had a moment to write out my monthly goals for February. They largely consist of unmet goals from January. Some of that was over-ambition. Some of that was other emergencies. Some of that was poor use of time.  I have those factors in roughly equal measure.

The goal I met:

I finished the kitchen lighting despite the spooky wiring left by previous owners. In daytime the dark slot would have a bit of skylight in it.

So we (the kids helped) learned that you can’t trust any of the neutrals to go back to a common bus.

And despite what I promised last post, I have not abandoned caution when it comes to electrical work.

 

I also got an episode in of Go Action Fun Time. I’ll go over that in a separate entry.

The project that was not one of the goals:

I ended up spending a week at Cheryl’s house helping her recover from foot surgery. She couldn’t walk. She has a large house with stairs. I had a week of vacation to burn.

My Butler name is “Handsy”.

I did get some writing done. And I appeared in a promotional video for the Las Vegas Pirate Fest. Well, I did. Which brings us to:

The goal that is not from January:

We will have a booth is said pirate fest. By we I really mean Cheryl, and her room-mate, Captain Blackheart, who heads one of the factions guilds that organize the event.

We will have one of these:

A vendor booth, not unlike the one pictured, not the bystanders

 

Blackhearts’ Boutique is the trial run for what may become a more permanent enterprise. We will have Artifacts, Relics, Apparel and Sundries available for the particular adventurer. I’ll have a whole thing with photos as we get closer. But if you follow Cheryl or Rey on Facebook, you’ve already seen things.

Everyone involved in this has an expanding To Do list.

Past this event we plan to call the enterprise the Unobtanium Emporium.

Goals becoming goals.

Also I have to mow my lawn, and eat better.

And put on pants.

Watch this space.