Can You Hear Me?

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I make a phone call for someone in need.

She was an older woman, standing on the sidewalk between Alco and Osco. She looked nervous. I made eye contact with her on my way into Alco. When I came out, she was still there. But this time, she was looking right at me, obviously ready to approach me.

“What do you need?” I said, walking right up to her.

“I am deaf,” she said in the voice of a person who is obviously deaf. “Can you make a phone call for me? I will gladly pay you.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you don’t have to pay me.”

She didn’t hear me, of course. She was deaf. But she understood that I’d help.

We walked over to the pay phone and she pulled out a small folder that she opened and showed to me. She pointed to one of the two names with phone numbers on it. “This is my daughter,” she said. “I need you to call her for me. Let me talk to her, then you take the phone and listen to what she says and write it down for me.” She took out a pad and pen. I picked up the phone. “Call collect,” she advised me. “It will be easier for you.”

I made the call as she requested. A moment later, I was talking to her daughter. “I’m making this call for your mother,” I said. “She wants to talk to you and then I’ll listen to what you say and write it down.”

“Okay. Thank you.” She’d obviously done this before.

I handed the phone over and the woman talked. She didn’t stop to listen. She talked about where she was and about checking the mail. She talked about leaving a check for her daughter’s trip. She said she was fine and hoped her daughter had a good time on the trip. There was more of the same. Then she told her daughter that she’d tried for a half hour to get someone to make this call for her and that I’d finally come along and said yes. “God bless her,” she said. She told her daughter that I’d take notes and handed the phone back to me.

The daughter kept it brief. She thanked me, then gave me a few messages regarding the mail. She ended up with, “Tell her I love her. And thanks again for helping her.”

Meanwhile, the woman was attempting to put money in my pocket. I tried to dodge away, but the phone cord was too short. I said goodbye and hung up, then handed the woman the notes I’d written. She read them aloud and nodded. Then she tried again to give me money. I wouldn’t take it.

“I tried to get so many other people to help me,” she said. “They wouldn’t come near me. They must have thought I was a leper because I was deaf. Please take the money. Just for a Coke.”

I had tears in my eyes, thinking about this woman wasting 30 minutes of her day trying to get someone to make a simple phone call for her. I gave her a hug. When she was insistent about the money, I took it, then slipped it into her purse, which she’d left open just a little bit. Then I said goodbye and left her.

What is it with today’s people? Can’t they take a moment to help someone in need? Someone with a simple request that would take only a moment of time and not cost a penny? It surprises me. You’d expect people to act like that in a big city. But not in Wickenburg.

But maybe it takes a big city person to be brave enough to face someone in need.

I Stand Corrected

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He wasn’t wasting my time after all.

On Saturday, I showed my helicopter to someone who’d flown up from Mesa to see it. He spent 90 minutes looking at it, taking pictures of it, and asking me questions about it. Then he said he wasn’t sure if buying a helicopter with only five years left on the main rotor blades was a good idea. And he left.

I thought he’d just wasted 90 minutes of my day.

But on Monday morning, he called. He made me a low offer, which I turned down. I told him what I’d take and he said okay. So I guess it wasn’t a waste of time after all.

I asked him for a $2,000 earnest deposit and he said he’d take care of it on Wednesday. He was going to Vegas on Tuesday. I worried that he’d gamble away the money he had for the helicopter. We settled on a closing date on or before November 8.

On Wednesday, he called again. He wanted to know what else had to be done for the sale to be finished. I told him I thought the escrow agent had everything he needed. He said, “Then why don’t I just send you all the money? It saves me $20 on wire transfer fees.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

So he sent all the money yesterday and I FedExed my official, signed bill of sale to the escrow agent. Today, Thursday, the money should be transferred to my lender to pay off my loan and to my bank account, where it’ll sit for five to six weeks, waiting for more money to join it. I just hope that other money shows up.

I’ll deliver Three-Niner-Lima to its new owner sometime soon — probably this coming weekend.

I’m sad. I’ll miss Three-Niner-Lima. We had some great times together. But I keep reminding myself that a better ship is on its way. And we’ll be good friends, too.

