All Together Now

I'm not exactly sure where this year went, but I do know that three weeks of it were spent on furlough. I also know that our parent company firing our publisher and bringing in a new person to run the place about two weeks before Christmas was not the kind of end-of-year surprise we wanted, but what can you do, right?

Work has been a whirlwind, mostly because it's a rushed time of year anyway--deadlines are shorter because of the holidays, you try to work ahead so you can have days off (and to accommodate the bigwigs in town who take off about three weeks and are impossible to get ahold of for interviews), and, if you're me, you're so jumped up on processed sugary foods that it's nearly impossible to concentrate. No lie: Some company delivered an entire massive cookie cake to our office. This is why I will probably die of a heart attack at 35.

And in the middle of this, our publisher was fired on a Thursday and we were told a man from our parent company and a new publisher would come down on a Monday. This gave us an entire weekend to worry about getting laid off. It was a pretty anxious weekend.

But somehow we survived it all and still have jobs (so far). It's Christmas Eve, there are snow flurries outside, and I'm sitting on my living room floor with Fenway, who's got one eye on the window above which some sparrows have a hangout. He talks to the birds every morning, and they disappear about midday and he lies waiting for them. Most days, the spot where he sits is a big patch of sunlight, where he can warm himself and look ridiculous, but today's it's chilly and the windows are a tiny bit fogged up.

I'll be going out to the barn later, giving the horses some treats and making sure they have warm blankets for the night, then driving out to Dallas to spend the night with my parents. I'll take a timeout in the evening to see Dan when he gets off work, and I admit I'm excited about that. We've been dating for about five years but have never yet seen each other on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, since my parents always lived halfway across the country. I would usually see him on his birthday, which is Dec. 27, but I think it will be nice to give him his Christmas gift actually on Christmas and his birthday gift on his birthday. That, and I hope I can convince him to drive me around the ritzy parts of Dallas to look at Christmas lights.

Spending Christmas with my parents in Texas is a bizarre thought. I think part of the reason work has seemed so frenzied lately is because usually I just check out and leave, using up most of my vacation days to take a luxurious trip back to Virginia. This year I actually had to be at work during all those days I'd usually be gone. (Actually having to work--what an indignity!)

This Christmas will also be the first one without any family pets. Our last childhood pet, a cat named BC, had to be put to sleep over the weekend. She was about 16, I think, and we got her when I was in 5th grade or so, and she was getting old and the vet had said before that she seemed to have some kind of slow cancer growing. I don't know what exactly happened--it happened on Saturday morning, and my mom still doesn't want to talk about it yet--but when Mom sent a text message to tell me (I suspect because she would have started crying if she called), I found myself crying pretty hard.

BC was a good cat, and we all loved her and all her weird quirks, but her death was also the final one of all the pets we had when I was growing up. Sugar, the yellow lab my parents got for themselves as a wedding present, had to be put to sleep when she was about 11 and I was in fourth grade. Taffy, the cocker spaniel we got when I was in third grade or so, was put to sleep when I was a sophomore in college. He'd actually been diagnosed with a bad heart condition when I was in middle school, and the vet told us he'd die that year, but he was on daily heart medication and lived until he was about 10.

Ginger was the cat we adopted while we lived in England. At the time, taking animals to the U.K. was just a pain because of the rabies quarantine laws, so Sugar lived with my grandparents the three years we were there and Ginger was a tiny orange kitten when we got him from a farmer who was going to drown the litter if he couldn't give them all away. Gin went through the embarrassment of being called a girl for several months before we figured out his sex, and he was a loving but very vicious cat. He killed every bird and rodent he could get, leaving feathers strewn in the back yard, before we moved back to the States and he became an indoor cat. He was put to sleep when I was a senior in college.

BC we found under our car at the barn one night in San Antonio. The back pastures were patrolled by coyotes when the horses weren't turned out. While the animals never posed a threat to the big horses, every barn cat and most barn dogs disappeared, and we were going to leave the barn one night when we saw this little kitten under the Suburban. She wouldn't move, so we hauled her out and took her home and named her BC for Barn Cat. (Just as we named Ginger for his coloring as a big ginger cat, as the British called their orange tabbies, we named BC for something obvious. We're an original family.)

BC was referred to as a vampire cat for the first few years with us, since she largely lived under my parents' bed and only came out at night. She finally got kicked out of the house for two years when we lived in Alabama--she wouldn't quit peeing on people's shoes and clothes, so she was relegated to the barn. We were out there every day for several hours with Rio and Topper anyway, and she adjusted well and became a great mouser. She came back into the house when we moved to Virginia, and she never peed on people's clothes again.

As I said, I'm sad about BC, but I'm also sort of sad because she's the end of an era. She was one of the last things about my childhood still around, and it's sad to realize they're all gone. They had good lives with us, and we dote upon animals like nobody's business in our family, but it's still painful. Fenway is my own cat, so he's a bit of a different thing--I got him as an adult, as someone with a job. Rio and Topper are also something different, since they're not exactly pets and since horses are generally so long-lived. I expect them both to be around for a long time yet, and still BC's death just reminded me of how much I dread having to one day say good-bye to them.

Now that I've dragged this post down with talks of death and everything--sorry!--I'll wrap it up. The snow has picked up outside, and it reminds me of what it looked like one white Christmas in Albuquerque, when we trekked out back behind the house to the barn to let the horses out to play in it. Topper ate the carrot nose off the snowman and startled himself when a piece of the head fell off. Christmas isn't quite the New Year, so it's not a time yet to look toward the future and make plans. Instead, Christmas to me seems more a time to remember the past, remember the good things that have happened, and try not to forget.

Home For The Holidays

I haven't updated lately, although I meant to write about what a transcendent experience it was to be at the sold-out TCU/Utah game a few weeks ago. I showed up with my signs for College GameDay, ate a giant burger at Dutch's, drank warm beer and then cold beer given to me by the guy who was my editor when I was but a young reporter at the college newspaper and then another cold beer given to me by a former professor. I fought the lines for the bathroom--sometimes I wish I could pee like a guy--and watched TCU kick the shit out of Utah. It was good, and the fans were so noisy and everything was so great I almost wanted to cry.

