I have been visiting my parents in Arizona since sometime shortly before Thanksgiving Day.

I'll need to go home soon, at least for a day or so, if only to collect my mail before the USPS sends some of it back to its senders and discards the rest. I would like to come back to be at my parents' home on Christmas Day.

Shortly after I got here, my mother told me that she had an artist's light box that had stopped working and that she had replaced but that she'd been holding on the chance that I'd want to try to repair it. Its fluorescent ballast had failed. I was able to find a replacement unit with the same ratings and form factor at a local Ace Hardware. (The box has used a 15W bulb, the ballast can handle anything from about 14W to about 20W.) Some of the original connections had been made with twist-on wire nuts, so I used these for the extra connections of the repair. The parts came to less that US$10; the actual work on the box took a very few minutes. The restored box is worth about US$200. I offered to return it to my mother, or to trade it to her for the newer box (which lacks a built-in tilt-stand), but my mother insists that I keep it. It will be nice to have.

My brother and his wife now live in the same general area as do my parents, so I have seen a fair amount of them during my visit. Also, one of my cousins (a very nice guy who suffers from some significant cerebral impairment as a result of mishap in utero) has been visiting my mother for the last few days.

Although I've spent a lot of time staring at the computer screen (much as I would be doing if back in Hillcrest), my mother has taken me (sometimes with others) out to see some of the sights.

Although the right sort of job offer would get me to move here, Arizona is very far from what I would consider an ideal place to live. I much prefer the physical geography and most aspects of the culture of the Pacific Northwest along I-5, especially in the area of Portland. (The politics of Portland is to my left, but the politics of Arizona is very much to my right.)

Tohono Chul Park Seasonal Display

I didn't get a chance to ride the bicycle that my father gave me. The vehicular gate to the parking area of the apartment complex in which I live was mysteriously disabled; and a few days later, on 25 November, exactly one thing was stolen — that bicycle. Whoever stole it came prepared with something that could cut through a heavy-duty security cable.

I learned of the theft on the morning of 26 November, as I was packing my car for a trip to visit my parents. The complex manager promised to review the video recorded by the security cameræ. Since the bicycle wasn't visible from the street and the thief or thieves were prepared with cable cutters, I'm pretty sure that the theft was by a party including someone who had been on the property earlier, and that said person or persons had disabled the gate. He, she, or they were probably attendant to the position of the security cameræ.

As unhappy as I was, I considered not travelling, but I knew that I would make my parents very sad if I didn't come. So I went ahead.

On top of ordinary reasons for visiting them, I had been asked to help them get their computers up-graded from Windows XP SPs 1 or 2 to SP3. Although SP3 installed without difficulty on my Windows partition, the installation aborted on each of their machines. Well, we have SP3 on their machines now, but the processes have been trips through mine-fields, with many explosions.

We ultimately resorted to formatting the principal hard drive of my father's desk-top computer, and installing everything from scratch except in-so-far as we have over-written much of the new contents of the Application Data folder with the old contents. It seems to be in reasonably good shape now.

Things went smoother with respect to my mother's lap-top computer, but (at this stage) the OS knows that the built-in sound card is some sort of audio device, but does not recognize it as a Playback or Recording device. In fact, the OS likewise cannot tell what sort of audio device a SoundBlaster PCMCIA card is. I've tried many things, and visited many sites looking for a fix, but have so far failed.

As I've fought with the computers, my mother has repeatedly acted as if my father has been pushing me too hard to solve the problems, while actually my father has at various stages pushed me to quit working the problems hours before I would normally want to stop. I greatly wish that neither would act this way.

Also making me unhappy is the reduced opportunity to talk with the Woman of Interest. My parents are Morning People, and operating on something like their schedule greatly reduces my window of opportunity to speak to her. Then, because I use a head-set, people don't have a good visual cue that I'm using the phone. People have a propensity to start talking to me without first listening to whether I'm in conversation. And, finally, a fair amount of my normal telephone interaction with the Woman of Interest involves one or both of us being relatively quiet for extended periods. (We have unlimited connection time within the Sprint PCS network,[1] and so leave the connection in place and interact as if separated by a room partition.)

My brother and his long-time girl-friend also came for Thanksgiving, but left on the week-end. Yester-day, they got a quick civil marriage. Later, they will have a bigger ceremony to which they can invite friends and family. What precipitated the marriage seems to have been that my brother was offered a job in Tucson shortly after being laid-off from his job in Austin. I think that his girl-friend reälized that she should seal-the-deal. (Yes, she seems to have been the one most reluctant to commit.) My parents and I really like her.

With my brother moving to Tucson, my father is now speaking wishfully of my moving here as well. But he does understand that I would much rather live in or near the forests of the Pacific Northwest than in the Arizona desert.

Yester-day, my cousin Lyn (a really nice guy, who suffered some sort of in utero cerebral damage) came to visit my mother. I tagged along as they ran errands yester-day, and to-day as they went to Sweetwater Wetlands and to Tohono Chul Park.

My parents were in-town from Friday after-noon into Sunday morning. Dad came in part to do a reading and book-signing at Mysterious Galaxy Books.

My parents were quite surprised by my appearance, not having seen nor been warned about the sideburns. My mother insisted that I now have a beard.

They brought with them a bicycle that my father used. He now finds it too hard on his hips, and so gave it to me. It has been more than fifteen years since I owned a bicycle, and more than twenty years since I rode on one. I'll hope that riding a bicycle is just like riding a bicycle.

He also gave me a couple of surplus Logitech computer mouses (one in need of repair and the other essentially brand new), and books and copies of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I gave to Dad the crushable Aussie hat that I got for him, and a Beanie Baby husky. (Dad is not know for being a fan of Beanie Babies, but we have fond memories of our last family dog, a Siberian Husky.) I completely forgot to give to them any of the CFLs that I got when they were on sale.

I have plans to travel to Tucson for Thanksgiving, in part because my parents' computers need some sort of maintenance.