Making for Mecca ...

My leaving Redding has been on the agenda since I arrived but it really started looming large last January. Finally, after being told I was going, being told I might be let go, being told I was going etc, etc, etc … well, I'm going. But not to Santa Maria as originally planned. Nope. Now it's off to San Diego but with a 12 mos stint in Phoenix first. Yep, Phoenix. This California native is going to follow the work and give the desert lifestyle a try. So last week I made the journey to Mecca (Phoenix headquarters) once again. This time to attend the mid-year company meeting, to find a place to live and to set in motion the next chapter of life.

I left on a Thursday morning from Redding on one of those teeny, tiny, toy airplanes that I “love” so much, flew into SFO and arrived relatively unscathed. Whew. We left SFO on time headed for Phoenix on what I finally surmised must have been the female pilot’s maiden voyage because the plane pitched and yawed in every conceivable direction on it’s sea of air. Having had nothing but coffee all day, my body's response to all this was to get frighteningly close to giving me the chance to inventory my stomach contents, in detail, in a ridiculously tiny, navy-blue, airline-provided paper bag. A new first in my long list of firsts.

Just a thought … When a pilot is a female wouldn’t it more appropriate to spell it pilette?

I arrived in Phoenix at 3:08, stomach contents yet intact, jumped into a cab and buzzed uptown to a realtor’s office for the ten-cent tour of Phoenix and the chance to look at some places to live. We squeezed in four possibilities … I nearly rejected the first one almost before we got out of the car but politely held my tongue until we’d actually toured the place and THEN, willing to have the relator think I was a snob, I rejected it … the second and third places more than made up for the first place and the fourth place was closed. Sooooo … choosing was ultra simplified by the fact that I only had two choices. Even so, I needed to sleep on it and so I asked to be dropped off at the hotel where I ate (finally), soaked in the tub, watched bad TV and finally fell asleep really early. Rising the next morning and, for once, consciously choosing the practical over the most fun, I called the realtor and took a 3-level townhouse. We'll be giving "resort living" a spin. The next day I went to headquarters where I found my name already on the wall of my assigned space … wow … and spent a few hours at my new desk filling out the application and gathering all the assorted nonsense I needed to apply for the new townhouse, stuffed it all into an overnight envelope and deposited it with the receptionist before finally heading out for the company meeting. The company meeting was fantastic. Truly. Between 2pm and 5pm I absorbed enough inspiration to feel really positive about this choice to move to Phoenix and am looking forward to what the next year will bring.

That night I had dinner with Renebabe friend Kanika and her two kiddos. We hung out for a few hours at the Tempe Marketplace where we ate Mexican food and watched her kids play in the mall’s splash-fountain. It was incredibly hot. The kind of hot that makes your feet stick to the cement … or maybe that was because I spilled my entire strawberry smoothie under our feet. Ack! There was no greenery or shade in sight so watching the wee ones frolic in the water was our refreshing relief from the life-sucking heat and the food and the company were a great break for me from an otherwise stressful couple of days.

Saturday morning it was up and out to the airport … and a delay due to fog in SF that finally led to a total rework of my travel plan home courtesy of the airline's kiosk agent. Thank goodness for kiosk agents! I had to be re-routed from Phoenix thru Portland to get home …. and it took alllllllll daaaayyyyyy … let’s just say I don’t ever want to see 3 states in 5 hours again. The upside though is that the flight from Portland to Redding is incredibly beautiful with views of Crater Lake, Mt. Shasta and Lake Shasta that make you believe in God.

Stepping off the teeny, tiny plane and onto the griddle-hot tarmac in Redding, I realized it was incredibly hot here too … temperature gauges indicated it was actually hotter than Phoenix but for whatever reason the heat just isn’t as hot here as it is in Phoenix. Funny because the increased humidity should make it feel hotter?? Oh well. Maybe it’s the absence of so much cement …. or the absence of sticky strawberry fluids underfoot … or because a shorts-clad B was there waiting to whisk me home into the nice, cold, air conditioning …. Mmmmmmmm