But anyway, enough waxing poetic there. I've been mostly keeping up with the National Novel Writing Month that is November. I'm about 34,000 words into what needs to be a 50,000-word short novel by 11:59 p.m. Nov. 30. I didn't really start with much of a plot, except I'd have a reporter who gets laid off and gets a job at a horse stable, and I've gotten that far. I don't know what else to really throw in, so I'm making stuff up as I go along, under the careful watch of the wonderful Kate, who's a great coach. Maybe I'll actually do a triathlon some day. She'd be a great coach for that, too.

(Hey, Kate, tonight I'm going to go running for the first time in . . . well, a very, very long time. You should turn your whip that direction, too.)

Thanksgiving is this week, and it's so nuts to think about the holidays with my parents nearby. They're about 50 minutes away, which is just mind-blowing. My parents buy me like a week's worth of barbeque and send me home with leftovers, and this time I'll see them without the vacation days and flights to Reagan.

Winter and the holidays were always my time to be in Virginia, to be riding the Metro around D.C., to be walking around in the cold from museum to museum, iPod on and hands in pockets. I knew when I was at home (I refer to everything as "at home," it feels like; my apartment, my parent's place, Dan's apartment, etc) in July that I'd miss Virginia. I miss the gray skies that hold the possibility of snow. I miss the fat squirrel who lived behind our first house and the fat rabbit that lived behind the second one. I miss driving around to the Bloom grocery store or the Safeway, and I liked the church our family went to there, since there were windows to look out and see the trees through.

Since I was a sophomore in college, holidays always meant Virginia. I spent summer vacation and spring breaks there, too, and I did spend two brief Christmases in Tampa when I was in grad school, but they're pretty firmly linked with Virginia in my mind.

This holiday will be fantastic, no doubt. But at the same time, I won't have the luxury of stepping completely, totally away from my responsibilities as an adult to go home anymore. When I was halfway across the country, there was no chance of an editor calling me to do something or of me worrying about getting something in the mail. My parents are close, now, and their new home is, too. I just won't be able to get away from my home, either.

I love Fort Worth, I sort of think of it as an adopted home, but I am antsy.

Fast Goals

The goal of the weekend was to go big and go fast.

I started that with a Halloween party on Friday night, and let me just say I don't think I've ever been that drunk. I was drinking everything in sight, tequila shots included (because has tequila ever hurt someone before? of course not), and it all ended rather badly in the guest bathroom of the hosts, whom I'd never even met prior to that night. I'm blaming the Jesus costume. I thought I could work miracles.

That said, I did have a lot of fun before we got to the part that I totally don't remember. I don't know how I got the bruise on my forehead or the one on my arm, and I don't remember anything after the guest bathroom, but I am glad Dan was there to haul my drunk ass home and deal with more nonsense there. When we go out to a party, we usually decide beforehand whose turn it is to be designated driver, and I'm glad he was there and available for duty.

I felt horrific most of Saturday (ooh, the hangover, my mortal enemy), thanks to my gung-ho attitude Friday, but I got everything out of my system in enough time to get to the second half of the TCU homecoming game. (Go Frogs!) My parents were there, so I had to pretend that I had a peaceful, wholesome time the night before, but they had to leave early to drop my sister at work. I met up with them after the game when they took me out to dinner at the Flying Fish for catfish fillets, and I explained to them that I would be doing NaNoWriMo and both were enthusiastic. I didn't tell them I was posting everything online because, again, they need to think peaceful, wholesome thoughts about me.

Crystal was pushing me to go out that night, but I was feeling queasy again after dinner so I settled on the couch to watch several episodes of SciFi's The Invisible Man on DVD. This show was, hands down, my favorite show when I was in high school. Well, ok, it was tied with ER, but the first season of this show was everything a dorky girl could dream of. I didn't much like the second season, but I ordered the first one on Netflix and have been reliving it the past few days, feeling like I'm 17 again, which is a pretty righteous age to be.

I stayed up until midnight, and decided I may as well start with the NaNoWriMo challenge. As previously mentioned, all of it will be posted online because I need other people prodding me to get things finished. I spent an hour and a half writing last night, then a few hour-and-a-half sessions doing the same throughout the day. I'm trying to log as many words as possible as quickly as possible because I know how I lose attention for these sorts of things so quickly. I also know that once work starts up again on Tuesday (I took a four-day weekend) that I'll get bogged down with the usual writing, trying to make word counts to fill our ever-slimmer paper.

Tomorrow night is a write-in, in which people from the area who are participating in NaNoWriMo meet up and sit together and work on their projects. It's at the Flying Saucer, a bar, and I'm thinking I may be up to drinking alcohol again by that point. I'm going to try to focus on being fast and furious with the novel and not with my drinking this time around.

Endless Drivel

Five minutes ago I was checking my normal list of blogs for the day when I ran across this entry from Molly:

I'm going to do it! I'm going to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I don't have an idea for a plot or any characters yet, but the lovely thing about NaNoWriMo is that it places importance on quantity not quality. Starting November 1st, I will be writing a 50,000 word manuscript for a crappy (or brilliant--either works) novel. On average, that's about 5-6 pages a day. I'm excited to try out a new kind of writing for me and I hope that it helps improve my professional writing--or at least is just fun.

Here's the link if you want to find out more: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

To all this, I have just one thing to say:

Oh HELL yes.

Molly (I didn't link to her blog because I feel awkward linking to people's personal blogs without prior permission) was a classmate of mine at BU, and if there's one thing we were taught at BU, it was how to write. Copious amounts. About sometimes seemingly dull topics. So a novel? Piece of cake, right?

For all you journalists or otherwise slacker-types who may read this, I think you should also get involved. It's a fantastic excuse to procrastinate on other stuff, like work that pays the bills, hanging out with friends, and having a life.

So. Yes. I like to think I'll write faithfully with some sort of schedule, but what is more probably is I'll do one of those madcap things where I try to write the entire novel in the last week, the way I wrote all my honors thesis papers in college that were supposed to be done all semester. If anyone has any ideas--topics, characters, genres, etc--leave it in the comments. Seeing as how this will be nonsense at best, I'm sure I can fit all the suggestions in.

