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Last Three Months in Reno

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Shirlee and I returned to Reno and my plans to leave started to accelerate, just as her plans to stay solidified. Thus, we entered a surreal in-between state, neither of us quite here, nor there. 

I  commenced to divest of most of my possessions, accumulate books on Ecuador, make plans on when to fly and where to live, and catch up from being gone four weeks.

The day before Thanksgiving, with the holidays looming and time off beckoning, my 18-year-old tech-savvy son Jonathan and I found SubHub and began working on this website.

Shirlee and I took off for Vegas in mid-December for the grand opening of the Cosmopolitan, the last megaresort gasp of the 20-year boom down there. I also traveled to San Francisco to attend to my six-month visa and say goodbye to two brothers who live there, then made another quick trip to Vegas to tie up some loose publishing-company ends.  

And here I sit, a week before flying out, still writing, filling in some blanks, polishing up the site, getting ready to launch it, any by God day now.

 

Articles

  RELINQUISHING A LIFETIME
Returning home from our month in Cuenca was surreal, to say the least, as if everything had taken on a strange skew, and it never quite straightened out.
  LIQUIDATING PART TWO
Over the summer, as I wrote in Liquidating Part 1, Shirlee and I went into the used-book business and sold off a ton of titles through Amazon. Orders still come in, we have a 100% positive response, and we’ve made a couple grand on recycling our old tomes. We also had a yard sale and got rid of a ton of kitchenware. But I didn’t start the serious liquidating till we returned from our month in Cuenca.
  WHAT TO BRING

In “Liquidating,” I wrote about filling my luggage with clothes, toiletries, and books. Not much more to say about that.
  THE COSMOPOLITAN OF LAS VEGAS

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has debuted and it’s taking Las Vegas by storm. Shirlee and I were there, working and partying and paying some extra attention to my day job at the publishing company. If you don’t like Vegas stories, skip this one and the next two. But if you like them, these three are pretty classic, if I do say so myself; together, they encompass 20 years on the Vegas beat and have a happy -- and apt -- ending.
  JOCKEY CLUB
The Jockey Club opened in Las Vegas 1974 in its prime location, just south of the corner of the Strip and Flamingo Road (at that time, it was next to the Dunes and backed by the vast Dunes Golf Course).
  LEAVE-A LAS VEGAS

My first day at my first job in publishing was in April 1981, a week after I turned 29. This was at Moon Publications, the guidebook company, located at the time in Chico, California. I started as a typist (this was before personal computers), then moved up to typesetter (when my phototypesetting machine was the size of a Chevy Suburban).

  BOOKS
Search for “Ecuador” on Amazon.com and you’ll come up with around 6,500 books. To put that into perspective, I’ve so far searched 300 of them -- which took an hour. As soon as I put in only 20 more hours, I’ll have seen the rest of them.
  FLUSH THIS MORTGAGE
A highly lively, sometimes threatening, other times ludicrous, and always amusing wrestling match is under way between me and the foreclosure sumos. I'm now a few months into stretching the mortgage-payment envelope, testing how far the collection agency, brilliantly disguised as a mortgage servicer, will let me fall behind.
  YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR VISA ON YOUR VISA

First things first: Ecuador takes cash or money orders only. That’s what Sylvia, my contact at the Ecuadorian consulate in San Francisco, made it a point to tell me. No credit or debit cards. No personal checks. She needn’t have bothered; one of my favorite things about Ecuador is how everyone, natives and expats, deal in paper money. And you can take that to the bank.
  THE VISA PART TWO -- COPS AND DOCS
A few days after I spoke to Sylvia at Ecuador’s San Francisco consulate, I made the rounds to collect the paperwork needed for the six-month tourist visa.
  THE VISA PART THREE -- I LEFT MY MONEY IN SAN FRANCISCO
I drove down to San Francisco on Super Bowl Sunday, to visit with and say goodbye to two brothers, one older, the other younger, in the City by the Bay. I mean this in the positive sense: They’re happy to see me go. On Monday I headed downtown to the Consulado General Ecuador de San Francisco to keep my 11 o’clock appointment visa appointment.
  THE VISA PART FOUR -- WHAT NOW?

Up until recently, in order to apply for residency of any kind, you were required to enter Ecuador on a 12-IX tourist visa, the one I arranged in San Francisco. But according to Gary Scott, as of January 2011, that's no longer the policy. Now you can apply for residency after coming in on the T3 three-month tourist stamp