I am very busy designing the house. I am anxious to start building as soon as possible as I really can’t expect to get any writing done, at least until this new house is designed and fully specified. Building becomes a compulsive fever with me; it drives everything else out of my mind.
April 6, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…I’m still bending over a hot drawing board-I’m very slow, for I am not an architect and have to look up almost every detail. But the end is in sight. As soon as I can get a water system hooked onto our spring and a driveway bulldozed, we will probably buy a thirdhand trailer and move onto the place during building-Ginny is now willing to do this in order to move our cat here. There has been a rabies scare in Colorado Springs; all animals are under a quarantine and we are having to keep him in a kennel with our vet.
June 22, 1966: Virginia Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
[Robert] is still relaxing, since when he spends too much time out of bed, he tires very easily…
Every once in a while I hear some sounds which seem to indicate that our cat is trying to despoil a bird’s nest nearby…He seems to like it here, hasn’t started that hike back to Colorado which I predicted.
July 1, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I have received, but not yet read, The Psychology of Sleep — but will read it as soon as I can stay awake that long; I want to find out why I am so sleepy. I seem to be practically well now, save that I am sleepy all the time; I’m sleeping twelve and fourteen hours a day. I get up late, have breakfast, and can barely stay awake long enough to go back to bed-get up again, get a couple hours of paperwork done (with great effort), men take a nap. Resolve to get something done after dinner but find myself going to bed again. It is not unpleasant save that I am totally useless and the work piles up. The incision seems to have healed perfectly and my surgeon says that after the 15th of July I can do anything I wish-lift 200 Ibs…( which will be remarkable as I never could in the past. (Oh, off the floor, yes-but not a clean press up into the air.)
EDITOR ‘s NOTE: Robert’s health was somewhat fragile. From time to time he would be required to have various major and minor surgery. Although he was able to do extremely heavy work at times, illnesses such as influenza hit him hard, and it might take weeks for him to recover.
These illnesses fell into major and minor groupings. In his early days he had TB; recovery took about a year. In 7970, he had a perforated diver ticulum, undiscovered for seventeen days; it took a long recovery period. Because of the shock to his system, he followed that with herpes Zoster. Because the doctors were afraid to remove his gall bladder at the time they operated for peritonitis, that operation had to be deferred until 1971, when he had recovered from shingles.
In 1978 in Moorea, he had a TIA {Transient Ischemic Attack, a temporary interference of blood to the brain], which resulted in his undergoing a carotid-bypass operation.
August 15, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Ginny is fretted and frustrated because she does not yet have water at the building site-badly needed to stabilize a very dusty excavation and to permit her to start ground cover for great, raw cuts that will wash away if not planted before the heavy rains. Someone warned us when we came here that Santa Cruz was very much a manana place, with the leisurely attitude affecting even the gringos-and that person was so very right. We were promised a pumping system in two weeks; it has now been more than a month-if we don’t have water in a few days, I am going to have to get very nasty with that subcontractor. Which I dread.
We can’t pour concrete for the house until we have [a building] permit, but there are lots of other things to be done. I still hope and expect that we will be closed in by the rains and able to move in, even though the interior will still have to be finished-if Ginny and I both don’t wind up in straitjackets before then.