Sleep Cycles

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The importance of an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

Early Saturday morning, around 1:30 AM, a car came down the road that leads to my house and two others. I know this because my dog decided it was worth waking me up about. He started with a low growl and wound up to full barking mode. It took a short while to calm him down, but by that time, I was wide awake.

The car went to my neighbor’s house.

I lay in bed, wide awake, for about an hour while Mike snoozed peacefully beside me. Even the dog had gone back to sleep at the foot of the bed. I got up, went into the next room, and spent about an hour reading. Feeling sufficiently bored with that (believe it or not, I’m reading a writing style guide called Lapsing into a Comma: A Crumudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That can Go Wrong in Print and how to Avoid Them by Bill Walsh; it’s about as entertaining as a grammar book can get), I tried to go back to sleep. After about another hour lying awake in bed, I finally dozed off. That was shortly after 4 AM. By 5:30 AM, I was awake again, ready to start my day.

With a total of about five hours of sleep.

I had a lot of things to do. After feeding the horses with Mike, we gathered up all the trimmings our landscaping guy had left in front of the house and dumped them in our landscape trimmings dumping area in a corner of the property. Its the same place we occasionally dump horse manure, so it turns into a nice compost pile. After a few years, the wash flows big and takes away all that nice soil we created, usually a month or two before we’re ready to use it in the garden. That job took two trips in the pickup. It wouldn’t have been so difficult if the trimmings didn’t include agave leaves and cactus pads.

Then I had to rush over to the airport to wash my helicopter. Someone was coming to see it at 9:30 and I wanted to make sure it looked clean. I got wet while I was doing it — that happens when you wash things over your head — but it looked great when I was done. Come to think of it, it really didn’t look bad before I started, either. Then I blew 90 minutes with the potential buyer, answering his questions and keeping him company while he filled a 128 MB smart card with photographs of every inch of my ship. Jeepers. When I left, he was trying to figure out how to get gas in his homebuilt helicopter (now THAT’S a brave man!) without moving it to the fuel island.

Alex the BirdBy that time, Mike was gone on a four-day trip to New Jersey. Alex the Bird had been picking his feathers lately and I decided to take him down to the bird stores to get him out of the house and to pick up some new toys and food for him. Sadly (but not surprisingly), Wickenburg doesn’t offer much in the way of caged bird supplies. Alex is an African Grey parrot and he eats Harrison’s bird food, which isn’t even sold in Petco/Petsmart. So a drive down to Surprise wasn’t going to do it. Instead, I went to BirdWorld on Greenway and 39th(?) Ave and JD Birds, etc. on Bell near I-17. These places have everything a bird owner could want or need. I went to both because I hadn’t been to BirdWorld for a while and because JD Birds has a great collection of cheap, chewable toys. Alex came in with me and I let him stand on my shoulder for much of the time in BirdWorld. He didn’t really like shopping; he was very nervous and wouldn’t talk to anyone in the store. I spent about $150, which should last about 6 months. Among my purchases were some long pieces of hardwood, which I’ll use to build a tabletop stand for Alex. The one he has is stupid and I wasn’t about to dish out $169 for one that was marginally less stupid.

I hopped on the 101 westbound and made stops at Petco (for fish food) and A.J.’s Fine Food (for Maria food). If you’ve never been to A.J.’s and you like to eat, you owe it to yourself to stop in. I went because they have a sushi bar and will make sushi for you and pack it to go. While the sushi chef did his thing, I swept around the store, picking up fresh mozzarella balls, gourmet frozen tamales (not anything like the lady who sells them in front of the Wickenburg post office makes), and eggs (okay, so I could have gotten them in Wickenburg, but why make two stops?). I also stopped by the butcher counter, which is A.J.’s best feature. That’s where I bought freshly made Thai peanut yakitori skewers and some barbeque pork. The butcher only charged me for one of the skewers because I had to wait more than three minutes for him to see me (he thought I was with someone else standing there). I told him that was a good thing, because I probably could only afford one of them anyway. (A.J.’s ain’t cheap.) I admired the fresh meat and beautiful fresh seafood on my way back to the sushi bar to pick up my order. After leaving a small fortune at the checkout counter, I actually made it out the door before the magnetic pull of the bakery counter pulled me right back in. The bakery counter is A.J.’s best feature. (Oh, did I already say that about the butcher counter? Well, one of them is.) I took it easy (and cheap) by ordering a cream cheese brownie and a pecan pie square. Their cakes, however, are beautiful. They also cost about $50 each. Probably worth it, but I’m not supposed to be eating any of this stuff anyway.

