I don't watch American Idol or any of
the other singing shows on TV for a lot of reasons but mostly because
I've never been a big fan of pop music. That may either be a question
of taste or it just might be that I'm a snob.
So, until moving to Landers, my little
world did not include singing sensation Phillip Phillips. I'd never
heard of him, never listened to his singing, and knew no more about
him than anyone reading this knows which direction I'm facing or what
I have on.
But, in my move up here, I was
separated from the music I'm used to. The radio station I listened to
pretty much since I was sixteen is too distant and its signal
probably can't make it over the surrounding mountains. There are
radio stations I was able to pick up in the truck that was hauling my
stuff and in my Jeep when I drive from the real world to this desert
outpost, and the local one when I was moving in broadcast a few times
a song I've come to associate with my new life in Landers.
I first heard it when moving in, and
latched onto it as my desert home anthem.
A few weeks after moving in (and
hearing it several more times), I learned its name and found a video
of the singer performing it
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRkntoHkIE)
. I was unhappy that the song was by an American Idol winner since I
try to avoid anything having to do with that phenomenon, but there
you have it.
The singer is cute enough to be
popular, I guess, it borders on being too country for my tastes, but
there's enough flags in the video to satisfy most people. I can't
honestly say I love the song. It's just that I consider it my welcome
to Landers so it has an emotional appeal that I doubt anything else
he does would.
Like most songs on the radio, I just
heard it as background noise, never paid any attention to the lyrics,
and only heard the “make this place your home” line. Only much
later did I pay enough attention to hear it correctly with the
preceding “I'm gonna..” part, but it stuck in my mind as “you're
gonna make this place your home.”
Fortunately, this blog entry isn't
about the song. I've already said too much.
I'm certainly no expert on buying homes
or escrow practices, but in the three times I've purchased property
I've always been struck by how anti-climatic it is when escrow closes
and the property is finally, legally and officially mine. There's
never any formal ceremony, no shaking of hands, no official
paperwork, just a call from the realtor telling me that I can pick up
the key.
Which, after all the stress,
frustration, mysteries, and edginess that the escrow process creates
in me, is almost a letdown. After all that, after spending or
obligating myself to spend more money than I can imagine, I get a key
or two that you can pick up in a store for no more than a couple
dollars.
In this case, when I bought the desert
place to make my home, I got three keys.
Two of the keys are for the door (I
almost wrote “front door” just out of habit, but since this place
only has one door, that descriptive, limiting adjective is
unnecessary), one for the deadbolt and the other for the spring lock.
That's fairly typical in the houses I've owned or lived in.
The other key is for the padlock that
fastens one of the gates closed.
As I've mentioned before, while the
property is 2.5 acres in size, the house is surrounded by a
chain-link (hurricane) fence that encloses about half that. At the
corner of the paved road and the dirt one is one gate and farther
down the dirt road is the other. Both gates are made of two sections
and each of them is held closed by a length of chain that is fastened
by a padlock.
That's a very common thing, at least
around here.
Some people, maybe the rich ones, have
actual locks on the gates, some going even farther than that and
having electric gates that can be opened from inside the car. Most of
us, though, just have a length of chain wrapped around the gate tying
it to the post or, like in this case, holding the two sections of
gate together.
It was this farther gate that the third
key fit, and that gate is the one I'd been using.
The realtor mentioned a third, mystery
key that was inside the place and I found it just inside the door.
After settling in, some time the next day, I walked up to the front
gate, which looked as though it hadn't seen any use for years, and
tried it. The key fit in the lock, but wouldn't turn. I sorta
shrugged.
Since the lock on the farther,
northern, gate was better (bigger, more manly) than the cheap one on
the corner gate, I didn't think of it as much of a loss. Also, the
entrance to the north gate, maybe because it had seen much more
recent use, was smoother.
A few days later in a burst of optimism
I tried that key in the corner lock and was just as rewarded as I had
been the first time. The key, simply put, just didn't work, not even
after the liberal application of graphite.
So, I shrugged, spit on my hands, and
attacked the lock with my hacksaw.
After a few minutes of desperate
sawing, I'd made no impression on the lock at all. I thought about
prisoners and them getting hacksaw blades in cakes, about spending
mindless hours working on the lock with hopes of freedom, but soon
grew bored with the tiny results my sawing were creating on the lock.
So, I gave up.
Then, about a week ago, there was the
envelope left on the north gate with a couple keys inside, the name
and phone number of the guy who'd left it, and carrying the message
“These might be the for the front gate.”
Well, despite my hopes and eagerness,
they weren't.
They were, in fact, two more copies of
the one useless key I already had. But, it got me busy and I went
back to Home Depot, bought the type of hacksaw blade that actually
works on padlocks, and in about ten to fifteen minutes had managed to
cut the lock open.
I already had a couple padlocks that
I'd used for securing my bike to replace the now cut one, so I could
begin using the front gate (if it worked). The years of disuse had
not been overly kind to the gate, and it took some work to move the
rocks and blocks that had been placed at the foot of the two gates.
One of the gates proved too deeply buried in sand and brush to move
easily, but less work was needed to swing the other one open.
Next, Minardi and I got in the Jeep and
tried out the “new” gate. There's a lot more vegetation around
that front gate, even inside the chain-link fence, which I didn't
feel like running over senselessly, but we were able to make it in
and out of the gate a few times with success (but with much more
jostling over the crevices in the sand that resulted from years of
water. The beginnings of another grand canyon is up near that corner,
but it's still several million years away from completion).
In the end, I swapped the chain and
locks between the two gates (the hefty and newer lock doesn't fit in
the smaller chain that had been used to hold the front gate closed)
and exclusively used the front gate for the past few days.
Then the original lock began giving me
problems. It would unlock, but not open, and was getting more
reluctant with every use. Rather than being locked outside my own
place, another visit to Home Depot ended up with my buying not one,
but a set of two new padlocks that were the same model and design as
that original, but now failing, one. Even better, both new locks took
the same key, so I could fasten both gates and have one fewer key to
carry around and confuse me.
I also ended up buying a new set of
deadbolt / spring lock for the door, which also use the same key. Not
the same one as the padlocks, but instead of carrying around four
keys (one for each padlock, one for the deadbolt, and a fourth for
the spring lock), I could lessen my load and have only two!
Yesterday I replaced the door locks,
fastened the front gate with one of the new padlocks, and as soon as
I get some larger chain, will be able to use the other new padlock on
the north gate.
This, when you live in the desert,
might be considered progress.
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