I made this

A reconnection with an old friend.

A move to a different state.

A bucket of flowers delivered to our house.

4 bouquets, 3 boutonnieres, 3 arrangements.

One happy bride. One happy me.

Memory Lane

One of the things that we discovered when we arrived here in the 'dale is that my mom left a bunch of my stuff in the house, things she'd been keeping for me since I moved out to go to college. I spent a few hours looking through old yearbooks and old schoolwork and old literary magazines (complete with poem by Sara entitled My Hands!), through the basket of letters I received during the summer after my freshman year in college, and reading through all of the old school newspapers I'd saved for some bizarre reason. I found a VHS tape of my High School Video Yearbook that may be some time before I get to watch, since I don't know if I know anyone with a functional VHS player. And I found this stuff.



"Carlitos" was an exercise I had to do in one of my Spanish classes, though why it has someone else's name on it (on the top of the page, above the photo), I have no idea. In case you can't see what I wrote in each of the bubbles, I'll provide both the Spanish and the English translation.

Panel 2: "¿Por favor, tengo quiero usar el baño?" (Please, I have to want to use the bathroom?) (It should have been, "Por favor, ¿puedo usar el baño?", or Please, can I use the bathroom?)
Panel 3: "¡Pero es muy importante! ¡Necesito ir al baño AHORA!" (But it's very important! I have to go to the bathroom NOW!)
Panel 4: "¡Ay Caramba! Es demasiado tarde." (Oh noes! It's too late.)





Me at a dance with High School Boyfriend at his school. Perhaps Valentine's Day? I'm wearing a dress of my mom's circa 1970, a silver peace sign necklace I got at the Renaissance Faire, and awesome white low-heeled pumps! It's a photo of a photo, so not exactly the most accurate representation, but you get the idea.



From top left: Handmade doll with embroidered face, yarn hair, etc. I named Rose; Snoopy doll I got for having my birthday party at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, the ice rink owned/operated by Charles Schultz and family; stuffed lamb sans one eye; small stuffed raccoon; baby doll that used to have a matching bonnet. I forget her name.



I could write an entire blog post on this alone, but I'll try to make a long story short. When I was first babysitting, I pretty much saved all of the money I made and used it to pay for camp in the summer. Eventually, I had made enough that I had a bit left over, and I decided to buy my very first pair of shoes myself. I was probably 13 or 14 years old, and up until that point, my parents had bought all of my clothes/shoes for me. I'd wanted a pair of Birkenstocks for a long time, and I finally had enough money to buy them for myself. So I did.

As you can see, I wore these shoes all the time. I wore them with socks when it was cold and without when it was warm, and I love love loved them, as they were the most comfortable shoes ever (and to me, paying $80 for a pair of shoes felt totally obscene, so I was determined to get my money's worth out of them). When I bought them, they were a pretty slate blue, but as the years went by they faded to a dull grayish color. I didn't care, though; I still wore them all the time. I wore down the soles and wore out the toe and the heel, and eventually they started looking pretty ratty, but I couldn't imagine giving them up.

The summer after high school graduation, my family went on our very first ever (and, it would turn out, only) family camping vacation. Our first stop was a campground someplace in the Western Sierras, and when we had the tent set up my sisters and I went for a walk down to the river, a tributary that would feed the American. Wearing my Birks, I climbed out onto a big rock to sit only to catch my right shoe on something. It fell off my foot and into the fast-moving snow melt runoff river.

I was so sad. I felt like I'd lost my best friend, something that had been with me for so much of my teenage years, something that had cost me EIGHTY DOLLARS and I just couldn't bring myself to through the unlost shoe away.

Something tells me that it has been long enough now. This is not moving with us to our next domicile.




I DID write an entire blog post about this one. Here's the sole Piers Anthony newsletter I ever received, where I responded to the pen pal request for a certain Kent B Golden of Hamden, CT. Who knew that 16 years later I'd be attending his wedding?

Justifiable Homicide

*

One of the stipulations for getting to live in this big (mostly) empty house is that Dan and I agreed to help my mom out with some of the major projects that need to be accomplished to make the house sale- or rentable. Since we had no furniture, internet, or television for the first week+ we were here, we spent most of our time working on the first big project, which was to paint my sister's old bedroom. Somehow, back in the early '00s, my mom took leave of her senses and let my sister paint her bedroom red with black trim. The worst part is that the large built-in book case/desk units in the room were also black, which meant a lot of small fiddly painting, and because the room was mostly red and black, we knew that it wasn't a matter of just a simple coat of paint.




Before...