I'd make some punny joke about "Write on, man!" but it just feels too easy.

And of course I'm going to post this piece of shit on the internet. I even created a brand-new blog to put it all on. Few things make me as happy as creating blogs I am devoted to for a short time period and then let fall by the wayside, and on this one I can automatically forget about it by Nov. 30. Brilliant! No entries until Nov. 1, naturally, but then check back and we'll see if I've already forgotten about this.

Looking Up

I know it's taking me forever to post all this stuff about New Mexico, but it seems ever since I got back that things have been busier than they've been in a very long time. Work stuff, coordinating with Dan's schedule, the barn, the parents--all of it has come together and I was grateful tonight to spent two and a half hours in a laundromat, just reading.

The biggest reason I chose to go to Albuquerque over the dates I went is because of the Balloon Fiesta, the most crowd-drawing thing the city has to offer. Every year, people from around the world bring their balloons to show off, compete in challenges, race, and all sorts of other things, and a ridiculous number of people show up. Every day starts off before dawn, when a small contingency of balloons light up in the darkness like luminarias and go up to test the weather conditions. Thanks to the Sandias on the east, the Three Sisters volcanos on the west and some funky air currents, Albuquerque is a great place to fly a kite--wait, a balloon. Probably a kite, too.





We wanted to show up for the mass ascension, the very first event of the festival every year. Showing up before dawn means pulling on many, many layers of clothes, fighting traffic jams at 4 a.m. (or doing park and ride, which we did), and buying cinnamon rolls and breakfast tacos and coffee at the park. People get so excited when the balloons start going up, and slowly dawn reaches Albuquerque. It takes a while, since the sun has to come up over the mountains, but the balloons grow up like technicolor bread dough rising in the giant park.





To get the balloons up, the material is spread out across the ground and the basket is tipped on the side. Fans are used to initially puff up the fabric, and sometimes a person will go inside the balloon to help it along. Once the balloon is upright and the basket is tipped the right way, noisy burners are set off. Needless to say, no smoking is allowed anywhere in the park, but crowds always try to gather around the balloons. It's cool to see that kind of fire close up--fire that can be harnessed to put people into the air--but the warmth is also a big draw. Balloons of all colors and shapes went up--there are much better photographs out there by others, I'm sure, but at the end of the morning there was a huge swarm above us, gently bumping into each other as they took off and then floating away to the northwest, like paper boats sent down a slow stream.















Later in the day, my companions--Amy, my second host and her friend, who was a middle school science teacher--went back to the park for a second round of balloons. (Why did we go back? Well, I'm a science journalist, Amy's an audiologist, the teacher is a science teacher . . . there were extreme dork levels, and we gave in.) Late that afternoon gas balloons--not heated, but filled with gases like helium--were supposed to take off for a race, and we kept waiting for the start. The sun started to set, we amused ourselves by drawing mustaches on our fingers and talking in funny voices. We gave an 8-year-old a mustache when he asked for one (with his parents' permission, since it was permanent marker. And yes, it was the journalist walking around with a giant bag of pens and markers in her purse.) The wind got bad, the balloons ducked and bobbed and partially collapsed. Nothing took off. The moon came up. They set off the fireworks, so no one got a weather refund. We packed it in, went to a bar and did karaoke. I butchered Steve Miller Band and the White Stripes.











Sunday I spent some time out wandering around off the Cottonwood Springs Trail at the western foot of the Sandias. Later that day I would drive around the streets of the city, revisiting various childhood places, but I'd never been on these trails. It was pretty, peaceful, quiet broken by lizards scuttling in dead leaves and mountain bikers skidding down narrow trails in the distance. I got off the trail and wandered through a dried creek bed, looking for fossils. I think I saw petrified wood sticking out of a giant rock, but I don't know. Quartz is abundant out there. I tried to remember not to walk around always looking at the ground, checking for ways I'd trip and hurt myself, but to look up every once in a while.

Childish Things

The second time we lived in New Mexico was from 1990 until 1993. We briefly lived in Albuquerque in the mid-80s for about four months before we moved to England while my dad finished some special ops flight training stuff (or something). I was really young and don't remember much about the first time. Here's what I do remember:

We lived in the pink apartments (but then, everything's pink and adobe in N.M.)

I almost drowned in the complex pool (my mom told me not to go in, but I did)

I refused to eat the green eggs and ham (made with a touch of food dye when reading Dr. Seuss at playschool)

And I was terrified of this place:



This is an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, a place that would become one of my favorite spots on the face of the planet (besides the barn and the Rio Grande Nature Reserve) when we moved back to Albuquerque after being in England.

This volcano exhibit scared the shit out of me because the floor was of thick plastic with red "lava" running underneath. When I was little, the first time in Albuquerque, I was about four and my dad had to carry me through this room because I was afraid the floor would collapse and we'd sink into the whooshing lava below. This is probably why today, if I ever lay down on a tanning bed, I can't stop thinking about what would happen if the plastic cracked and I fell onto the light bulbs.



There were other great things about the museum, though, including the dinosaurs and the exhibit about the start of life on earth. I loved the tiny colored diodes that came together to form DNA; even as a little kid, I was a dork. When I was in elementary school, after we moved back from England, I'd generally gotten over my volcano fear, but I still didn't particularly like that room. When I went back this year, I saw they'd opened a new dark and dramatic room about the end of the dinosaurs, filled with strobe lights and crashing sounds and shaking floors, and they feature a nice warning for parents. There's still no warning on the volcano room. The new room also features this awesome photo of tiny rat-like creatures eating a T-rex carcass. That's mammals FTW, for those of you keeping track at home.





I did the science museum on the first full day in Albuquerque. That day I woke up, hiked around one of the canyons that is part of the Petrogylph National Monument (more on that later), went to the museum, dinked around Old Town (which is like the Stock Yards in Fort Worth, filled with tourists), and then went through the nature reserve (more on this in a later post, too). My last full day in Albuquerque, Sunday, was again partially spent looking at my elementary school years in New Mexico.

