Okay, here's this other thing. I've written about our love of a local little mountain town called Crown King quite a bit over the years. Specifically here, here, here, here, and here. Randy and I have been spending long weekends in Crown King for years; there's a single "hotel" up there with maybe eight "rooms", and at least once every July or August Randy would look at me through the heat waves blasting up through our family room floor, and he'd mouth the words Crown King. At which point we'd both bound out of the house to drive the two hours north on a treacherous mountain dirt road until finally emerging into a thick canopy of pine trees and the sweet, merciful sounds of things not drying up and sticking to other things.

We'd always talked about how much we'd love to have a tiny cabin up there in the woods, something really small and manageable, something ridiculously inexpensive and quirky that we could fix up. We also always managed to talk ourselves out of it because cabins by their very nature are expensive. But then we found a cabin that wasn't expensive. An inexpensive cabin. A tiny, manageable, quirky cabin so very, very inexpensive it was like an engraved invitation.

So we bought it. And couldn't believe our luck.

This was last August. We've been working on rehabbing it steadily since then. And I've been taking photos and making notes of the entire process so I could share the whole thing here once we finally finished. Last weekend we hauled the very last piece of furniture up the mountain, and this weekend we'd planned to drive up to do a big final house cleaning and take a bunch of "after" pictures.

But then a fire broke out in the mountains. A house fire. During which a propane tank exploded, setting a pine tree on fire. Wide-eyed witnesses say that was it, that was the beginning of the end, that it took maybe fifteen seconds for the fire to jet across five hundred yards of spruce pine and underbrush, cutting across the mountain like a... well, like a wildfire.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/nation/2012/05/others-leave-ariz-town-wildfires-size-triples/617311

The Gladiator Fire is now pushing 6,500 acres. It's approximately four miles north of our tiny, almost-finished cabin. The town of Crown King is a myriad system of rugged dirt roads nestled inside a natural bowl in the mountains (hence the name Crown King; the Bradshaw mountain peaks surround the town like the peaks of a crown). This topography makes it next to impossible for firefighters to try and fight the fire from inside the town-- if the fire makes a turn toward the south, it will essentially turn the town into a giant trap. For the last few days the wind has been blowing toward the north at 40mph and this is good, this is blowing the blaze away from homes. If the wind shifts, however, or even stops, the firefighters speculate the fire's next natural move would be to double-back on the town and potentially wipe out everything.

I'm absolutely physically ill thinking about the ramifications of this. The thought of losing our little place-- this tiny little retreat that we busted our ASSES to fix up over the last year-- is nothing compared to the thought of losing the entire town. I can't even wrap my mind around it. So I'm going to go ahead and post a bunch of photos I'd taken over the last year, hopefully in some semblance of order, just so they're here and not just trapped on my phone.

These first shots are of the cabin right after we bought it, before we changed anything.

This is the back of the cabin. That boulder is massive, apparently too massive to move, so the original builder just said fuck it and built the house around it. How awesome is that?

I don't even know if I have a picture of the front; the entire thing hangs off a hill on stilts, so from the ground you have to just point the camera up and you can't see anything but deck railing. When you see the deck, that's the front of the house.

Okay, the front of the house from the ground looking up. We spent last Thanksgiving up there assembling IKEA furniture and acting like we'd never seen snow before. 

Again, taken right after we bought it.

There's an amazing little "workshop" behind the house, too, it's like a little playhouse. We toyed with the idea of putting bunkbeds in there and making it a bunkhouse for kids, but then I realized that sleeping in a ten-foot isolated room in the middle of the woods is actually on my Ten Fucking Scariest Things In The World list, so maybe we shouldn't throw my six-year-old nephew and five-year-old granddaughter in there.

The original kitchen.

There was an antique stove here that the previous owners took with them.

From the kitchen looking into the living room. (The whole house is kitchen, family room, two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. It's about 800 square feet.)

The living room looking into the kitchen.

Stove in the family room.

Back wall of the family room. The deck is outside the window.

Urinal!

One of the first things we did was rip out the carpet. And pull up the kitchen tile.

And get DirecTV hooked up because please.

Randy ripped out... all of this.