We knew it was a big job, so we decided to consult an expert. A friend of mine worked for an independent paint store for many years, and knows more about paint and the paint business than anyone else I've ever met. I sent her an email describing the situation and asking for recommendations and advice, and she wrote me a novel in response that outlined all of our options and choices, with helpful commentary. The first thing we had to do when we got here was to check how many layers of paint were on the walls, since I knew there were at least three and maybe as many as 7 or 8, depending on how many times it had been painted since the last time it was stripped. (The house is pretty old, with at least 3 owners prior to my mom, so it was possible that we'd have lots and lots of old paint to deal with.) My friend had given me a plethora of options for paint stripping, so we were prepared to have the room closed off for many days while waiting for a stripper to do its job. When we did a bit of chipping away, however, we discovered some faux wood paneling on some of the walls covered with three layers of paint, so we knew stripping wouldn't be necessary.


Giant ball of used tape!

The second thing we did was to go to the Ace Hardware in town, where my mom said was a list of all of the various paint colors she'd used in the house in the past 20-odd years she's been here. We decided to use the same color on the walls in the bedroom as in the hallway and living room ("Powdery mist", aka a light tan color) and all the trim in the same color ("linen") as the trim in the whole rest of the house. My friend had told me that if we didn't need to strip the paint, we would for sure need stain-blocking primer to help cover the black and red, and Ace was kind enough to tint it for us to match the color we'd eventually paint.

So once we'd bought the tape our friend recommended ("The green stuff is cheaper and if your project is going to last a week or less, don't bother buying the blue stuff") and taped everything off and put down plastic, we began by priming all the red walls and all the black trim. And then we started on the first black built-in. Only a few minutes into our project, it was clear that Laurel was going to have to die for her sins. Painting every surface of every cubbyhole in that built-in was absolute torture - we had to do it all by hand, sharing the same bucket of primer, Dan doing the above bits (and only getting a little bit on my head), me doing the below bits (and cursing at the tedium).



2 coats of primer on walls, one coat of primer on built-in



Trim primer'd, walls/built-ins painted


It was toward the end of the first coat of primer on the first built-in that we began to plot our revenge. And then we started on the second built-in, which has a desk and an underside that I had to lay on my back to reach, while primer dripped on my face, and the murderous fantasies began.


Walls painted, trim primer'd

We ended up doing two coats of primer on everything, to ensure we wouldn't have to use a ton of (more expensive) paint, and then we did two coats of paint. So we painted each and every one of those built-ins over and over and over and by the last time, we had all kinds of elaborate torture situations dreamed up, and decided that my mom and the friend who helped her paint deserved horrible, horrible death as well. Finally, after working on it for several hours a day together, we finished the last touch-ups on the trim five days later.








After!

*Dan wrote the above poem using the fridge poetry. It really says everything that needs to be said about the sucketry of the paint project.

Princess Robin goes here

It took Robin 8 months to be willing to walk on the floor from one room to another in our apartment in Denver, and that stopped pretty soon after we started tearing up the house packing and organizing and getting rid of furniture and such, especially since Loki was likewise stressed out and (of course) took it out on her by chasing her and generally being a butthole. I had some hope that when we moved to a new place, one that didn't already smell strongly of Loki (and Petra) everywhere, they'd each have a chance to carve out some territory and perhaps, if not become friends, they might at least get to the point of ignoring one another.

The house we're in has a little bit of furniture (a bed and a dresser in one bedroom, a table in the kitchen) but it's mostly devoid of such and so Robin has decided that she's again not capable of walking from one room to another. Loki has already chased her a couple of times (and been admonished for it, of course) but it's understandable that he be stressed out in a strange house that probably still smells a little like my mom's cats, and there's no familiar furniture or belongings, so I can't blame him too much. Robin has taken to living on the refrigerator and has figured out how to open some of the empty kitchen cabinets and climb inside to hide from Loki/watch him from her high vantage point. We've been using the cat relax pheromone spray which I think helps some, but it's pretty funny that we essentially have to take Robin to the bathroom several times a day and close the door to allow her to use the cat box, and when she's in the bedroom with us and isn't sleeping on the bed with us, she's on the top of the dresser or exploring in the drawers.

But mostly, Princess Robin (as we call her) lives here.

Runaround

Two things:

Thing the first: I have discovered one of the drawbacks of not yet legally changing my last name. I put in a change-of-address form for me and for Dan when we left Denver late on Wednesday night, and got an email confirmation for both. Dan got his on Monday and, using that, was able to get a library card here in the 'dale for using internet on library computers, checking out books/movies, etc. But mine never came. And then my mom told me that when she moved out of the house, nearly 2 months ago, she'd put in a change of address for everyone with that last name at her Cloverdale address. So it's not only possible, but likely, that all of my mail is coming to Cloverdale and then getting forwarded to her new house. I've been to the post office here, and they couldn't really tell me anything. So in the meantime, I can't even get a library card because I have no proof of address. Harrumph.