We moved from a tiny community in England, a fishing village, to Albuquerque, where I got ridiculed for my accent and the administration at the school tried to put my sister and I into speech therapy. It was a confusing time for me, that first year (second grade). Third grade got better, and fourth grade was one of my best years of school, period. It may have been THE best year of school for me before graduating from high school. Those three years were spent at Kirtland Elementary School, right outside Kirtland Air Force Base (where my dad was stationed) and within walking distance from the base housing. I'd walk to school every day with some other kids from base housing, and after a while, I loved that school.

There are new murals on some of the walls, now, and the playground looks infinitely smaller than it seemed when I was little. I remember buying popsicles after lunch for a quarter, trying to eat them before they melted into the sand, and catching lizards on the playground. All the play equipment is new, shaded, covered in brightly-colored poly. There are still portables where some of the classrooms are, and there's one tree in the back playground. There's still a carefully cultivated green quad that's shaded with big, handsome trees where I studied Van Gogh for the first time.





Tooling around the perimeter of the base in my car with the windows down was strange. Very little had changed, except now what was one of the centers of my life--everything within the borders of that base fence--was now off limits, gone. That's something I can't go back and visit again, like so much of my past. Well, I guess I could if my parents escorted me on base as a visitor, but that doesn't do much for my personal love of revisiting the past on my own.

There were three blue-tiled pieces of public art near the base that I took a lot of delight in as a kid. One was a giant car, up on an arch, that actually had a hole all the way through it. I always thought it was a real car they somehow gutted and holed out, but now I think I was probably wrong. The other was this odd, slanted table coming out of a wall. The third piece, a blue armchair that appeared to be sinking into the ground, is gone. I found the piece of land it used to be on, but now it's flat and empty, pink concrete that no longer has a quick-sand appearance due to the disappearing chair.







I guess some things do change, after all.

The East Side

When you're driving west along I-40 toward New Mexico from Amarillo, the ground abruptly drops off from under you about 20 miles from the Texas/N.M. border. I got up early on Wednesday morning to make the drive to Albuquerque, unsure of how long it would take (turns out it took considerably less time than Google Maps and Mapquest and the GPS thought, thanks in part to the time zone change).

The drive was fairly uneventful, passing through occasional small towns that reminded me of the places I went to high school my junior and senior year. My junior year was at Moriarty High School in Moriarty, N.M., 20-odd miles east of Albuquerque and on the other side of the Sandia Mountains from the big city. When I was making the drive, I caught my breath momentarily with recognition when I saw the Sandias and I saw roadsigns for Moriarty and Edgewood, the next town over (and where we actually lived).

It's strange going back to places you've been. I discussed this with my mom when I got back, and it turns out she feels the same way I do--that there are certain large chunks of my life that feel like a dream and feel like they may never have really happened. Driving through Moriarty to the school, which I could still drive by instinct despite only spending one year there, affirmed my experience. I did go to school there. I hated a lot of it, but I really enjoyed other parts of it, and the school was largely the same. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the only students were with the football team, so I waltzed myself into the school, wandered around, took photos, and no one ever questioned me.



I think every school has these big school year posters that show senior class photos of everybody from that year. When I was going down the main hall, I saw that poster for the 2000 kids--I had somehow ended up ahead in most of my classes, and so my junior year was spent surrounded by seniors. It was weird, looking at all the kids. There was the skater kid whose locker was next to mine, to pulled me into this weird waltz down the hallway one day; the one out gay guy, who caught a lot of flak but showed off his shaved legs in shorts regardless; the meathead who was a total jerk to me and once made me cry in the middle of civics class; the Army ROTC kid who sat next to me in civics class; the girl who was obsessed with comic books and introduced me to some really funny British comedy shows; the cowboy kid who worked at the supermarket we went to and was always really nice and polite and was always wearing shitkicker boots. The nametag on a nearby classroom was the same, too; it was my civics teacher, a liberal New York-state Democrat in a generally Republican town whose brother was a movie director.

After leaving the school, it was only a short drive to Edgewood, and I drove through town (it used to be just a supermarket and a few tiny restaurants; now it's a supermarket, a Super Wal-Mart and a few tiny restaurants) and headed north toward where our house used to be. It's easy enough to find, since there aren't a lot of streets and all of the houses have at least a few acres. It's easy for me to get turned around in a big subdivision, with houses crowded and lawns all the same; out there, most houses are adobe or have colorful metal roofs. The house we leased was still there, still looking largely the same, although our landlord had sold it and the people who lived there had a ton of broken-down vehicles on the edges of the property. The large hill--or is it a mountain? I need to find out some day--was still there to the north, and the sky was clear. I'd forgotten how it was so damn windy all the freaking time out there on that side of the mountain.





I still had time to kill before I met with my couchsurfing host, so I cut through back roads to Tijeras, another tiny town, and took the scenic Sandia Crest Highway up to the peak, slowly winding 14 miles up. Some of the trees were starting to turn; chipmunks and squirrels darted out of the way. At the top was a viewing area, a good 15 degrees or so colder than at the base of the mountain. Teenagers in T-shirts, tucking their arms inside, were up there. The inside of the bathroom doors are stenciled with a black bear, the New Mexico state animal, and with the words "Feed a bear, kill a bear." A fenced-off area full of radio towers was fascinating to me, almost more so than the view down to the west, over Albuquerque. The sun cast a glare over the city, so it was hard to distinguish anything, but the towers and wind combined to make a sound like a jet engine revving nearby.





With the sun sinking and making photos more difficult, I climbed down, got into my car, and drove down. I passes cyclists, huffing their way up the roads, and wondered what they would do when it turned dark; the sun sets earlier, and I'd be afraid of getting hit by a car (or wandering black bear?) out at night on a bike. When I cut back through Tijeras to the highway and then through the pass to Albuquerque, the sun was setting and the sky was dark orange. When I called my parents later that night to tell them I'd made it, my dad was disappointed I'd unplugged the GPS and put it in the back seat when I got into New Mexico. I was afraid I'd come back and everything would have been developed, that large, generic and faceless rows of strip malls and housing complexes would have taken over, but not much had changed. I didn't need directions.

