The Colorado River. Peaceful and quiet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EV3xLNbBbo&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL Peaceful and quiet. Unless it’s a weekend. Then the jet skis and big boats are out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gROkuDyNeOU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0TDdIejcyg&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL It’s hardly fair that the river water is so beautiful here. Clear and green and cool. All the rivers in Colorado, including this one, are blown this time of year; churning brown in an effort to erode all the Rocky Mountains into the Pacific. It’s our brown river in Colorado, but apparently all the silt drops out before it gets to Arizona and California. Must be all those dams along the way. Hot and sweaty. Even with the low humidity. It’s triple digits every day. I hiked in the desert on Saturday and Sunday, but stayed in all day at the computer today. We’re on the ground floor, so I ran around in the hotel room in the air conditioning when it was time for exercise. I probably hardly annoyed anyone.
Parker, AZ
Gone from Las Vegas. Now we’re in Parker, AZ to visit with Judy’s sister Sue and John at their house on the river. An updated map of our travels: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=205131835882428706345.0004a0e19bb8bf61d6456&ie=UTF8&ll=35.065973,-109.731445&spn=22.543992,56.118164&z=5
Aria
Actually, this place is pretty cool. Having mastered the learning curve, we now have all the electrons lined up, just waiting for the word from us. When we leave the room, we hit a switch by the door and the room goes dark. On our return, when we scan our room key card at the door, the room wakes up and restores all our customized settings for lights, curtains, temperature, everything. When we hit the sleep button at night, everything migrates to nighttime settings, including the room temperature selected for sleeping. At the pre-set time for waking up, the curtains, lights, and temperature adjust to the specified morning settings. Next time we check in here in a year, when we scan our card at the door, it will recognize us and apply all our preferences to the new room! Engine update from this morning. Still disassembling the motor so it can be removed. We didn’t talk to our mechanic, he was up to his elbows, so we talked to another guy. In the words of the other guy though, “He’s got it whipped.” The projection was for the engine to be out of the chassis and on a bench by the end of today. A little more disassembly, and they can call the Warranty Company to come back out and have another look so they can agree on the repair required.
Conference
The Conference, the Practitioner’s Symposium, is over. Now Ken and I hang out together for a couple days and have a Partner’s Meeting. We talk about what we’re doing, what we’ve done, and what we want to do. It’s a good Partner’s Meeting. We’ve just gone through three days of presentations about how best to do what we do. Most of what we hear doesn’t really apply to us, we’re so specialized, but there are always a few of the ideas we hear each year that resonate. We get to talk through those. We get to reinvent something. A word about hotels. We’re in the Aria, not the Vdara. The Vdara is the hotel with the death ray, a beam of concentrated solar energy from the concave glass face of the hotel, that sweeps across the swimming pool area each day. Both hotels are part of the new City Center complex. Ken and I don’t have to run screaming from the Aria pool in the afternoon, but people at the Vdara pool might.
Aria
This hotel. It has 4,004 rooms. A walk from the elevator to the end of the hall is 200 steps. That’s about 600 feet; two football fields. The hallway goes both directions from the elevator bank. Then it splits in two partway down. There are four hallways on each floor, configured like a flattened rounded X; no straight lines. I took my walk tonight in the hallways without ever leaving our floor. The rooms are high-tech. Everything in the room that involves electrons is centrally controlled, either by the television remote and the big flatscreen on the wall, or the iPad on the nightstand. There are control switches, not anything that resemble conventional light switches, on the walls, but it’s hard to figure out what they do. When we first got here in the afternoon on Sunday, we were trying to change the lights when Judy inadvertently pushed the “Goodnight” button. The sheer drapes, then the blackout drapes motored closed across the floor to ceiling windows while all the lights slowly dimmed until they were all the way out, leaving us totally in the dark with no idea how to turn anything back on. We found our way to the door and let some light in from the hallway. Luckily for us, a housekeeper came by and helped reboot and start over. That was the end of any trouble we had with the lighting……….until later when I decided to turn the desk lamp on. I pushed switches I was not familiar with. Judy pounded on the wall from the shower when all the lights in the bathroom went out leaving her totally in the dark. If I could have seen what I was doing then, I’d have turned them right back on for her. The adventure continues.