Thing the second: The moving company we used, ABS, promised me that a) it would take our stuff 5 business days to arrive at the terminal in Santa Rosa, and b) someone would call me during the time it was in transit to let me know what day to expect it, so I could rent a local truck and haul it up to Cloverdale. Today is 6 business days, and since nobody had called I called them this morning, only to learn that our stuff is in Sacramento, may be at the terminal tomorrow but probably not until Monday. Somehow, 5 business days and notice = 8 business days and no notice. I'm not very happy about spending another several days with a too-small, sort of uncomfortable bed, 2 uncomfortable chairs, a table that isn't for eating on so the top slides around and gets all wobbly if touched, no TV/computer/router for internet, not much kitchen stuff or clothing, etc., but we'll have to make do. Thank goodness Dan got a library card so we have books to read and DVDs to watch on the laptop!

Full circle

I never remember how much work it is to move until I do it. Packing, organizing, getting rid of stuff we don't want, shredding/destroying all that junk mail with personally identifying information (like those awful fake check things that credit cards send), and, of course the cleaning - it's all hours and hours and hours of unfun work. We spent weeks trying to get rid of things for money and then a couple of weeks trying to get rid of things for free, and some stuff still ended up in the alleyway or given to my cousin across the street or our upstairs neighbors.

My last day of work was a Monday, and that evening I packed and organized and cleaned while Dan deposited the cats at his parents' house and retrieved his dad's big truck for hauling things. Tuesday, we loaded up the truck with boxes and assorted things four times, and Dan drove it up to the place where our 9 feet of trailer to be hauled by ABF lived, unloaded it, and played a life-sized game of Tetris to figure out how to fit everything into the allotted space in the best way. While Dan was out doing his bit, I stayed in the house doing more packing, organizing, and cleaning, fielding emails from craigslist from people who for sure wanted the stuff we were selling but never showed up to buy, and feeling totally weird because we were LEAVING the place we lived for over four years, and the state I'd lived for nearly 8 years, and the state Dan had lived in since before the age of two.

We worked late into the evening on Tuesday, and got takeout pizza, and saw Julie and Steve for a few minutes, but were otherwise too tired to do anything. Wednesday we were up early and spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how to get the couch through the front door. After removing the feet, we finally got it, but it took some serious doing and both of our brains and brawn to accomplish. We did two or three more truckloads of furniture and random assorted stuff, and then Dan came back to help me with the remainder of the cleaning. And oh, internet, there was so much cleaning to be done - carpet shampooing and wall scrubbing and all manner of other surfaces that needed to be cleaned. (I was ridiculously glad that we'd already done the heavy kitchen cleaning like the oven and the greasy walls/cabinets and the fridge and all the blinds in the house the weekend before.) I scrubbed and wiped and washed and generally kept my hands in graspy claw position or squirt bottle trigger pose all day long, with the exception of when I helped load the truck. We were due for our walk-through with the landlords at 5 PM, and of course it rained that day (OF COURSE) and then the mop broke and we were just terribly behind and so we had to call them and tell them to push it back until 6. (I cleaned the laundry room floor, the kitchen floor, and the hallway floor ON MY HANDS AND KNEES WITH A RAG AND SIMPLE GREEN due to the mop incident.)

They showed up sometime after 6:30. We still had to drive up to the truck center and finish playing life-sized Tetris with our stuff and tie it all down with rope but of course we had to wait for them, and then they wanted to chat about something or other, but finally Jenny wrote me a check for our pro-rated rent, we shoved all the stuff that would be going in the car with us into the truck (much of it going into a pillowcase that seemed to triple in size; the more we put in the more it held) and got goodbye monkey hugs from the 9-year-old next door and got in the truck and drove north.

It took us until after 9:30 to finish loading the truck. I stood on things and lifted things and shoved things and finagled things and silently thanked myself for all the times I'd gone to the gym to lift weights in the last several years, because if I wasn't regularly lifting 40K pounds in a variety of ways using a variety of muscles, I don't think I would have been able to do everything I had to do in that dark truck in the rain late at night after days of lifting and twisting and bending and cleaning all the things. Finally, we managed to get everything into our allotted space, and tied down with rope so as not to have it move around too much, and finished the drive up to Dan's parents house. When we got there, I'd stiffened up and felt 120 years old, but we had one more job to finish - we'd traded beds with one of their guest beds, and so we brought our old mattress and box spring out of the truck and into the guest bedroom. The kitties were noticeably wigged out, and we each took some painkillers, ate some dinner that Dan's mom had kept warm for us, and fell into bed, completely exhausted.