Silence

After about two weeks of deliberating, I've decided not to take my computer with me to Albuquerque.

This might not seem like a big deal, but to me it sort of is. I leave tomorrow to go back to the Land of Enchantment, one of my homes, and I have all sorts of things planned. The biggest goal of this trip is just to get away, totally, from what I have here in Fort Worth. Not that my life isn't good, but I need a break to retain my sanity. Fall finally coming through North Texas in little fits and starts is helping, but I need more.

I thought about bringing my computer so I can look up places, get directions, blog about the trip, download photos. Then I decided I really don't need that. My parents lent me their GPS, which has directions and directories and whatnot, and I can always buy new memory cards. It's not like I'll be away for that long, either, so it's not like I'll never be able to catch up on blogging. If I run out of room on my camera, I can just buy a new memory card.

What pushed me over the edge is that I don't want to be checking my e-mail or reading the NYT or looking at blogs while I'm away. My computer is very much my tie to the outside world, especially since I don't have a TV, but I don't like feeling that I need it. What I really need is some silence, some time to think, some time to just exist.

When I was in high school in New Mexico, we lived in this fantastic house of the east side of the Sandia Mountains, to the east of Albuquerque. The house was one of four on a cul-de-sac that was sort of in the middle of nowhere; we had two acres, fenced in, including a barn for the horses, a riding arena, a round pen, a basketball court, a garage big enough for our three cars (since I was driving at this time) and still plenty of room to see rabbits and catch horned frogs. Our office room looked west, toward the back side of the Sandias, and the computer desk was in front of the window. We had dial-up at the time, and this is when everybody used AOL and Yahoo was the search engine of choice, and I remember sitting there at midnight or so, hoping and waiting for the dial-up to go through and connect me.

I think I'll be just fine for a few days without internet. I actually feel liberated by the decision. I'll twitter about everything by text message from my phone, but I'll come back and blog when I return home. Stop by in a week and take a look--hopefully I'll have some good photos and good stories.

And yeah, there will be a lot of talk about food.

Security Check

Friday I'm going to Dallas to cover this giant fund-raiser event for M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. I guess they hold it in Dallas because there's more money for Houston; I'm not sure, but this will be my third year going and it's a chance to get out of the office for a few hours, get a free lunch of "eh" quality (but it's free!), and write a quick and easy web story.

This year the guest at the event is former first lady Laura Bush, so the PR people for M.D. Anderson had to get names of reporters turned in ahead of time so we can be checked out by the Secret Service, I guess. Check-in for media is also scheduled for much earlier--so they can frisk us? Who knows? I'm not really one to complain about it; it is what it is, that's fine, but it got me wondering what would be found if anyone did a background check on me.

It made me wonder if the government has a file on my somewhere because I'm a reporter, or because I have a blog where I say I work for the damn liberal media. I wonder if they know I have several thousand dollars on a credit card that seems like it will never, ever be fucking paid off because I've moved on it several times, lived on it for an internship, bought tires and dental services on it and used it to bridge pay gaps with my furloughed job. I'm not a heroin addict or alcoholic, but I like beer and some wines and tequila. Mixed drinks are usually screwdrivers or whiskey sours. If they looked hard enough, would they find the old websites I made when I was in high school, where I posted these melodramatic short stories I would write? Half my characters had some weird disease or syndrome because I had this set of medical encyclopedia things that I would peruse until I found something to obsessively research and then was compelled to use that research in something. (Yeah, ok, we were all weird kids, let's remember that.)

I don't particularly have anything interesting that people could find, I don't think. No arrests, only one speeding ticket ever (I'm usually able to charm my way out of them). No Swiss accounts, although those won't be secret for very long for a lot of people, so that's a moot point. Well, that and I'm a fucking journalist, so I've got shit money anyway. Anyway. I wrote some passionately-worded opinion columns for my college newspaper, but they were all about vaccinations or keeping religion out of science classes or how there were too many freshman clogging the sidewalks and admissions should be tougher.

In grad school, I took some class--I can't even remember the name or topic anymore--that was taught by a conspiracy-theorist honorary professor who was a big writer in her day (although I'd never heard of her, but I've been known to read stupid shit like Twilight and the original Star Wars books, so my knowledge of authors isn't always tremendous). She would talk about how she knew her phone calls were bugged. I'm not sure how she knew this--she was discombobulated at the best of times, and I earned an A by showing up regularly and giving a presentation about the New York Times (the sole grade in the class). But it makes me wonder if my life is boring, since I have no good dirt to dig up.

But then I realize, fuck, that's generally ok with me. I go to work; that's fine, I generally enjoy my work, it keeps me busy and (barely) keeps a roof over my head. I go spend time alone with the horses. I feed Fenway marshmallows and donuts and caramel corn, because he is strange. I go out with friends and drink, I spend time lazing around napping with the boyfriend on weekends. I blog about stupid shit.

Sometimes I think right now that's all I can handle. I'll muss up my reputation when I've got the money to rectify it.

(And as a complete side note, my internal clock is effed. I stay up way too late, and even getting up late feels too early during the week. I had this theory it was anemia or something, so I started taking an iron supplement, but I dunno, it's not helping. I think what it really comes down to is that I am naturally a night owl, and sometimes I lapse back into that. Hence why I'm here blogging when I should be finished writing stories and going to bed to read for a bit before sleep. I haven't done the story I thought I would. And I will try to get up early to do it, and odds are I'll sleep in. Good thing there's only two weeks until furlough/vacation.)

Escape

As if you didn't already know from Monday's post, it has been a shit week. Some other things happened, which I won't bore you with, but I spent most of yesterday simmering with general anger toward the world. I felt better when I saw Dan for a short while last night--he and his sister are roadtripping to California and left today--but it all returned with a vengeance this morning because it's deadline day.

And then, lo, yonder in my inbox, behold: My second couch confirmation. I am going to Albuquerque.

I will be splitting my time staying with two different people, sleeping on their couches. Room service? No. But I will be meeting some cool people who are young and generally poor, like me, and are willing to open their homes up to a stranger with a serious case of furloughitis, as it shall henceforth be called. I found them through the CouchSurfing Project, which I cannot recommend enough. It's free, and you sign up, post information, and give as much as you can. In return, you can take what's offered if you ask nicely. It's taking the idea that travel shouldn't be financially treacherous to the next level.

