It’s the eve of the house! It’s so hard to believe it’ll be here tomorrow. I just hope nothing goes wrong. We don’t need any incompetent fuck-ups working for us. As it is, we’re wondering things. Things like - why didn’t Palm Harbor check out what roads they’d be driving the house on? When are they gonna get trees and shit like that out of the way? They have to widen the road. The house is way too wide for it. Remember, most of these dirt roads out here only get a few cars a day on them. We’re so remote that we make Tammy seem like she’s in a little city. She can get to a store sooner than 20 minutes, and she doesn’t have 7 miles of dirt roads to drive on before she hits paved roads. Her nearest neighbors aren’t two football fields away, either. Aside from the few main 2-lane dirt roads, most of the dirt roads are single-lane roads that look more like large paths. Some of these roads are actually driveways leading to people’s houses.

Anyway, all I can do for now is hope everyone knows what they’re doing; the people driving the two house halves, Gravity and his crew, APS, the well driller, etc. It’s the damn well permit we’re waiting on. We may be able to get the house set up quickly with electricity and septic but be delayed from moving in cuz of the well, which will hold up the inspection.

They still have some standard procedures to go through too, before the house can be set up. They’ve got to level the land, clear away brush, and do a termite treatment.

I did some ant treatments today. God, I hate those ants! At least you can spot them from a distance, cuz they surround their holes with those weeds that have those stickers I hate. They peel off the little stickers and use those. I don’t know why they do this, but they haul pieces of it that are barely a quarter of an inch long and place them around their holes. I’ve seen them at work carrying the things. They have big black ants as well as little red ants.

I made myself a nice little walking trail that I not only get good exercise on but good color as well. I walk when it’s not too hot or too dark. I’d love to expand my little trail, but I can’t get by these washes too easily where the brush is too dense, and you just never know what creatures could be lurking in there. It’s still a good long trail, though. Way bigger than the perimeter of our Phoenix lot (these lots are numbered and we’re number 40).

At sundown, but while we still had enough light, I took him for a walk on the trail with me. He said he didn’t realize how far around we were going at such a bad time for snakes, and I was like, bad time for snakes?! He says snakes are out in the early mornings and early evenings and that they’re cold-blooded and cannot take heat or cold. Oh. I thought they were mostly out all through the night and were pretty much nocturnal like rats, but nope. Thank God one of us is a native and knows how this stuff works.

While we were out walking Tom said he saw them working on the houses behind us. I’m not looking forward to people moving in there! Not the people, but their dogs. A dogless household is so rare in Arizona and a dog that lives indoors is even rarer. Poor Gloria. She’s got to be going crazy with the two collies and the three dogs the people who bought our place have.

It’s still so weird that I don’t hear dogs here every night. That group of dogs that’s about a mile away were going off yesterday at dusk as we were leaving for our last night at the La Quinta, but not tonight. Tom mentioned the possibility of someone breeding greyhounds when we first heard it, and we saw one running around loose on our way into town earlier, but who knows for sure if what we heard really are greyhounds? No matter what they are, it’s nice not to hear them every evening, but I still wonder why we don’t. Just my inquisitive nature, I guess. Tom suggested it may have to do with the direction of the wind, but I doubt it. Those dogs were still loud enough and close enough to be heard even if the wind was blowing their barks away from us.

Tom refilled the trailer’s two propane tanks today and says we won’t have to empty the duty tank till we’re done with the trailer cuz it’s barely half full. That’s nice to know we don’t have to dig a hole every week to dump it. At first I was like - all this shit and we’re only half full? But we are only here a few days a week, after all.