We got up before 7 the next morning in order to get all of our stuff out of the truck so Dan's dad could go to work, and it took us about 2 hours to figure out what all we'd be able to fit in the car, what would need to be mailed to us, and what could wait until spring when Dan's newly-retired parents come to visit us in California in their 5th wheel. After several calls to our vet, we'd finally gotten our hands on some kitty valium and hoped our car ride wouldn't be too miserable (if Loki can emit 3 fluids in a one-hour car ride, what can he do in 10 hours?) So we dosed the cats and shoved 'em in their carriers, made one last stop to Target and Petsmart for some road supplies, and officially began our trip to California around 10 AM.

Somehow, the kitty drugs and the kitty calming spray we'd picked up seemed to do the trick, and Wyoming and Utah passed with only one poop incident, no pee, and no barf. There wasn't even much yowling after the first hour or so, just two really high kitties. I didn't take any photos, since we've done the drive several times, and mostly we just listened to music, checked on the cats, and only had to stop a couple of times for gas/pee/$5 footlong. I'd planned to do some knitting on a baby blanket for an October baby, but my hands and forearms hurt so much from the overuse of the previous days that I couldn't even grasp the needles without yelping in pain, so I did nothing but do my best to entertain Dan, who did all the driving. I tried to get the cats to drink some water and use the box during one of our stops, but neither of them were interested in either option, so we just let them be until we pulled into the Motel 6 in Wendover, UT, checked in, sprayed some kitty spray in the room, and let 'em out. Luckily, the drugs were wearing off right around that time and so they both spent time exploring, eating, drinking, and using the box we set up in the bathroom.

We set out early on Friday for the remainder of our drive, only to realize that the car was making a funny noise and the lights were sort of flickering, which scared us. Serendipitously, Wendover has a plethora of places to get your car looked at, since it's right next to the Bonneville Salt Flats (where people come to drive cars really really really fast). We had to wait until 8 AM for one of them to open, and when it finally did, the guy poked around under the hood and declared us OK to drive. "One of the police cars in town was doing that for years," he told us, and surmised that our alternator (the one we just had replaced), while functional, was responsible for the noise and the flickering. I figure that once one of us is employed that we'll have it swapped out again for a different one.

Friday's drive was quite a bit hotter than Thursday's, and because we didn't get an early a start for the actual drive, the cats were drugged for a good chunk of the morning that wasn't drive time. They protested quite a bit more toward the end of the drive, when our only accessible atlas steered us in a weird direction when we were trying to avoid rush hour traffic on highway 101. We ended up coming up the back way, through Napa Valley, and across to Geyserville on 128, where construction stopped us for 10 minutes at one point (after we'd been in the car for over 10 hours, and the kitty valium had worn off, and the sun was in our eyes and it was still really hot). Finally, just as the sun went down, we made it to Cloverdale.

So here I am again, sitting in the Cloverdale Public Library using the free wireless. It's hot; yesterday it was in the mid-90s here, and I am more than ready for summer to be OVER. I haven't lived here since 1996, and I'm kind of having a difficult time not feeling like a failure. We tried to make this move for over a year but had no luck finding jobs, so we hope that being here will make that part easier, even if we are currently 90 minutes away from where we'd like to be living. We're doing some things to help my mom fix up her house and yard in order to get it in saleable or rentable condition, and the cats seem to be enjoying exploring the new space. My mom left some of my things from high school and earlier times (dolls, stuffed toys, my baby book) in the house, which I guess I'll have to decide what to do with when we leave. We're both going to be job hunting like mad after we finish the painting portion of our time in the house, and our stuff will arrive sometime this week, after which we'll have to rent a truck for a day to clear it out of the trailer and haul it up here. And in a couple of weeks, I'll be doing flowers for a high school friend's wedding, which I'm really excited about. For now, it's kind of like we're camping in a house - we don't have TV or internet, and we have two chairs which are only sort of comfortable to sit on. The table isn't really an eating table, and we're limited in our cookware, but we'll make do with what we have. And so far, we've been playing a lot of gin in the evenings.

Anybody out there who'd like to put out some good thoughts in the universe for us, that we find jobs in the Bay Area soon and get to move into a place of our own, they'd be much appreciated. In the meantime I'll be exploring the county where I grew up, and trying to find the good in our situation. At least we're in California now, right?

Big Change

Every couple of years, my work does a partial-day staff retreat during which time people take a personality test and find out their colors. People are categorized into blue, gold, green, and orange based on which "color" shows up most in their test. I'm not entirely sure what sort of system the test is based upon, but I do know that over the 6+ years I've worked here, my results have come up the same: equally blue and green, some orange, almost no gold. Blue = people person, empathy Green = science, data, results Gold = neat, organized Orange = change, excitement

Or some shit like that.

Anyhow, last year I took the test for probably the 4th time and orange had jumped up to be just about equal with blue and green in my results. Which meant that the part of me that craves change and challenges was crying out to be heard.