While I do have a place to stay, I am still considering scaling back my plans once in Albuquerque because of my furlough nonsense. I will get paid a few days into my trip, true, but it will be a furlough paycheck. I have decided there are really only two places I must eat at (the Owl Cafe, which serves a great green chile cheeseburger, and Garduno's, a local chain that makes sopapillas that are so perfect and fluffy and delicious that I'd like to live inside one). I've decided I should probably skip the art museums. I may not drink much beer while there. These are serious decisions. But hiking is abundant and cheap--usually just a few dollars parking--and I like the idea of just being outside in the pretty weather.

Speaking of outside endeavors, I may have also found a lead on leasing out the pony. With the days getting shorter, I will have a hard time riding both of the horses this fall and winter on my own. But a trainer I'm friends with has a student who needs a reliable ride, and Po is nothing if not reliable. Reliable and cute. He's pretty damn cute.

Tonight I'm going to the barn then going to watch Project Runway, which is back on, bless everything that is holy, in Tim Gunn's name we pray, amen. Tomorrow I have a concert after work to go to--free!--and Saturday my mother has offered to take me out and pay for my day. Plus I get to see the house they bought in Rockwall. Sunday I will be lazy, and same goes for Monday. This three-day weekend could not come at a better time.

Third Time Is No Charm

Yep, a third round of furloughs.

This was announced by e-mail yesterday. It's not exactly the best way to crush the hopes of your employees, but hey, I'm not the boss. I would have preferred they wait until Friday, when I'd gotten paid, because I would have been brilliantly blinded by the non-furlough paycheck I'd just gotten and may not have realized it was the last one until well into the next week.

I'm not going to do the calculations, but I think this means we get more furlough paychecks--paychecks with 10 percent taken right off the top--than regular paychecks this year. It also means there's another five days that have to be dealt with, but no money to help out with them. I'm also stuck with nine vacation days to use, so I scheduled to take off about two weeks straight for the end of September and early October. I'll still have four vacation days to use up somewhere.

I'm still planning to use part of those days to go to Albuquerque, but now my plans have been hit by paycheck worries. I'd planned for N.M. because it was fairly close, fairly cheap, and I thought I'd at least get three or four regular paychecks before going. But no: two regular paychecks, and then back to the skimpy ones. I'm reining in my plans for the trip; not as many museums, not as much food, maybe not buying Christmas gifts there. (Fuck, maybe I'll just scrap Christmas gifts this year. Maybe if I tell everyone now I'll skip accepting them if it means I can skip giving them, my budget will be a bit happier.)

I was really, really pissed off about the whole furlough things yesterday. It happened to fall on a bad day--a Monday, first of all, and secondly I was sore from the crossfit class on Saturday that I think sprained or strained my right elbow. That arm is kinda wonky since I messed it up in college with a bad riding fall and really badly broke it, and I can't straighten it now. I went home and had some wine, took a hoarded muscle relaxer (from the most recent bad riding fall, back in 2007), called my student loan company to get an extension on only paying interest on my loan, and went to bed at 9 p.m.

Today I'm pretty dejected, and I've got shit to do. There are special publication stories to be written and people to track down for this week's normal stories. I just don't want to be here at work today. It's not worth it. I can't really concentrate, and I just need a few days to be in my funk and then I'll be fine. But some days you know you're not going to get much done at work and you still have to be there, and it's frustrating. I'm looking forward to 5 p.m., when I can bolt out of here and go to the barn. A trainer at the barn found a potential family to lease the pony, and both the boys have shoes again, so I'd much rather be at the barn than here at my desk.

I know I'm grateful to have a job, to have health insurance, to be able to afford groceries, even if I'm going to have to redouble my efforts to not spend money. I'm grateful to be with a company that appears to be doing everything it can to not cut people.

But fucking hell, they did a shit job of telling us all this, and we're all pretty damn tired of it. Sometimes I feel like fate is trying to give me a sign but I'm too dumb to take notice and get out. I don't know. What I do know if there's a cold half-bottle of wine in my fridge and I look forward to finishing it.

Pilgrimage

Thanks to the handy-dandy recession and the generally shitty state of journalism, I've been using up a lot of furlough days this year and still have nine vacation days to figure out what to do with before the end of the year.

Until now, my vacation days have been saved up for taking off luxurious amounts of time for the holidays, since my parents were in Virginia. Now that they're an hour and a half away, I should use the days for something else. I mean, I still want some days off to see how many pounds I can pack on during Christmas by eating cake for breakfast and the like, but I need something different.

Last year, Dan and I took a four-day vacation to San Francisco, where some friends of mine from grad school got hitched. We celebrated Halloween, we drank beer, we gawked at the tourists, we saw the modern art museum and new science academy and one of us cycled up Mt. Tam. (I know it's a difficult thing to do, but I'll let you guess which of us what was.)

This year, Dan's halfway into a new job and only has a few vacation days, which he's using to help his sister move to California, where she'll be entering Stanford's business school for an MBA. I rather like the idea of taking a vacation on my own, and I think tonight I've decided to knock off a few days to drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Albuquerque and the surrounding areas are a key part of my years growing up. We lived there briefly before going to England, and then moved back from England to the city, where I attended second through fourth grade. We moved back again for one year when I was in high school, and that year we lived on the east side of the Sandia Mountains and I went to my junior year at a high school that was crappy.

Of all the places I lived growing up, New Mexico is where I spent the most time. I took lessons there, I went to night classes about various animals at the nature reserve, I learned how to ski on the Sandias. I ate fry bread at the pueblos, I went to the movies with my friends, I got my driver's license there. (It was a rocking photo, something I've tried hard to replicate but never had much success with. Maybe it's because I was 17.)

I haven't been back to New Mexico since we moved away Alabama. Going back to a place where I lived as a kid is always a very personal thing. When I went back to Orford, the place we lived in England, I did it on my own, and it was deeply cathartic. I think going back to Albuquerque would be the same way, plus October is the Balloon Fiesta, which is awesomeness. I can go to that, I can potentially take my bike, I can go hiking, I can go to the nature reserve and to the museums and the restaurants. (The thought of real sopapillas is enough to make me hungry right now.)