From there, Alex and I went home. I had a wonderful sushi dinner and chardonnay (sadly, a Trader Joe’s purchase from another journey south, although I do buy most of my wine in Wickenburg) while surfing the Web on my laptop. I spent quite a bit of time at Michael Moore’s site. A lot of interesting reading there this political season. Then I fed the horses and went upstairs to read.

Right around this time — 7 PM or so — the lack of sleep from the night before was starting to get to me. I literally could not stay awake. (Okay, so maybe that grammar book has something to do with it.) So I put out the light at 7:30 or so and immediately passed out.

And woke up at 3:30 AM, refreshed and ready to start my day.

This has happened to me before and it’s not fun. First of all, there’s not much you can do at 3:30 in the morning. Sure, you can have coffee and breakfast. But you can’t call anyone and you can’t do anything outside because it’s still dark. If you live with someone else, you can’t even make noise in the house because you might wake him up. (Or, in my case, wake the bird up.) So what’s left? Take out the laptop and do some blogging — hence this entry. Hop in the car and go to the office — heck, I can get three hours worth of work done there before I have to come back home to feed the horses.

But waking up early isn’t the big problem. The big problem is how I’m going to feel again at 7:30 PM. Like I want to go to sleep. And if I do, what time will I be up? 3:30 AM. Or earlier.

It’s a vicious cycle, one I need to break out of today.

Two possible solutions. One is to take a nap in the middle of the day so I’m not ready for bed at 7:30 PM. The other is to force myself to stay up later, perhaps by watching a movie.

Maybe I’ll hit the video store in town for a copy of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Scams, Time-Wasters, and More

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I put my helicopter up for sale and learn that things don’t always go as smoothly as they should.

Sometime early in December, a brand-new, shiny red R44 Raven II helicopter is going to be wheeled off the assembly line at the Robinson factory in Torrance, CA. And my initials will be on its tailcone.

But before I can take delivery of this thing, I need to sell the R22 in my hangar, N7139L.

I put some ads online with Trade-A-Plane and AeroTrader on October 8. The calls and e-mails started immediately.

One of the first e-mails was from a man — we’ll call him by his initials, KG — based in the UK. According to KG, his company had discovered oil on some mountainous island and they needed a helicopter to get around. He didn’t know anything about helicopters, but mine was right at his budget. He didn’t waste any time asking typical questions. He went right into negotiation mode. We decided on a price and he said he’d be in touch when he’d arranged for shipping. For me, it was too good to be true. Way too good. But I arranged for a title/escrow agent anyway and had him get in touch with KG by fax. KG never responded. Meanwhile, other people were calling and they sounded interested. I sent KG an e-mail message and a fax, telling him that if he didn’t contact my escrow agent by noon Thursday, the deal was off. He e-mailed me before the deadline and said he’d made all his arrangements and was going to send me a certified check via DHL. The check would be for the purchase price PLUS $10,500 that I’d turn over to his shipping agent. The idea was that I’d cash the check and then make my own certified check for the $10.5K. I e-mailed him back, telling him to work through my escrow agent. I told him I would not accept delivery of a check. I didn’t give him my address.

I haven’t heard from him since and don’t expect to. It’s a scam, one that almost sucked in someone else I know for far less money. You cash the check and pay the shipping agent. Then the “certified” check you cashed bounces and you’re out the amount of money you paid to the agent.

As my friend Rod said, “I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.”

The calls asking for more info aren’t all that bad. They’re usually short and to the point. People probably dreaming about a helicopter, trying to convince themselves that this is the one. Or people who are serious buyers but want to pay about $15K less than I’m asking. They get pretty rude about that, too. “You’ll never get what you’re asking,” they say. Yeah, but I’ll get a lot more than what you’re willing to pay.