Or some shit like that.

I sat with the miniscule "orange" group that day though 2 other colors were equally represented in my results (it's apparently rare for orange people to stay long in the type of organization I work for) and thought to myself that it had been far, far too long since there had been any sort of change, positive or negative, in my life. "I need to fix that, some time in the next year," I thought to myself.


* * * * *


Today is my last day at a job at which I have worked for more than six years, at a place of employment at which I have worked for 7 years.

I'm equally gleeful, terrified, sad, and hopeful (about the future). There are some people who work at my job whom I will miss, but I'm really looking forward to doing something else now, thanks. Change is good, and because I've worked here so long my vacation and sick time payout means we'll have some money to live on until we both get fabulous jobs in California. Right?

I haven't done anything this seat-of-the-pants crazy since I up and moved to Colorado back in January of 2003, so it's about damn time.

So, to recap:

Last day of work
We move on Thursday. To California. To the house in which I grew up. We have no jobs lined up, though we do have a couple of good leads (plus I've got a wedding I'm doing mid-October).

The last month has brought enormous change to our lives. We went basically a whole year in which nothing of note happened (other than Petra dying and acquiring Robin). Then, we made the decision to move and after that things started happening. Dan's grandma died. I heard from several people from whom I've not heard in years. Plus some other stuff that I'm not ready just yet to write about.

Dear orange part of me, it's your time to shine. Make it count.

The last dance

I've been going to this class at my gym for the last few months. It's a Zumba class, and a friend who used to take the weights class with Deb recommended it. I took my first class back in May and I was hooked, and this whole summer, on Thursday evening and Friday at 11:30 AM, I've been shimmying and bopping and otherwise moving my body to Latin and Bollywood and African and Egyptian music with a group of other people who like to dance. Zumba has been a great workout, and I really like the instructor.

Today I took my last Zumba class at my gym. And next week, I'll go in for the last time, say hi to Kenny and Sam at the desk, grab my towel, log in to the FitLinxx kiosk, perform some sort of cardiovascular activity while listening to music, go back downstairs to shower and change, and say goodbye to everyone there. Because on September 22, Dan and I are moving to California.

I joined the YMCA in August of 2004. It was right after I'd started at my current job, and I realized that I was just not happy with the amount of regular exercise I was getting. I'd been in the habit of walking stairs with some of my coworkers, but when I took the new job I moved to a different building, in the basement with only a few other people around, and walking the stairs there just wasn't as interesting. My clothes were tight and I was feeling all-around bleah, so I decided to check out the Y which at the time was across the street and half a block down from where I worked.

Over the course of the last several years, the Y has become my third place, the place at which I feel most comfortable and spend the most time other than at home or at work. I've seen trainers come and go; I've seen other gym patrons get pregnant and have babies and get pregnant again and have second babies. I've taken a plethora of classes: yoga, mat pilates, cardio salsa, qi gong, step, cardio/weights, weights, and Zumba. I've made friends and knitted blankets for babies and gotten injured. I've gone there nearly every work day for an hour or more a pop and sometimes twice for over six years. That's a lot of time by anyone's standards. So what have I gained?

Peace of mind. Stress relief. A reason to get up out of my chair at work. Something I do for myself, on nearly a daily basis. Physical and mental health. A place where I could keep track of some sort of life progress, even if it was only a machine telling me how many hours of cardiovascular activity and how much weight I'd lifted in the past day, week, month, year, lifetime. The gym membership has been worth every penny I've paid for it, every month of the last 73. I've lost weight and gained weight and gotten way, way stronger and it's all been such a big part of my everyday existence that I know I'm not even going to know how much I will miss it until we are gone and I'm not in there every day, getting high fives and smiling at Cate's baby bump and sweating while I move my body around.

Charming Billy

The last couple of weeks of June, I watched as the sour pie cherries on the tree outside a business on my route to/from work went from zero to bright red. I waited and waited and watched and sampled and then, the first week of July, just before we went on our trip, I sprang into action.

It was after work one day, hot and dusty, and I asked Dan to accompany me to the tree. I brought a reusable plastic container and hoped I'd be able to fill it with only the gleanings from the branches that stuck over the fence. (Most of the tree, and therefore most of the cherries, were out of reach of passers-by.) First I picked, and then Dan picked what I couldn't reach, and each cherry plopped a satisfying plop into the container. I nabbed every cherry that seemed ripe, and Dan grabbed every cherry he could reach, and we ended up with several cups of cherries.



We walked home, stolen fruit in hand, and I washed, pitted, and stemmed the cherries, then set them out individually on trays to freeze. My original intention had been to use them right away, but this summer was hot, hot, hot. I think we maybe only turned on the oven two or three times in three months.