Plus, it's Albuquerque. Compared to other parts of the country, it's practically free. I can drive there in nine hours, I can stay in a hostel for $25 a night, and I can probably afford that if I save between now and then.

Here's hoping. I'm calling the hostel tomorrow to check on availability.

The Dork Reporter Redux

Yeah, so it was a failed experiment the first time around, but now www.dorkreporter.com is back. It's back and it's filled with journalistic fantasies. Other people from all types of journalism are encouraged to share their fantasies. I want it to be an orgy of journalism fantasies, just without the awkwardness afterward.

I paid for that domain, and it's gonna get used, dammit!

The Same But Different

When you put your foot in your mouth, you've embarrassed yourself (or someone else) with what you say. I don't know what you'd call a foot-in-mouth action--something you do that doesn't require words but still feels the same--but I totally pulled it on Friday.

(Maybe they just call that a "fuck-up." For a journalist, I'm having a crap time with words today. Anyhow.)

Friday afternoon I got out of work, went home and changed clothes, grabbed an apple to eat, plugged my iPod into my car's tape deck (and yeah, I have played tapes on it, and I feel like I'm 8 years old when I do) and headed out for the barn. My parents, after being in North Texas for a few weeks, were going to come out and meet me there and watch me ride as well as see the horses. It was their last chance before work caught up with them, as well as all the mechanics of a move, since they bought a house, and they were looking forward to an easy evening.

I meet them at the barn, where they fawn over the horses, since they haven't seen them in a few years, since we moved them out to Texas before my senior year of college. They fed the guys a bag of carrots, I let them split the apple core I had from the drive, and brought them both in from their paddock to get groomed. I tacked up Topper to take him out for a ride, and went out to the arenas while my parents took the pony out on his lead rope to let him graze outside the arena.

The large covered arena had a sprinkler set up in it that was taking up half the arena, and a full course of jumps meant it was pretty crowded when it came down to dodging obstacles as well as sprays of water. I went into one of the smaller arenas at first, but Topper's afraid of it because it's close to the road and the number of 18-wheelers and jackasses in souped-up pickup trucks is pretty high. We walked around once and the footing was crap, all dug up into trenches for some reason, so we went to the covered arena instead.

Topper takes a long time to warm up, especially now that he's recovering from a third serious injury. We took a good long time walking around, and then did some trotting and kept things light. The arena was pretty cramped--there was another horse out there sharing the fraction of space with us--and he was spooky because of the sprinkler and a bit sore with his front feet. I let him off easy and we're walking around next to the other horse and rider. Her horse is stabled across the aisle from Rio and Topper, and she's a middle-aged working professional, so we get along better than me and the middle school girls. I let Topper's reins out long and take my feet out of the stirrups, and we're just relaxing and talking, and all of the sudden Topper's halfway out from under me and I'm precariously balanced in thin air. I held on for about two seconds, my ass hanging out in the breeze to his left side, and I finally come down with a thump.

Topper, like most horses, wants to get away from a dropped rider. He puts one of his hind feet down directly on my foot and pivots to canter off a few steps away from me. I landed almost immediately behind the other horse, so I'm incredibly grateful he was calm and didn't step on me or kick me in the face. (When I was in middle school I knew a girl who ended up brain damaged by getting kicked in the face, and it's always been one of my rotating horse horrors since.) I bounced up immediately, because it was an easy fall and the adrenaline kicked in, and went over to where Topper had stopped a dozen yards away, his ears back in alarm and his eyes rolling. I calm him down and lead him back to the mounting block and we get back on and finish cooling down.

"I hope that wasn't for our benefit," my mother said when we rode past the section of rail where she was standing.

"Trust me, if I could have avoided it, I would have," I said.

It was pretty humiliating. I know my riding has gotten sloppier since I was younger; I haven't been with a trainer since I was 16 (holy shit, that was a decade ago), and there have been lots of time-outs from riding (like semesters at college, studying abroad, Topper's year-long stints on the disabled list, graduate school in Boston, etc etc). I'm still a good, solid rider, but I don't have the same grace and technical skills I used to. I was already nervous about my parents seeing me ride, and I was thinking I got through it well until the last lap or two around the area, walking and cooling off. Then off I go.

It was like putting my foot in my mouth.

Speaking of the foot, it did swell up and was really tender. Flip flops were ok, and walking wasn't too bad, but any pressure on the top was painful. I got myself drunk at a party on Saturday night, though, so that helped. It was the first time in a long time I'd had any substantial amounts of liquor to drink. Usually I'm a beer and wine person, but this was a Big Gulp Coke and Bacardi (thanks, 7-Eleven!) followed by several strong screwdrivers, a cranberry and vodka, and a dobblebock named Lobotomy Bock. I don't remember what it tasted like, since it was the last thing I had to drink, but the name alone will probably prompt me to buy a six-pack of it in the future.

All in all, embarrassing, but not as bad as some of my verbal foot-in-mouth incidents, like making a joke about death in a cancer treatment facility, my second day on the job as a full-time health reporter. Rock on.

Mild Forms Of Pain

I heard once that an itch is the lowest form of pain. I'm pretty sure that what the horses went through on Friday was more than that, but they did get drugs, which is nice. When Dan met both of my parents over the weekend, he did not have drugs, so there's that.

Friday was an appointment with our horse vet, who (as I believe has been previously documented) is awesome and cute and funny and smart. He also is passionate about horse teeth for reasons too dorky to get into here, so he came out to float the horses' teeth and make sure their dental works were all good for the next year. I don't know where the term "float" came from, but floating teeth means filing them down, since sharp edges from uneven wear can start to cause sores in a horse's mouth.

Both the horses are decidedly middle-aged, and Topper's got a bit of an overbite, so our vet filed everything down and pulled two pieces of cracked, loose tooth out of the pony's mouth. Topper had teeth pulled last time, so he got out without anything pulled this summer, but they were both heavily sedated during the procedure. I stuck around for a few hours after the procedure, to make sure they woke up okay and could eat and drink, and went home with part of one of Rio's molars in my pocket.

