And the flood goes on...

It’s been an interesting two weeks since I last wrote.

We here in Tucson have just finished the wettest July in recorded history. Ordinarily, I’d be overjoyed but our roof scuppers—known as canales (can-AL-ees) here in The Old Pueblo—were clogged from recent storm-related winds. The roof then became flooded and when the water rose above the guest bathroom vent pipes—voila! (or more colorful words best not uttered in this venue), our house was flooded. Again. Last happened in 2016. In July. Of course it happened in July.

This time luck was with us. Well, if luck can be associated with inch deep water inside the house, that is. The water only got to the two guest bedrooms (one is our office), the Jack-and-Jill bathroom, the hall, and the dining area. Last time it included the kitchen, pantry, hall, and living room and disrupted our lives for a year! We had to live in a hotel for about five months and our kitchen had to be redone twice. Only time will allow us to see how difficult life will be this time.

We had planned a party for Randy’s bridge group; we had to cancel that. We did manage to get to Pinetop to see our daughter, Kathy, and her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Chrissie, in a Lure Coursing event—and our first ever AirBnB house rental. Technically, it’s Kathy’s rental but we helped pay for it and were there so it’s our rental, too.

The Lure Coursing event was a first for me and, actually, not much more for Kathy and Chrissie. Essentially, there is a long string with three white plastic bags—oh, heck, read all about it here from the experts at the AKC! It boils down to “dogs chase a mechanized, white plastic lure around a 600+ yard course that simulates the unpredictability of chasing live prey.” Great fun for moments interspersed with many moments of sheer boredom enlivened by meeting lots of new dog people.

Kathy and Chrissie (in pink) with Chrissie's running partner.

Back to our Route 66 trip. I suppose it should be Our Route 66 Trip! since it’ll be our first real, long foray out and away from our home since about March of 2020, about 515 day. Well, OK, OK, it’s exactly 515 days or 1 year, 4 months, 28 days or 16 months, 28 days. Not that I’m counting or anything.

Got a new book: The Best Hits on Route 66; 100 Essential Stops on the Mother Road.  This one’s a little different because it only has a few stops (100, just like it says in the title) but a lot of them are not included in the other books, like being able to go up the Willis Tower (I still think of it as the Sears Tower), out on the glass walkway (gulp!) and look down at the start of Route 66. And it goes into more depth on each of the 100 Essential Stops.

Next step, I suppose, is to do a practice pack in the Corvette since we learned on our little trip to Pinetop that the stuff we WANT to take is not the same stuff that we CAN take! We learned that because we had to switch from the Corvette to the Jeep in order to bring everything we wanted. We KNOW we can do it because we went on the Corvette Caravan the year we bought the Corvette and that was about a two week trip. I know we can, I know we can, I know we can…!