Once the cherries were frozen, I dumped 'em into a ziplock and there they sat, mocking me each time I pulled out a handful of walnuts or got ice for my drink. "Use us," they purred. "You know you want us. It is our destiny!" "Quiet, you," I told them. "It's still too hot for the oven."

It was too hot all through the parts of July that we were home, and it was too hot all through August. On September 1 I awoke to what felt a bit like a change in season, a crispness to the air, and decided I'd make a cherry pie on Friday. Except Friday, and then Saturday, and then Sunday, were all far too hot to consider the prospect of the oven. Colorado weather teased me, keeping that sour cherry pie just out of reach, each red beauty icy and tantalizing when I'd open the freezer door.

I decided enough was enough, and yesterday afternoon it wasn't miserably hot, so I pulled the cherries out of the freezer, tossed 'em with some sugar, some corn starch, and a wee bit of salt, and let them sit and defrost for over an hour.




Meanwhile, I made a pie crust and stuck it in the fridge. I decided on this recipe, though I did tweak it a bit. Once the filling was pink and squishy, I squelched it into the crust and used the oat/almond topping from the recipe, and then I shoved it in the oven for about an hour.



Except about 50 minutes in, I started smelling something...burnt-ish. And then I cursed myself for forgetting to stick a cookie sheet under the pie. I hastily shoved one onto the bottom rack, but it was too late for the hapless goo left to burn on the bottom of the oven. Yum.

After dinner, Dan and I each had a piece of purloined cherry pie. It was one of the best pies I'd ever made.

A Burg, A Boone, 2 villes, and Team Chaos

OK, so it's been a while. I had three crazy weeks (work-related) and then I took Friday off as a mental health day and it's been hard for me to get back in the swing of blogging. It's been nearly a month since we got home from our trip, but I promised I'd finish the recaps, so I will.

We left Philadelphia on a Monday afternoon and drove for several hours until we reached western Virginia, going through Delaware and Maryland without getting out of the car, sitting in rush hour DC traffic, and finally making it to Harrisonburg, VA, where there is noplace easy to camp (we found out the hard way after many false starts). We ended up having to backtrack 10 miles north to camp at an out-of-the-way KOA, with great facilities and (sadly) prices to match. It was rechristened "Suckburg, vol. 2" (a long story) and then I realized that I would have almost no juice in my phone so I called our friend in Boone to give hir a heads up regarding approximately when we might end up on hir doorstep. Thanks to our interest in adding just one more state (West Virginia) under our belts, what should have been 5-6 hours took more like 8 and we barely made it to Boone before B/T had to go to class.


Old fashioned gas pump at a gas station in White Sulpher Springs, WV

It was hot, and we were totally sweaty and disgusting and the hummus went rancid and leaked all over everything in the back seat (including my shorts) so I rinsed 'em in the sink and we hustled downtown and found the Appalachian State campus, then parked our butts in the library for 3 hours and soaked up the air conditioning, comfortable seating, and reading material. Ahhhhh.

I really enjoyed our visit with B/T, and Boone is beautiful, but damn it takes a long time to get there from anywhere. We were up and out relatively early in the morning after a home-cooked breakfast, and on our way to Asheville. After an hour's stop (during which time we bought cold iced caffeinated beverages from a bus/cafe and mostly wandered around), we headed to Nashville. We had a downtown wander there as well, poking around in some of the music stores and watching some people play instruments on the street, and then we drove through the rain to eat barbecue at a pretty swell place.



Coffee bus!


Like the Vegas strip, only with more country music and fewer people with gambling problems.


All this for less than 20 bucks.

We had some additional camping snafus after sitting in some bizarre traffic in the middle of nowhere, but eventually (like, way way past dark) made it to a campground in that tiny piece of western Kentucky near Paducah that's also right next to Illinois and Tennessee, near Land Between the Lakes. It was hot and gross and we were hot and tired and miserable, but the campsite was free and nowhere near any noise other than insects and frogs, so that was something at least.

In the morning, we ate at some low-rent Denny's style chain called Huddle House in Metropolis, IL which is of course where there's a giant Superman statue. So we had to stop there.


Superman is pretty big.


Sadly, his junk leaves something to be desired.

We took a long, hot detour through southcentral Illinois and had some more bad luck with food stuff in St. Louis and then came the long, long, long hot slog across Missouri. We stopped twice along the way to steal internet from Days Inns along the side of the road (B/T had a laptop cord we were able to use to power up the laptop) and try to figure out where we were going to stay. A $40 La Quinta room (yes, next to Denny's) with A/C and a bed and a shower sounded like heaven, so we booked it and drove there, cleaned up, and went to dinner in a different part of Kansas City at a great restaurant recommended by Average Jane. We enjoyed our dinner with AJ and her husband and went back to our hotel room to vegetate.