The next step was trying to wheedle people into helping with the "heavy lifting". Randy's kids were all gung-ho, but we basically had to beg cabinet, appliance, and flooring people to come up. It doesn't translate well into photos, but the foot path from the driveway (a driveway so steep it's only traversable via four-wheel drive. And if it's icy? Either take your chances sliding down or don't try leaving, fool) up to the house is so unbelievably steep and treacherous... I'm not even sure what to compare it to. It's essentially just straight up mountain climbing. You get out of the car after a two-hour trip and you enthusiastically tackle the path to the house, only to discover when you get to the top you legitimately need to sit down for a minute.

We moved the sink to where the old range was and vise versa, so that's the new "sink" you're looking at.

And that's where the new range will go.

Refrigerator and microwave.

From the living room.

Next came the flooring. After a lot of researching and consulting with Chris (who knows about such things), we decided on an imitation wood product made of vinyl; the floor is so extremely crooked we knew a true wood product wouldn't work because it wouldn't have enough give to it. And we really didn't want to put down carpet if we could help it. So with the kids' help, we brought up a trailer loaded with fifty fifty-five pound boxes of vinyl flooring and we unloaded it all into the shed in the driveway. I remember thinking how much it was going to suck to be the flooring guy; he was going to have to move ALL of these boxes up the Path Of Slidy, Rocky Death and into the house. I remember thinking this in the selfishly gleeful way people privately think things when they're asking to be smited by the Universe.

The following weekend, the temperature dropped about forty degrees, no joke. The flooring was scheduled to be installed on Monday, and on Saturday Randy and I were headed up just to make sure everything was cool. But on the way we remembered that the instructions on the flooring clearly stated that it needs to "live" in a room temperature environment for 48 hours before it's installed so it won't contract or expand or otherwise get all fucked up. So Randy started a fire in the living room stove, and he and I carried every single one of those fifty fifty-five pound goddamn boxes from the garage up to the house. In the snow. While it snowed on us. I was wearing cowboy boots, the traction equivalent of wearing Jell-O shots on my feet.

Holy shit, though, look at that floor. The floor might have been the most significant milestone for us, not only because we'd agonized and debated over which material would be best for the job, but also because we'd been spending weekends up here and we were tired of popping air mattresses on carpet staples and bleeding all over everything when we tried to walk to the bathroom barefoot.

After the flooring was in, I was really sweating the appliance delivery. I literally didn't think it could be done.

Those guys routed themselves through the middle of the forest and cats-cradled that shit UP, yo. Took maybe twenty minutes total. Maybe. Unreal.

The same guys who delivered the appliances also helped us unload our trailer full of IKEA furniture. I had originally planned to have all of the furniture delivered by IKEA, if possible, so I grabbed a copy of the delivery specification sheet and ran through all the fine print. It looked like they really would deliver it to us, provided we signed off on some extra fees and a damage waver-- a DEAL as far as I was concerned, since I still had the imprint of a fifty-five pound cardboard box in my hip bone. I called the delivery company, gave them the zip code for Crown King, and was reassured that yes, they WILL deliver to us.

"Look," I broke it down, "This is wilderness. This is an hour of bad dirt road followed by twenty minutes of worse dirt road. And when you get here, you start climbing." I was just trying to be as up front as possible-- the only thing worse than not having the furniture delivered would be having the furniture delivered as far as the driveway. The company ended up sending a dude in a car to check out the situation and yeah, no. No fucking way. (As an aside, the nearest Home Depot is like 45 miles away, and they have a framed photo in their break room of a box truck with both axles ripped off. It's a reminder that they don't deliver to Crown King.)

So the appliance guys helped us out. You know. For money.

Countertops and sink. Those are Formica tops that look a lot like granite.

The kids, excited, got us cabin-themed gifts for Christmas:

My friend Stacy is a phenomenal artist, and I had seen an amazing painting she'd done of a highway exit sign. So one day when the clouds were particularly painting-y, Randy and I stopped on the side of the highway and I took this picture of the Crown King exit:

Which Stacy turned into THIS, HOLY SHIT:

(Stacy, I swear I'm going to take a better picture of it than this; I just haven't taken the SLR up there yet on account of I don't want to carry it up to the house because it's heavy but I KNOW I can get a shot of it that does your work better justice provided it doesn't burn to death in a fire.)

