Authors Electric

  'April is the cruellest month," T, S. Eliot lied in The Waste Land. An American in London, he'd never been to Tucson in the blazing month of June. If he had, he'd have been less poetic and howled with his brain frying. The average June temperature--dry heat, as they like to say--is about 100 degrees, with highs of 110 or higher..  Yes, we have desert rats riding their bikes without t-shirts or caps. Then again, in Alaska some like to jog or skinny dip when the temp is minus 80 degrees F. For the most part many on both coasts make what peace they can with the weather. Having spent half my life in heavily snowbound places, I know what it's like to hibernate for 4-5 months a year. But I had trouble adjusting to the desert's stifling heat. At first, I resented my staying indoors, dehydrated and exhausted. Even with air conditioning and an overhead fan, the writer in me withered. From mid-May to mid-September, I lost the city that I'd come to love. And I felt ...

In this new year, my life's become a war zone waged upon two fronts: 1)  Frantic efforts to pack for the move on August 2  to Tucson, AZ--though I'm recovering painfully from arthroscopic surgery. 2) Speaking of which, I must spend from 7-10 hours a day on rehab, both PT and home recovery. Since I have only until 8/2, when I move, I must make every hour count. So long for now to the old sense of myself as a practicing writer. My WIP, the final entry in the Seattle BOP mystery series, though drafted remains untranscribed. And a new series set in Tucson calls for more time and thought than I can spare. How could this be? I'd prepared for this move for a year. Yet here I sat, three weeks away--still at a loss for advanced tricks in moving orchestration. E.g.: I'll arrive by train on August 4 with several boxes of premium stuff, including an inflatable mattress and a collapsible chair. Assorted boxes will arrive by post while the bulk of my stuff will be delivered by mid-Au...

  No. no, Austin Powers! I don't mean shake your booty, I mean move your butt--as in relocate from coast to coast, state to state, possibly country to country. Lord knows, I've done them all for a grand total of some 30 moves. So you can imagine my consternation, as an expert on the subject, when I found myself hamstrung and befuddled in the middle of  a move: from Seattle to Tucson, Arizona.  With just three months to go before D-Day in August, and with a strong foundation already in place, my head had started spinning from thoughts of the puzzles I couldn't complete:   --How, on a limited budget, could I afford a professional mover and a junk remover?   --How could I adapt to the changes since 2014, when I moved to Seattle with only a steamer trunk and four boxes? Amtrak will no longer handle a trunk--or allow checked luggage for relocation. Plus, in the past eight years, I've acquired a slew of possessions I value--not the least of them being new books. ...