In the morning, we met up with Cagey and Team Chaos at a Denny's that was (again) next to a (different) La Quinta and had a great breakfast. Team Chaos were fun and funny and Cagey was delightful and it was just what we needed to start our last travel day. Which was long and hot and gross once again, driving all the way across Kansas and through Colorado back home.


Arun Macaroon and Peanut Butter Anjali!

So here's the rundown of the trip, in numbers:
States visited (driven through or stopped in): 20
States set foot, ate, slept, or peed in: 17
Miles: ~5,000
Awesome last-minute Travelocity hotel deals located: 3
License plates seen: 46 states, plus 5 Canadian provinces (only missing North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, Montana) (yes, we got Alaska and Hawaii!)
Friends visited with: 16 plus 3 kiddos
Friends we missed: Abby, EEK
Animals killed: One that we know of. We think it was a muskelid of some sort that ran right in front of the car, no way to swerve. :(

Trip: awesome.

Love, love, love

aka Road trip, part IV

Pennsylvania is big, you guys. Big, big, big. New Jersey isn't nearly so big, but in a hot, humid car with no A/C it still felt long. It took us about five hours to get across Pennsylvania and 45 minutes or so to get across New Jersey, and then it took us an hour to go the last mile up to the toll plaza on the George Washington bridge. In 100 degrees and high humidity, and no A/C. It was pretty brutal.

We finally made it across and into Manhattan, but despite our parking fears we managed to find a spot on the street in the West Village that cost $2.50 an hour until 7 PM. Not at all bad. We collapsed in limp puddles in Washington Square Park for a little while, piggybacking on someone's unsecured wireless connection, and tried to do some sightseeing but were stymied by the oppressive heat and humidity. Eventually we escaped into a $tarbuck$ (I KNOW. NYC, and we went to STARBUCKS) to get some air conditioning and some cold drinks. My unsweetened passionfruit tea was delicious, and I only had to wait for 20 minutes in line to use the bathroom.

We fed the meter one last time and hightailed it across the Village over to the East side, where we met a high school friend of Dan's for drinks with her boyfriend. A good time was had by all, up until someone at the next booth over spilled an entire beer down Dan's back. I only had two hard ciders but I was ridiculously tipsy (I guess maybe because of the day of heat/humidity in the car and out in Manhattan?) and we traipsed down to the southern part of the village, or maybe it was far northern Lower East Side, where we met my friend Purple Laura for dinner. I had a dish of cold noodles, salmon, and veggies because I couldn't stand the idea of eating anything hot. We spent the after-dinner portion of the evening in the bar next door, where Laura knew the bartender so our drinks were free. Woohoo!

It took us quite a while to walk back to the car, and it was still probably in the 90s with super high humidity, and then we had to navigate back over to 9A and north to get ourselves to New Haven, but it was a Friday night in the summer and everybody was still trying to get the heck out of dodge so the drive took a really, really long time. I think it was after 1 AM when we finally got to our hotel in New Haven (which was, incidentally, a La Quinta, but next to IKEA not Denny's) and I had to shower in cold water before I could cool down enough to fall asleep, even with the air conditioning on full blast.

The next day, Kent and Christine got married.

We were up early because I'd volunteered to help with some reception set-up, so I had to meet Kent at the church and then we hauled stuff over to the park and Dan and I spent the morning putting out luminarias with LED candles to line the pathways in the park, and setting up the bug lanterns, and other assorted chores. Once we'd finished, we got mashed potato pizza at Bar and headed back to the hotel to shower and get ready for the wedding.

The park had these gorgeous bright blue hydrangeas right by the tent

I learned merely days beforehand that I was also going to be an usher for the wedding, which was perfectly fine but somewhat unexpected. After Dan dropped me off, I set up the ice and the water bottles, and met my co-usher, and watched everyone run around the old church getting ready. I made sure the groom was elsewhere while the bride and her entourage scurried into the lounge and shut the door. I stood in front of one of the few fans that were going, as, you guessed it, the church didn't have air conditioning, either. And I handed out programs and showed people the guestbook and did the general sorts of things that ushers do at a church wedding.



Finally, everyone had arrived and it was time to begin. I closed the doors, and then opened them for the bridesmaids, and then closed them again. I gave the bride a big grin and arranged her train and opened the doors again for her to walk down the aisle with her mom. It was all quite lovely, and I realized that I haven't been to a wedding in a church since 1997. Even that wasn't a church so much as a giant open conference-type room that had the word JESUS in huge script gold letters above the front bit. But this church, oh, this was the lovely New England church you think of when you think of New England churches. At least, it was for me. Kent's family's been getting married in this particular church for multiple generations, so that added something to the whole experience as well.