Plus I had a piece of stained glass made to fit the bathroom window above the toilet:

So yeah. We hung towel bars in the bathroom complete with fresh towels. The IKEA double beds are sitting up there now, made up with clean sheets and quilts and this tiny pillow of a Sasquatch:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/91259554/ready-to-ship-your-own-personalA couple weekends ago we hung Randy's prize boar head that he shot when he was twelve.

So yeah, you know. The boar's on the wall, so it's pretty much home.

Do me a favor and keep your fingers crossed, would you? For the safety of the 600 men and women up there fighting this fire, for this hundred-year-old mining town, and for our poor tiny little house with its deathtrap of a walkway. Because I haven't even gotten to tell you about Mothra yet, the neighborhood pterodactyl, and that's a story I'd really like to tell.

I'm still driving back and forth to Tucson every day. Likewise, I still have eight-plus hours of A Dance with Dragons to listen to, but I guess I reached my fantasy recitation threshold or something because I can't bring myself to turn that shit on in the car. I just can't do it. It's almost like a hundred and forty-two hours was enough or something, weird, right? So I'll either have to make time to read it myself with my own eyeballs and one monotonous mental voice or else I'll just read how it ends on wikipedia. Fin.

Since I was here last, I started and ended an unfortunate adventure in audiobooks: I downloaded like seven Stuart Woods novels for absolutely no logical reason. I've never read Stuart Woods and never had any real inclination to read Stuart Woods, and since I've made this particular mistake before, you can probably go ahead and guess how it ends. CLUE: Wonderfully.

Nope. So I start listening to these books and the narrator is reading the protagonist, Stone Barrington, as a 1940s "film noir" detective. Which gets tiresome. These books are set in a relatively modern-day environment, but every time I hear this guy's voice I picture some dude standing in a dark rain wearing a trenchcoat and talking around a cigar. Not to knock the narrator's talent, since he's obviously a multi-faceted voice actor; In the event that another male character finds himself in a dialogue with Stone, that guy is always Russian. And god forbid there are three guys in a scene because Guy Number Three is then necessarily forced to be a Transylvanian vampire. So you might be involved in a scene where a lawyer is having a conversation with a New York cab driver and a cop, but what you're hearing is Sam Spade talking to Yakov Smirnoff with occasional interjections from Count Dracula.

I don't even want to get into how the female characters are voiced OR written because it's just too fucking horrible for words. All of the female characters are narcissistic sex fiends who force the protagonist into bed (or car or bathroom stall or large armoire) literally ten minutes after the initial handshake. And the (many) sex scenes read like they were written by a thirteen-year-old boy, you know? Like, he uses the word "penis" a lot. "Testicles" make a regular appearance. And judging by the context, you're not left with any kind of confident impression that Woods has ever actually HAD sex before. At least half of all sex scenes start with Stone dreaming he's having sex, only it turns out it's not a dream. And I'm not talking "passed out with a head injury" asleep, I mean "dozed off with last month's Esquire in a chaise lounge" asleep.

First of all, how fucking asleep do you have to BE? I've never actually woken up from a leisurely afternoon nap in the sun to discover that oh! wait! That wasn't a dream, there's actually A DUDE INSIDE OF ME RIGHT NOW. I was just resting my eyes for a second and now I'm naked and in Stage Five of a sexual encounter. AGAIN.

Likewise, at least half of said sex scenes end with a sex-starved female begging for a fifth go-round while Stone shuts her down. The female is typically "kneading his penis" as this conversation takes place. She has also been known to "stretch" it. I don't personally have a penis, but I've been around the block a few times and I'm pretty sure penises aren't made out of pie crust dough. For what it's worth, Woods goes out of his way to avoid dealing with the female genitalia at all. When he absolutely can't get around it, you can almost picture him covering his mouth and whispering, "down there," while furtively pointing.

When the women aren't stretching, kneading, or begging, they're busy making horrible decisions for Stone to clean up. Insurance fraud. Murder. Lying about paternity. Gold digging. It's one hundred and ten percent infuriating. And yeah, I listened to like six of these idiot books and I have absolutely no defense. I finally shut the door when two competing female characters were attempting to wheedle a reluctant Stone into a threesome.

