Beacon lit in Staines

There is a project to light at least 2012 beacons today (Monday) for the Diamond Jubilee celebration, in the UK and Commonwealth countries. We just got back from a Scout-organized beacon ceremony in Staines, at the field where Adam does archery. It's a cricket field, too, and has practice cages. There were quite a few people there, mostly Scouts and their families.

Here was the unlit beacon--a metal cage mounted on a pole.

There was a prayer, delivered from the ladder-podium,  I might be able to find the text of it on one of the beacon sites.

Just now on BBC1 they said the Queen lit the last of 4220 beacons.  The aim was 2012; they quite overshot it.  No problem.

Philadelphia and the last turkey sandwich

I was at the wrong gate. I'm lucky to be in Philadelphia at all.

I'm glad to be here, because I discovered I was at the wrong gate when the crowd cleared and didn't replenish itself.

There's a gate change here, too, but I plan to triple check when the time is near.

I got hungry on the flight, so I got out thinking "All I want is a simple $8 turkey sandwich," and I only had to walk about a quarter of a mile to find one. Success!! If I get a sandwich in England, it should be a chip butty, or have cucumbers or fish or something.

So out the window 50 miles as the plane flies from Philadelphia, I saw pretty, stripey farms cut out of the forest. There were trails cut for power lines. In New Mexico, farms are irrigated out of the desert (if they're not right by the river, anyway), but here they seem all carved from surrounding woods.

From the plane I saw a deep, deep... pool? Greenish water. An old quarry, maybe, with trees all grown in on the terraced parts. Maybe just a mine, but it had been disused and growing trees for a long time.

I'm trying to charge up all my "electronic devices" before getting on the long flight. My phone is dead (for no good reason), but the outlet is full and It's about to be unused for many weeks, so I think I'll just let that go.

Phoenix to Philadelphia

To go from an "A" town to another "A" town (Albuquerque to Ashford), I need to spend the day in "P" towns: Phoenix and Philadelphia. For another $1500 (or much more), I could've gone more directly, but I'm in the cheap seats. Time travel is fun, though. I left Albuquerque around 6:00 a.m. and got to Phoenix at 6:00 a.m. Nice. Seems a waste of time-not-passing, to have gone so far in the wrong direction. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is just to sit and fly, I guess. And to abuse Tennyson quotes in a medium he couldn't have imagined. So at 7:00 Albuquerque time (tonight, I mean; p.m.) I'll leave the U.S. bound for Heathrow Airport. Keith was nice to take me to the airport at 4:20. a.m.

This isn't what I should be doing, but I don't want to do what I should be doing. That would be trying to figure out the forms I need to fill out online to confirm what I said in February, that I would speak at the HSC conference. I was assured then that a contract would be sent soon. I finally heard from them again a couple of weeks ago, just before I was leaving for Massachusetts and Oregon/Washington. And I need to find the two receipts for what I paid for flights (the original and the replacements after the dates were changed) for the Florida conference.

I'm really looking forward to both of those events, and I hope a bunch of you (people reading this, if you're in the US and can afford to go) will be there! I'm going to have fun! I'm going to be a charming and inspirational speaker! But today I'm going to avoid "doing the paperwork" (paperless though it will be).

I'm at US Airways Gate A-25 just in case anyone wise in the geographical ways of Phoenix Sky Harbor wants to picture me. I'm across from a cooler of sandwiches and drinks with those typical-to-southern-Arizona strips of heavy plastic, overlapping, that people reach through to get their food, so that the cold doesn't get sucked out by the (even air-conditioned) heat.

When the plane came in, and it was six in the morning, we were warned that it was really hot outside, and were asked to close the window shades in the whole plane so it wouldn't get too hot while sitting.

I would take a photo of myself, but people get testy about having strangers take their photos in places likethis. I saw a family clearly headed to a wedding--the 20-yr-old-looking girl had a green dress in a big plastic bag. Bride's maid business. But she and the other young woman in the party of eight were wearing fleece pajama pants and t-shirts and looked tired. They wouldn't have wanted their photos taken. The two moms with three kids trying to get to a Mexican town I have never heard of, who had missed a flight, would not have wanted their pictures taken. And it's crowded now, at 10:30 in the morning.

I'm trying to look at it as my last day in the U.S. for seven weeks and some. Familiar clothes, drinks, food. Little kids whose accents I can understand (even the Spanish-speaking kids squealing and running, not knowing their poor moms were stressing out--good for the moms to let them play in peace). Familiar desert-camouflage fatigues.

There were two little kids singing loudly and with feeling

I like to eat, eat, eat
Apples and bananas

but they didn't seem to know any more than the first two lines of the song. I was tempted to sing on through it with different vowels and the full tune, but nah... And I thought that song might not even work outside of north America, because the internal rhyme would fail.

My two days at home were spent packing some things to mail and 63 books to ship in five boxes to three different Amazon distribution warehouses; in doing laundry and re-packing (Keith helped). Thursday Marty and I went to get him a new phone and we went to lunch and that was nice. Friday Holly and I went shopping for a dress for her to wear to a wedding, and found one the salesman and I really liked (at a kind of rastafarian import kiosk at the mall) and one she really liked at Anthropologie. Holly noted the different sales strategies: The rasta guy assured her she would be the only girl in Albuquerque with that dress. The attendant in the fancy dressing room at Anthropologie told her the dress was selling very well.