Today a time-waster came all the way up to Wickenburg to waste about 90 minutes of my time. That’s how long he spent looking at it and taking digital pictures. He now has more pictures of it than I do, and I’ve owned it for four years. At the end of his visit, he admitted that he didn’t think he should buy a helicopter with only 5 years left on the main rotor blades. Hell, he knew how much time was left before he came up to Wickenburg. Why waste half a day on the trip? I guess some people don’t have anything better to do with their time.

And then there’s the cheapskate. He makes me an offer over the phone and wants to close the deal when he comes to Wickenburg so he can fly it away. I tell him he needs to work with my escrow agent and that he’ll have to pay the escrow fee, since he’s offering $5K less than I’m asking. He tells me he doesn’t need a title search. That he’s already looked up the N-number online and knows there’s no lien. (Says it very smugly, too, like he’s so much smarter than me.) I tell him he’s wrong, there is a lien. (Silence on the other end of the phone. Seems he wasn’t as smart as he thought.) And that my escrow agent has all the payoff paperwork. And that I won’t do a deal without an escrow agent. Period. End of statement.

We’ll see if he shows up in Wickenburg anytime soon.

There are a few others in the running. One guy from Texas. Another from St. George, UT. And the flight school in Long Beach that made a low offer I already turned down.

I figure I have at least two more weeks before I have to start worrying. Near the end of November, my insurance runs out. And I need to have N7139L gone by then.

Another Chapter Done

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I revise book number 59 or 60 — I’ve lost count again.

These days, I’m hard at work on a revision to my Microsoft Word for Macintosh book. Officially titled Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, the book covers the latest and greatest version of Word for Macintosh.

The book I’m revising (which covers Word v. X) is only about 300 pages long. It has a companion book that covers more advanced features. For this edition, I’m rolling the two books into one big fat book. That’s what I did earlier in the year for the Windows version of the book (which covers Word 2003). That book is 450+ pages long.

Revisions are not as easy as they sound. Books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series are extremely screenshot-intensive, with 3-6 images per page (on average). The tiniest little change in Word’s interface requires that any screenshot of that interface element must be redone. Since Microsoft changed the way the ruler looks, for example, any screenshot that includes the ruler — basically any shot of a screenful of text — must be redone. Rather than try to determine what elements have changed and run the risk of missing something, I just redo every single screenshot in the book.

Of course, not only do I write the book, but I lay out its pages using InDesign software. When I’m done with a chapter, I create a PDF and e-mail it to my copy and production editors. They print out the pages, mark them up, and mail them back to me. I then make changes as they requested, finalize the files, and send them to the production person on CD or via FTP. The book is in print 3-4 weeks later. The whole process, from my start to book in stores usually takes 6 to 8 weeks. But as soon as I’m finished with one book and have taken a week or two off to clear my head, I’m starting work on the next book.

I’ve got revisions down to a science. For this book, I’m starting with the InDesign files for the Windows version of the book, which has most of the content I need, organized in the right order. I’ve printed out an outline of that book’s contents with a few Macintosh-only features inserted in the appropriate areas. For example, Chapter 13 will be a brand new chapter covering Word’s NoteBook Layout View feature. Then I open a chapter file and go through it, page by page. I edit the text for correct Mac OS terminology and instructions. I replace the screenshots, removing some completely while adding new ones. I modify all the figure references and caption numbers as needed. (This is, by far, the most tedious part of the revision job.) When I’m done, I have a finished chapter, all ready for review and edit.

I try to knock off a chapter a day. Sometimes, when the chapter is short, that’s easy. Yesterday’s chapter was only 20 pages. But Wednesday’s chapter was 28 pages. That may not seem like a big difference, but it is. This will be a 20-chapter book, so I’ll have it done in 20 working days. If I get two short chapters in a row, I’ll try to do them both in one day to speed things up.

The deadline for this book is roughly around Thanksgiving time. I’d like to get it done sooner, since I have out-of-town guests coming in that week. More important, my Mac OS X book is due for revision shortly. That book takes priority over all others. If it’s ready for revision before I’m done with Word, Word will go on the back burner until I’m done.

I wrote somewhere that I sometimes feel like a machine. When I work on revisions like this one, I do. But I’m a well-oiled machine with the parts worn in just right to get the job done smoothly.