Oh, and here's the other thing: Even if you happen to be down with Humphrey Bogart hanging out with Vladimir Putin and The Count for three hours while periodically getting his penis and testicles stretched and kneaded by vapid, evil whores, you still have to find a way to overlook the UNBELIEVABLE glaring errors in plot consistency. In one book, a female character gives birth to a daughter- in the next book, it's a son. The same female character has long blond hair- fifteen minutes later she's a brunette. Fifteen minutes after that, she's blond again. There's literally a scene where two characters are gazing into their coffee cups after dinner, and the NEXT LINE has one of them sipping wine from a wine glass. It's so far past lazy, I can't even deal.

So in summation: I highly recommend Stuart Woods' "Stone Barrington" novels if you enjoy predictable mysteries written by a mysogynistic and overly-masturbatory fourteen-year-old boy with short-term memory loss. Moreover, I highly recommend you listen to said novels if you're into Casablanca or the Kremlin or Count Chocula.

So I downloaded a bunch of audiobooks to my iPhone. The first book I listened to was Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. I have absolutely no idea why I chose this particular book, since I've never read anything by Stephen King and never particularly regretted that decision. But this was the book I chose, right, so let's do this. I got approximately FOUR HOURS into this thing-- four hours out of a total fourteen-- before I finally and mercifully figured out that I was listening to a collection of three short stories and not a fourteen hour novel. That was the best thing about the entire book, actually, the realization that I wasn't going to have to listen to ten more hours of some dude getting eaten alive by rats.

I was feeling pretty good cruising into Story #2, right, what with the rats and the gnawing and the dead woman rotting in the well all in my rearview, but it turns out my relief was shortlived. The second story (unlike the first story) was narrated by a female. A hauntingly familiar female. I sat in my car, both hands on the wheel, listening with my mouth open as this little lilting voice introduced her character-- a young, naive, successful author-- and I tried to get a handle on how I knew her.

"She's a singer," I thought, as she narrated her way through a fictional book signing event. "Or wait, no, she's an actress." She described leaving the event, taking an unfamiliar route, la-di-da.

It was one of those stupid trivia facts you just can't manage to put your finger on-- the kind of trivia you typically bet your mate a dollar over- or a gratuitous sex act, maybe- before reaching for any one of the five Internet machines in your immediate periphery to settle which one of you gets to take their pants off. 

But I was driving, obviously, and not about to scroll through IMDB on the highway, so I had to rely on my brain for data recollection. Worst case scenario. So I'm sitting there, my brain whirring and clicking its way through the dented hard drive, while our protagonist finds herself stranded along the side of the road. And as my brain begins to isolate the file I'm looking for, this poor woman is abducted and viciously sexually assualted by a truck driver. It was right around the time she found herself strangled half to death and naked in a ditch that I realized who this woman was: It was Jessica Hecht. Victoria from Sideways is narrating this nightmare of a story. Susan from fucking Friends is now running naked and bleeding down a dark country road.

I didn't even listen to the third story. It was probably a serial killer memoir voiced by Dakota Fanning.

I downloaded the A Song of Ice and Fire series and I've been listening to that pretty much nonstop since then. I hear a lot of people lamenting the fact that once they finish A Dance with Dragons there won't be another book in the series to read for a while, and I'm pretty sure I've found the solution. Stop reading. Let a theatric British guy read that shit to you instead. Each book is fifty hours long, you will NEVER EVER FINISH, TRUST ME.

I'm sitting here on the floor trying to force iTunes to sync music to my iPhone and perusing Google Reader in the meantime because seriously, let's face facts, iTunes is never going to come through for me, and I read that Mrs. Kennedy is going to post every weekday of 2012.

"Oh!" I thought to myself, iTunes whirring endlessly in the background like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser trying to figure out tea, "Now that's a good idea."

And it is a very, very good idea. I doff my cap to you, Eden. Don't touch it, though, I haven't washed my hair since Friday.

I do genuinely miss this, being here. And I've gotten some sweet comments and emails over the last month or so encouraging me to be here more. So while I can't commit to every weekday, let's give "every once in a while" a shot.

