(NOTE: Yesterday is now fully operational.)
Pity, if you will, Nick, who is the guy at the hotel who knows computer stuff. He has been informed by a guest that he cannot connect to the internet. Nick has been here before. Nice is here every day. Nick can usually solve things, but the network is a tetchy gal and has been known to buck and toss a rider for no reason. I can easily put myself in Nick’s shoes, so when he approaches I explain the problem:
“I am connected to the network, but I can’t force the reconnect that launches the login window. I have cleared my browser cache and restarted. I have pop-ups enabled. I have forgotten the network and remembered it. I have repeated the problem with three browsersI found a reddit thread about this very hotel chain and the wifi problems, and it said that the best way to force the redirect to the login window is to go to a site never used before, so there’s no cruft to get in the way, or to use an http site instead of an https site. This I have done. Nothing works.”
Nick brightens a little, because we will be able to speak the same lingo here, but also he sags a bit because I might have just walked on stage during a magic act, explained every trick, then asked him to do the last one he hasn’t practiced.
We did not fix it. Nick said it’s a chain-wide laptop problem. That’s okay. It’s not mission critical.When Wife made a request at 10:25 last night to change the video, I uploaded it to the cloud and back down to all devices, so I can run the up-to-date versions.
We have been up for a very long time. Left at 5:30 AM, got to the airport to a HUGE SECURITY THRONG which of course produced agita. I had made reservations in the line, and had been surprised when the window was 3:25 AM, but okay. The stolid matron manning the reservation line: “You missed your window.”
“That was the only one I could reserve.”
“That’s because they didn’t have any others,” she said, brusquely. No Minnesota Nice here. Fine. The line moved along because they were using the dog, which means you can keep your shoes on and don’t have to remove items from your backpack. (There’s a phrase that would have made no sense a few decades back.) We boarded, and I took some lovely takeoff footage:
And then everyone tried to sleep. They could not. I could. Landed to warmth and sun. Got the car and drove to Wife’s mother’s house.
We had been thinking, as ever, of moving down here, but that was when her brother was alive, and we’d see him, his kids, now and then. Now that’s gone and the whole place seems like an indifferent sprawling void in which we would have no compelling reason to reseat ourselves. Give up everything in Minnesota, and then one day just find that’s us, here, and why, exactly? But I’m also feeling over and forgotten in Mpls and tired of it all. So what, exactly?
Never mind that now. There’s the dinner to get through. Natalie is off with her cousins, the Cool East Coast Cousin working on no sleep at all.
The hotel is nice. It is new.
It is a Hilton Garden, one of the sub-brands that has a particular demographic pitch, like the rest. My wife wanted something to eat, and the map said there was a Great American Grill in the building. Are we doing that again? The Great American thing? I guess. We walked to the lobby, and I realized that the bar and buffet in the lobby was, in fact, aforementioned Grill. It was unmistakably American, but its claim to greatness eluded us, especially since it was closed. Well, no matter, she said - do you still have those nut bars? Of course. I had set aside KIND bars for wife and daughter as plane rations. I had also, the night before, made three Egg McMuffins with cheese and sausage, and put them in the fridge to be jammed down in the 30 minutes we had between waking and the cab. They were delicious. Wife took ten extra minutes and hence did not have time for one.
“Egg McMuffins are for closers,” I snapped, because she was late. I am a bad, bad man on airport mornings.
On the way to the airport she reminded me to text the house sitter to give Birch the pieces of steak on a white plate in the fridge. I nodded, knowing I had tossed them the night before down the sink grinder because they were six days old. I texted her to give him the Egg McMuffin.
I’m getting my narrative flow mixed up here, I realize. Back to the hotel. It is, as I said, rather new, and that is the appeal of certain parts of the world. They are fresh and bright and new. Scottsdale seems to be ever-expanding, more communities, additional office buildings - wonder if everyone has been commanded back to work. There is no center, no there there except for Old Downtown, but some of the new communities build ready-made centers of their own so the places will cohere. It’s all atomized and car-centric. I am not bothered at a moral level about the car-centric aspect, but still.
No, I don’t think we’re going to move.
But. I was looking at some neighborhoods, and one of them had the name Cave Creek. One of its restaurants was Cowboy Pizza. And the 9 year old in you suddenly wants to live in Cave Creek and eat Cowboy Pizza and call people Podner and tip your hat as they walk past you on the Front Street, where you’re leaning against a hitching post. Surely that’s all there in spirit, somehow, just below the red dirt. But then you think: quite possibly this is good marketing, calling up an idea of the Frontier to sell houses with swimming pools that quietly gurgle all night while a robot cleans the surface and periodically squirts a jet of chlorine like a poisonous squid.
But. Isn’t there always the sight of the hills, the mountains, silhouetted against the night? The stars? The howl of a lone coyote? Yes, I suppose you can imagine and connect with old myths and archetypes, but mostly you will be on the road behind someone in a shiny car heading home to watch the local hockey team.
A hockey team. In the desert. God Bless America. But this particular iteration, tantalizing and possible for so many years now, will not be my future. I think that’s off the table for good.
LATER We found a great house! It’s in the hills. Just the right size, and -
Kidding.
Tomorrow: Attack of the AV Geeks
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