Pen pals since 1994

After the ceremony, I ran back to open the door and I was the first person (after the groom) to kiss the bride, so that was pretty good. Dan and I waited a while and then went through the receiving line, and Kent's parents nodded and smiled until they realized I was *that* Emily, the one who exchanged letters with their son for years. Then I got much bigger smiles and big hugs. We got in the car and drove to the reception area, and I bustled around making sure that all my last minute set-up duties were attended to. We met some of K&C's friends and attempted to keep cool by drinking large quantities of ice water, beer (in Dan's case) and white wine (mine), and we munched on cheese and crackers and fruit. Eventually the wedding party, including the bride and groom, showed up and they did everything in a completely different order than I was used to (first dance before anything else?). Additional differences noticed in My First East Coast Wedding: Everyone (including the bride and groom) changes into shorts and tank tops or t-shirts or otherwise casual clothing about an hour into the reception. I wish we'd known. Because that was the one true drawback of Kent and Christine's wedding: it was hot, it was humid, and I'd chosen a dress without really considering the consequences. It was a cute dress, but polyester is not a fabric you want to wear when you are sitting in 90+F heat and high humidity. Sweat dripped down my front and my back all afternoon and all evening. It was pretty gross.


Mister and Mrs!

But there was food, and there was drink, and there was dancing and karaoke and a DJ that embodied every stereotype you can possibly imagine a wedding DJ to have. Dan and I both sang karaoke, if you can believe it. Here's a photo of him to prove it.


When the evening wound down, we went out to clean up all the paper bags and sand and LED candles, and help break everything down. It had been a great wedding, and a long day, and I was woe out.


Longarm of me and the bride, snagged right before she changed.


We had talked about what to do on Sunday, and at first we'd planned to head back to Manhattan to spend more time there, but after spending days in the oppressive heat/humidity (I know I keep writing about this bit, but we are just NOT used to humidity AT ALL), but we decided that we'd rather spend time in NYC when we want to actually be outside walking around and not ducking into Starbucks to take advantage of the air conditioning. So instead, on Sunday morning we drove from New Haven to Philadelphia, having booked a hotel room in Philly the night before and having realized Sunday morning that the laptop cord wasn't functioning. I'd recently got back in touch with my friend Sazzy and let her know our estimated timetable for the trip, and when we were in New Jersey at a Dunkin' Donuts we called her to say we were on the way. "Come by the store!" she said, and she gave us directions to the brick-and-mortar version of her amazing store, Sazz Vintage.

Sazzy and I go back to the early days of 2000, when I was first on the message board where I met Dan. At one point, she went to South Africa and when she got back, she mailed me several beaded bracelets from a place called Ndebele. She was unable to attend the Chicago get-together that fall, so I was entrusted with the task of distributing the bracelets to female attendees who were interested in them. I still wear my Sazzy bracelet, all these years later, and I never thought I'd get a chance to actually meet her in person. But thanks to The Wonders Of The Internet, we were back in touch and she's in Philly with her awesome store and we wanted to go there anyhow and now we had someone to visit. Hooray!

So we pulled into Old City and parked, and stopped in at the store first thing. After hugs and some chatting, Dan and I went out to explore Old City and some of Society Hill, and we started our alphabet project for Philadelphia. I managed to find the used bookstore I'd liked when I was in Philly before, but not the bar (sniff), and we decided to head back to Sazzy's store to arrange dinner plans. We drove down to the baseball stadium area, which is where our cheap hotel room was (in a Holiday Inn this time, not a La Quinta), showered, and changed clothes, then headed for the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood to our tasty mediterranean tapas dinner with Sazzy and her husband. Afterward, on their suggestion we had some gelato (that was nearly as good as the place in Berkeley, which is the best gelato I've had outside of Italy) and wandered around a bit, then headed back to the hotel.

Sazz Vintage flag

Monday morning we drove into town, intending to grab timed free tickets to the Independence Hall tour as early as possible. Dan parked while I got the tickets, and we grabbed some food while we waited for our tour to begin. We sat in the park right next to Independence Hall and it began to rain, so we ran under the eaves of the building across the street just in time for a 20 minute torrential downpour. We waited it out, and then went in to get screened and wait in the (slightly less wet) rain for our tour of Independence Hall, something I hadn't done when I was in Philadelphia before. After the tour, we went across the street and saw the Liberty Bell.


We walked through Chinatown and through the Logan Square area and all the way up to the Philadelphia Art Museum because you know we just HAD to run up the steps like Rocky. It was about 95 degrees, and the humidity goes without saying, but we did it in our street clothes, me in sandals, and it was just fine. And Dan got the Rocky statue as the perfect letter Y.

After retrieving the car, we drove to get Dan a gen-yew-ine Philly cheesesteak at the place that doesn't have a racist sign in the window, and then we left Philadelphia. It was a good less-than-24-hour-stop.