I started working again a few months ago, something I'm actually NOT going to talk about because seriously, fool me EIGHTY THOUSAND TIMES. But I can tell you that this job involves a four-hour commute several days a week. So maybe I should just record myself talking alone in the car for four hours and post THAT. If nothing else, it'll put an end to the sweet comments and emails.

So I'm ironing some Old Navy shorts I bought secondhand in 2003 and I don't know, something must be wrong with my spray starch because all of a sudden they look really threadbare and baggy and one of the pockets just fell off.

I'm guess I'm gonna have to get some new spray starch before I start pressing these long-sleeved thermal Anchor Blue bodysuits from my junior year of high school.

There wasn't much point. Only two channels on the whole stupid television were ever in English. One of them was HBO, which hey! Score! Except that every single time I turned it on, it was playing Funny People. Every city, every province, every hotel. Funny People. On a loop. It seemed an odd choice. Even odder, the Chinese government had edited it down to about forty-seven minutes. If you watch Funny People in China, you have no idea that Adam Sandler is sick or that Laura is married so you come away feeling strangely buoyant the first eleven or so times you watch it.

The other English-speaking channel was some sort of ongoing international news program that managed to be both hypnotizing and totally repellent. The format appeared to be simple-- four people seated behind a news desk discussing world events.

Which seems completely innocuous, right? I turned it on for background noise one morning while I was packing and I found myself concentrating harder and harder on the screen until I was sitting on the carpet, nose to nose with the lead anchor with my knees tucked up under my chin.

For starters, there was absolutely zero background distraction on this channel. No tickers, no scrolling feed, no station indicator, no weather map, no blue screen, no digitized dancing bears, no background props, no lettered signs of any type, no wall paint. It was like watching hostages debate one another in an abandoned warehouse on a hidden video feed.

Secondly, one of these people only communicated in Chinese. So when the other three people were discussing something in English? Dude Number Four would throw his two cents in there in Mandarin while everyone else sat back and listened, and then the other three would comment on what he just said in English. No translation of any of it, just moving right along. It was exactly like watching Hank Hill and Boomhauer have a conversation. Only, I suspect, more cerebral.

And I say "suspect" because (thirdly) I never had the slightest idea what these people were talking about. I think I have a fairly realistic grasp of how much I know versus how much I don't know (a little versus a lot), but over the years I've read enough about the world and attended enough college that I never expect to be utterly flabbergasted when I watch the news. I never expect to find myself perched on a hotel room floor in China with one eye squeezed shut, poking at the television screen with a shaky index finger and muttering bullshit under my cold, cold breath.

"Well, today marks the 3,529th Annual Festival of Anspi today in Bananastekistan and the parades are in full swing. From sunrise to sunset, the royal children will be gathering dragonflower vines and butternut roots to make their ceremonial capes, and the villagers have been hard at work for weeks building the ten-story llama lofts."

The other newscasters smile and nod. The Chinese guy shuffles some papers and interjects in Mandarin.

"Oh, absolutely!" someone answers, laughing. "I was in Bananastekistan two years ago for the festival and it was simply amazing. I still have my wooden pith helmet full of glitter and moss."

Then just as quickly as it started, it's over. Their smiles vanish in unison like ships lost at sea.

"The euro zone debt crisis reached a critical point yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average once again fell short of wide expectations despite an overall rise in commodities trading."

But it's too late, I can't be cured by banality, I'm already curled up in a sweaty ball with my face all screwed up trying to figure out what the fuck I just heard.

Randy walked into the room then, back from his breakfast salad foraging, and he informs me that it's now 6:20am and I better get my luggage out to the bus if I have any hope of seeing it tomorrow morning in Kunming.

"Have you ever heard of Bananastekastan?" I ask him.

"What?" he answers, and I am at once smug and validated.

"Oh wait. You mean 'BananastekIStan'," he corrects, "of course I have. The llama lofts are supposed to be unbelievable."

I pretty much summed it up back in 2008, there's really not much more to say about it. Except maybe to add that I'm now legitimately prepared to wake up one morning three years from now to discover the lower third of our mattress severed and lying on the floor.