Bookman’s

Super Bowl Sunday had me (Dave) feeling the best I’d been for days – suddenly I didn’t feel cold, my temperature had gone. Sadly, Sadie had come down with it. And has had it worse than me, and still has it now, 4 days later.

I celebrated freedom from illness by cycling to Bookman’s at Speedway and Wilmot. About 5 miles away, a 25 minute cycle ride. Below is a photo of Sadie in one of the 4 used magazine isles.Bookman’s is one of the great things about Tucson. It’s a huge, Arizona only store, and there are two in town, selling primarily second hand books. It also has a massive selection of used magazines, CD’s, some computer accessories and select bric-a-brac. To give you a sense of the scale it is like Barnstaple or Northampton library but everything’s for sale. It isn’t like the book collection you’ll get on the shelves of Oxfam. These books have been selected for quality. There are arm chairs dotted around to sit and read, the place is even wi-fi fitted to enable you to while away the hours in the internet. And the best thing, the reason why I was there in the last paragraph, is their 7 day, no quibble, money back, guarantee if you’re not happy with your purchase.

I was returning a notebook wireless card ($20) and a book about running a photographic business which I’d bought for the included CD with full business software on it, unfortunately not changeable from dollars to pounds.

On my second ride to Bookman’s on Super Bowl Sunday (first time I’d left my, impressively thick and heavy, cycle lock behind), I bought a couple of books: Birds of the South West Desert, by Gusse Thomas Smith ($5) first printed in 1941, this one was 1989 – I thought we ought to be able to identify some of the wonderful birds they have here, and a book about business and making it green, low carbon etc ($7). This book I’ve already taken back (see next paragraph) but it had an example which Sadie read out to me about a very successful business, selling to all 50 States. This guy was making sculpture out of cow-dung! The ‘green’ idea was that it was good for the garden so make it look like a work of art and it will serve an aesthetic purpose as well. Where are they now?

So I took it back to the other Bookman’s yesterday at Grant & Campbell (about the same distance in the opposite direction), reason for returning? Too American – doesn’t translate well into pounds. Grant & Campbell is the bigger of the two stores and I spent a good hour just looking through their ‘Nature’ section. We don’t get this library designation in England, it’s more environmental studies, green issues, nature science – this is where you’ll find Rachel Carson, David Attenborough etc. I picked out a few books: One The Desert by David L. Eppele ($3) signed by the author – a local book published in Bisbee in 1990, general musings about the desert and living in it; Entering the Stone by Barbara Hurd 2003 ($6.50) “an exquisite meditation on caves and their peculiar power” – Pittsburgh Post– well that sold it to me; The Voice of the Desert by Joseph Wood Krutch, originally 1954 this on 1962 ($8) – there were a couple of paperbacks at $4 but this is a lovely object – simple, flat colour embossed graphics, icons of the sun and saguaro cactus with text printed on the clear plastic dust jacket, inside cover pages are bright yellow and a set of b/w photos that the paperbacks don’t have – “Thoreau had his New England pond; Joseph Wood Krutch has his Arizona desert” is what sold it to me; and lastly The End of Nature by Bill McKibben 1989 ($5), a book I’d read reference to before and described as “a kind of song for the wild, a lament for its loss, and a plea for its restoration.” – The New York Review of Books.

Settling in to the house and neighbourhood

You probably thought the initial flurry of posts then the sudden stop meant we were having too much fun to write. If only that were true….

We’ve both been ill with flu. Dave got it first just over a week ago, totally knocked him out, temperature, hot then cold, off my food, needing 10 hours sleep, runny nose. He did get out occasionally in the daytime and friends Sally and Tammy independently loaded hiim up with vitamins, throat sweets and drugs. He missed Jeff’s housewarming party on Saturday 2nd though Sadie went, seeing some old friends like Rand (made the tin picture in our kitchen) who we hadn’t seen for about 2 years. Back to the blog proper… The house is great, plenty big enough for 2, with 3 bedrooms, kitchen, dining area, bathroom, lounge, and a recording studio/IT room complete with big speakers (great for Dave for his music even played not too loud) – our ‘landlord’ and friend Jeff works in radio and does radio ads, so its his workspace. He occasionally comes over to do some work here, but not very often. We have internet access and cable TV. What more could we need? (maybe a channel worth watching!)

It helps to have a good, comfortable space to be living in, and be based in, so we can concentrate on other things, like doing our work (business planning for our bespoke vacation planning business venture) and also being sociable. We can invite folks over for dinner – we had a movie night on Monday with our friend Sally and had some Greek food. There’s a food store called Caravan about 2 miles away and they do mighty good olives. We also got some Bulgarian Feta from a Middle-Eastern grocery store - smooth, creamy and salty. It’s also an African store and we had a chat with the owner, from Somalia, mainly about football and also about London.

There are many places we can go right from the house, either on foot or on bicycle - which of course is harder work but much quicker.
The Tucsonans always give and receive directions based on the compass points – so if we head West there’s a brilliant breakfast place 10 minutes walk away called Frank’s. We have already been there once and are planning to go a lot more, now we have discovered the $1.50 plus tax ‘early bird breakfast’ – for this you get 2 eggs cooked any style, home fried potatoes and toast! What a deal. Heading East, we have about half a mile away a really good cinema called Crossroads. It has movies about 3 months after the bigger cinemas (still earlier than we get to see films in Devon). It’s also cheap - $3 a seat. We went to see ‘Into the Wild’ on our first Saturday here – excellent film, go and see it if you can – and we bought a 10 movies for $20 pass, making it only $2 a movie! Another great deal.
In the same vicinity there are also 2 supermarkets, one being Trader Joes, good for health foods and Tofu for Sade, the other being Fry’s, a big chain store. There’s also a whole host of other small stores and Blockbuster video if we want to rent a DVD.

We got a whole day of mainly torrential rain with localised flooding.

Heading North and slightly West there’s a similar collection of places again to shop and get all you need just 10 minutes walk away, including WAGS, another breakfast diner which is themed on everything from Iowa and plenty of John Deere tractor paraphernalia – including curtains. Going South is the same kind of story, there’s a major route into downtown, called Speedway and we went there on the bikes yesterday to explore a couple of blocks – went to another good Thrift store, Goodwill, and an outdoors shop called Summit Hut. There’s all kinds of stuff on this road as it runs many miles from east to west and even has the ‘Saguaro National Park’ at either end of it.

Downtown is about 5 miles West and slightly South – we have cycled there already and spent time outside our favourite café, Chocolate Iguana – and yes you can buy a chocolate Iguana there, amongst other things. Sade had her first hot Chai tea latte with Soya, just over $3 (her favourite) there, yum. This café is on 4th Avenue and there’s some interesting little and independent shops and places to eat and drink. It’s in the University area and full of students and more than the usual amount of bicycles. You can walk into downtown easily from there and we picked up a bus schedule so we can plan some further away adventures.

Next door's roof got fixed by a gang of workmen in 2 mornings. They don't use ladders here, just raise the bed of the truck to the height of the roof and walk straight on.