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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 di
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
Gi
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 Gi
September 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
We have (a) started the house, (b) acquired an unhousebro-ken kitten, and (c) had a houseguest on our hands for three days when we literally have no room nor facilities for an ill houseguest-so we are ru
The kitten is a fine little girl cat who buzzes all the time...and craps right under this typewriter with healthy regularity...and gets herself lost under the house...and insists on sleeping under Gi
I finally fired our silly architect and took over the job myself...
We have water now, on a temporary pump hookup from a temporary tank...The site is no longer the horrible dust desert that it was; [Gi
...asking me to lecture. The fee is satisfactory and I have in mind an outline for an appropriate lecture. Will you take over from here and accept subject to the following conditions? Mr. Heinlein's terribly busy schedule (i.e., mixing concrete, carrying block, and pushing a shovel, which is none of his business) will not permit him to accept a date to lecture earlier than the first of the year, and also I would expect transportation, to wit, round trip by air from San Francisco to Chicago.
...I guess that is about all, and I've still got to do some electrical work tonight-calculate the maximum working loads for the whole house and try to see if I can use a four-wire, three-phase cable underground...This is just one of the hairy little jobs the architect left undone.
The new cat is out again and again under the house-no way to get under, but she manages. Gi
November 21, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I enclose a picture taken last week of the state of the job. As you can see, the masonry walls are almost complete. Four courses of "bond beam" now go around the top of what you see (looks like all the other courses but has buried in it four half-inch steel bars, poured in place-this building is for all practical purposes a steel-reinforced monolith; there are hundreds and hundreds of pounds of steel concealed in it).
But we are having trouble: (a) the winter rains have started; (b) our mason is being childishly temperamental. The contractor is quite disgusted with him, and I have refrained from telling him off simply because I did not wish to joggle the contractor's elbow-he being a number one conscientious and mature person.
December 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
We are now building between raindrops, but thank God the masonry on the house is at last all finished. We still have two little masonry outbuildings to put up, a pump house and an electrical service housing, but these won't take long and are neither urgent nor difficult-even I could lay them up. We need about two weeks of dry weather to frame the roof and put on the roofing-but the winter rains have set in unusually early and unusually hard and it could very well be some time in January before we get the roof on. The contractor has decided that the job will work every dry day from now on, including Saturdays and Sundays. But dry days are scarce. There have been only two fairly dry days this week, it is storming right
Robert and Virginia tree planting at Bo