There are two reasons that I came back to Tucson for two weeks, while the rest of the Airstream’s crew is up in Vermont.  Reason #1:  I had a dentist appointment that just couldn’t wait, and couldn’t be done up in Vermont.  Reason #2:  I had an enormous backlog of work as a result of being on the road for a few weeks and being at Alumapalooza.

Now, I can get the work done fairly efficiently up in Vermont because we have friends who will lend me their home offices with fast Internet.  (It’s still not as efficient as being here, because if I’m home alone I’ll work longer hours.)  But the big requirement was the dental appointment; I just couldn’t skip that.

See, these days I’ve got braces on my teeth.  Yes, at age forty-something I went to the orthodontist to finally have my crazy bite and radically misaligned teeth straightened.  They were driving me bonkers whenever I tried to eat. Now both Emma and I have braces, a moment of shared father-daughter experience.  I can’t say that it has been especially bonding, but Emma has been helpful with tips, like how to eat popcorn.

I thought I was pretty old to get braces until I ran in our good friend Petey at Alumapalooza.  She said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re doing that!  I was very happy that I had braces.”  Her teeth looked perfect.  I asked her, “When did you get braces?” and she replied, “When I was 70.”  So that put me in my place, and now I don’t feel particularly old to have tinsel teeth.

And I’ve been amazed that the things really work as well as advertised (see pics, I apologize to those of you who really didn’t want to see a closeup of my mouth).  Two months into it I’m already seeing quite an improvement.  22 months to go …

Having two members of the family in braces at the same time has been detrimental to our Airstreaming.  This is the first time in several years that E&E haven’t spent eight to twelve weeks in Vermont.  With our mutual dental appointments we just can’t stay away from home base for long, so I will be flying back up to Vermont on Monday and next week we will hitch up the Airstream and haul our traveling circus back the 2,700 miles to Tucson.  We’ll be here for the rest of the season, riding out the heat until it’s time to go to Colorado for Alumafandango.

The trip back from east coast to (nearly) west coast is a mammoth one.  When we were full-timing we would take about a month to go this far, but this time we have a mere twelve days.  That’s 225 miles per day on average, although realistically we’ll do a lot of 400-500 mile days and then stop for a couple to catch our breath.  I would really like to see a few things along the way.  It’s torture to just keep driving past interesting stops, and I’m not crazy about spending $750 in fuel just to see Interstate concrete roll by for 44 hours.  In the end our trip will probably come in at more like 3,000 miles because straight lines and Interstates are boring — and even that represents a serious effort at avoiding distractions.

I’ve discovered that two weeks as TBM doesn’t give me enough time to get into trouble, which is unfortunate.  The backlog of work was so massive that I’ve been locked to the laptop.  So my plans to do a follow-up Sonoran Hot Dog test, go tent camping, and take a roadtrip have all failed.  Instead, I’ve been working on Alumafandango (which is coming together nicely now), next year’s Alumapalooza, and of course that “other job” of publishing a magazine.  (The Fall 2012 issue is now in layout and will be distributed in early August.)

Plus, I’ve been working on two other projects.  One of them is a caravan, and the other is a third Aluma-event.  Brett & I have talked extensively about this and we know we can really only afford the time to do one or the other, and right now it’s not clear which we will pull off.  We are both approaching total saturation and after this we are either going to have to stop launching new projects, or get some help.  (I mean staff help, not psychiatric help, although we may need both.)

We’ll figure that out soon.  In the meantime, Alumafandango is occupying both our minds.  This summer’s heat meant that everyone is anxious about baking while they are in Denver, so we managed to work up twenty “30-amp” campsites (which allow you to run your air conditioner).  We announced them to the current registrants with an upgrade price of $125 and POOF! they were gone in 48 hours.  We now have a waiting list of people who are hoping we can get more, and that’s definitely something we are going to try to do.  So if you were staying away from Alumafandango because we didn’t have 30-amp, now you can go ahead and register and get on the wait list for delicious coolness.

TBM has been stalled this time by tedious practicalities, but I’ve got one weekend left before the TBM flag comes down.  I’ll ponder a few ideas for this weekend and try to get into something that will make you proud.