Traveling, sleeping

I can hardly believe I haven't posted about the Massachusetts visit, or Life is Good. No time. I've been sleeping plenty (which is good) and visiting and playing games. I've been speaking formally and informally.

There are some pictures from the YMCA camp in Massachusetts here:
http://allinmay2012.blogspot.com/2012/05/speakers.html
and
on Laurie W's: http://joyful-abundance.blogspot.com/2012/05/massachusetts-allin-may-2012.html

My room in Vancouver, Washington, has a deck, and the view is something like this (only three-dimensional without the distortion):

In the hotel lobby is a computer. It's where I'll print my boarding passes tomorrow, and the labels for sending books on to Pam Sorooshian's house. The background picture seems clearly to be from/of New Mexico.

Conference in Florida in October!

Testing a link/button for the Florida conference this October:

Not a good day for it, as I'm leaving town in the morning, but I just spent a long time changing reservations for me and Holly (the conference dates changed) and getting Keith a ticket on the same flights. Those things stress me, and I'm a little shocked by the price of changing a flight. But it's done, and I have a few months to recover. :-)

Holly says this will be the second time she's gone on a trip with just me and Keith. The three of us drove to see Kirby a couple of years ago.

Home Alone

Everyone's gone but me. It's very overcast and looks like it could rain. Yesterday it rained. I stood in the garage leaning on Keith, smelling that first-rain-for-a-long-time smell, and being glad to be home, looking at so much rain we couldn't see the mountains.

Today Keith and Marty are in Colorado Springs (Dragonsspine, actually, for Outlands coronation).  They went separately.  I woke Keith up at 1:30 so he could leave before 2:00.  He'll spend the night at Needham's house in Pueblo.

Marty went with Jeff early.  I was asleep, from 2:00 to nearly 9:00, and stayed in the bed another hour.  This is a celebration of home.

Holly left for an afternoon at a give-away swap in a park, with Will.  Then they're going to a house concert.

The house is silent. No appliances, no music, no movies.  Just quiet, at the moment.

I haven't been blogging much, but I plan to use this blog for notes on my travels, and there are about to be a BUNCH of them.  I'll just paste what I sent to the chatnotes subscribers:

The chatroom can be used anytime by any group of unschoolers who want to go in there. And if people want to keep the Wednesday routine, please feel free to show up there! I won't be there for a while, though, because...
I'll be in airplanes every Wednesday for a month straight.

• Albuquerque to Boston May 16

• Boston to Portland May 23

• Portland to Albuquerque May 30

• London to Geneva June 6

Then the flying slows down, but the being busy doesn't.

• camping with unschoolers in France June 13

• being in or driving to the Yarrow Valley in Scotland June 20

Back to planes:

• London to Amsterdam June 27

• Amsterdam to London July 4

So after this week my next potentially free Wednesday is July 11. I didn't realize that until I started making this list! But seriously, I'll be in England. I would rather be at a fish and chips shop than sitting in front of the computer. I'm sure you understand.July 18, a Wednesday, I'm returning to Albuquerque.
July 25 I'll try to be in the chatroom, on time, and without a topic from the book. We can talk then about chats, and the summer, and what people have been doing.

I lined through June 20.  That leg of the trip is off, possibly to be completed in summer of 2013.  Three or four different inconveniences rolled into one "better to wait," and so there will be less rush and stress in my summer, but still a lot of travelling.

I'll put the photos here!

Cat's ass night

The phrase/word on Wheel of Fortune looked like _ _ _ _ L E _ _ A P and I was thinking "rattle trap." But it was bubble wrap. And I had just two hours before bought and used bubble wrap. And it reminds me of DrawSomething, which I was playing a lot for a while and not so much lately. :-) For the past ween and some I have off an on read and read at Amazon to see how to get books from my house to their warehouse so they can sell them directly. I would read until I was too confused to go on, or until I came to a place that seemed I needed to upgrade my version of Excel, or something else daunting. Today I finally gave in and arranged to get help by phone (once I found the "get help by phone" section again). I needed to send four boxes, to three different distribution centers. I'm writing this partly to have a record of when it started. The first two were difficult; the second two I understood it better. This summer when I'm traveling, though, people can order books without Keith or Holly needing to send them. I need to remember to change the webpages on my site. Marty and Ashlee are going to see The Avengers at midnight. They already have tickets, and they're going to stand in line at 9:00 to get seats with their friends. Holly and I brushed and washed (some) our fat old cat Shadow, who hides in the sewing room most of the time. But every Tursday night, she comes in the den to let me scratch her and pet her while I watch my favorite shows. She can't clean herself very well anymore. Holly and I have had it on the calendar for a week to help her tonight, so we were ready with wash cloths, warm water and towels, and Shadow showed up right on schedule. We just went outside to see the moon, heck the hot tub, between shows (The Mentalist starts soon; this post has taken me two hours during commercials). Shadow is out there on the lawn and just meowed and meowed at us. I guess she's feeling good! She wasn't hiding. She was bragging and talking. :-)