That piece of tooth is what I gave to my parents as a hello gift on Saturday, but I don't think they were particularly impressed. My parents showed up in the grand town of McKinney, Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas, last week, and they're staying in an apartment there while they find a house (they put a bid on one in Rockwall, east of Dallas, on Sunday, so cross your fingers). Dan and I went out to see them on Saturday night, since I got four tickets to the FC Dallas soccer game that night.

Now, Dan and I have been dating for four and a half years. He has met my father once, briefly, when my dad was in town between flights and took my sister and I (and Dan) out for dinner. Dan has never met my mother. My parents have been living halfway across the country during the time we've been dating, and they've only come through Texas two times, maybe three, but it was always for a day or two. I usually only see them once a year for Christmas, flying home, because of my work schedule (and before that, my school schedule). Dan has had an equally nutty schedule with school and work, so although it sounds bad that he hasn't met them both, it really isn't.

My parents took us out to get burgers before the game, and then the stadium seating separated us all into a row and gave us a game to watch and talk about. It was a beautiful evening after thunderstorming all day, and I think everything went well. I guess you'd have to ask my parents and then Dan to find out how it really went.

Now it's a Monday, and Dan's off with his sister enjoying a day off while I'm watching the clock. He is now switching over to a Tuesday through Saturday work schedule, so we're only going to be able to spend Sundays together, which sucks. A lot. But I guess it's good I got him to meet the parents when I still had the chance. I wonder how long they could have managed to not see each other while living in the same metroplex?

Word

I pass this church on the way out to the barn, which is in Mansfield, and it has a marquee outside that has churchy-kind of inspiring sayings or things to make you think Christian-like thoughts, like "Is your life Christ-centered?" and whatnot.

On Saturday I noticed they had something to the effect of "Hope and faith are a choice. So are fear and depression." Now, I totally get what they're saying--you can choose to look at things in a dismal way, or work to make them better. Fine with that. But irked by their (speaking of choices) use of the word "depression."

Today on the way back from the barn I was feeling awesome about myself--Topper and I took a few turns over a little jump, and we both survived!--and I saw the sign. I pulled over, got the phone number off the sign, called and left a message asking them to change the word to "despair" since "depression" is a chemical imbalance in the brain and cannot be wished or prayed or chosen away, even if you're a Scientologist. I left my phone number, too, in case they want to call back and debate medical terminology with me. I'm no nurse, I'm not doctor, but I'm a journalist and it's my job to be picky about words.

I joked to Dan that someone had to defend the depressed because they were too depressed to do it themselves. I dunno if he thought it was funny.

Fin

Tonight is my last night in North Virginia (Nova, as some say), as tomorrow morning I fly back to Fort Worth and by the end of the month my parents will have also moved to North Texas. This whole trip was about seeing things and people again, and perhaps for the last time, and it's the first time in a while I've felt the sort of full sadness that has always been a part of my military brat upbringing.

When I was a kid, moving was fairly traumatic in the short term. I'd have to say good-byes to friends, and we'd pack up in the car and drive away, and sometimes I'd be sobbing in the back seat as we left behind what had been home for a year, two years, three years. The last move I did with my parents was after my freshman year of college, when they moved from Alabama to Virginia for my dad's assignment at the Pentagon. (This was probably the only move where I never felt sad about leaving, too.)

My sister attended high school here in Virginia for three years, and I came back here for my summers during college and all the holidays and breaks. I worked at the steak house down the street, blew Christmas money on shoes at the Potomac Mills mall, rode Topper at the barn where he lived before moving to Texas. After I graduated from TCU, I stayed in Fort Worth for the summer before grad school, and that summer my parents moved from Virginia to Tampa. I never got to say good-bye to everything I knew in Virginia, which made me sad, but it was OK; my sister and my horse were in Texas. I saw my parents twice in Tampa, one for each Christmas they were there, and then my dad was offered another job in the D.C. area, working in the acquisitions office for the Secretary of the Air Force.

I was excited when my parents moved back to Nova, which they did shortly after I moved back to Fort Worth from Boston, after grad school. Now, two years later, my father has retired, and he's accepted a job for a large company north of Dallas, and he and my mother will be moving to North Texas, a place they've never lived before. Coming here was my last chance to go to the grocery store we used for years, drive through the woods and hills, eat whole steamed Maryland blue crab in a giant mess of shell fragments and butter stains and orange goo from the guts.

The retirement marked the first time we saw a lot of military family friends in many years, too. The primary core of my dad's helicopter group was formed at Woodbridge Royal Air Force Base, in England, where I lived when I was young. My dad was one of about 18 pilots or so under a commander who was one of the pioneers of the 53 helicopter during the Vietnam war, and most of those pilots formed a tight, close bond that survived because it was such a small group and there were so few places these men could be stationed that you'd run into them again on other assignments down the road. I'm the oldest kid of all these pilots; my parents had us when they were fairly young, in their mid- and late-20s, and so these people have known me the longest of anybody besides family.

My dad's extended family also came for the retirement too, which made for this strange juxtaposition in my mind. Here was my traditional family, those who were together with my father, and here was this military family that I saw more than the relatives and with whom I often felt closer. These were the people who ate dinner at our house, and whose houses we stayed at when Mom and Dad took a weekend trip, and people who gave us stuffed animals and books for birthdays and Christmases in person, as opposed to the packages from relatives. These are men and women who were like second parents, or extremely close aunts and uncles, and it was a relief to see them again. They were excited to be together again as well, and the event was a mini reunion, more about the group than my father. The helicopter has since been retired, and the Pavelows are no more; the V-22 Osprey is the replacement now (as I wrote about here), and the men are all retiring from their high-ranking desk jobs now. My dad was one of the last.

As great as it was to see them, I know there's no guarantee of seeing them all like this again, just like there's no guarantee I'll ever live here in Virginia again, as much as I'd love to. (It's pretty much guaranteed that as a pair of journalists, Dan and I would never be able to afford it. The high living costs up here is part of the reason why my parents are moving.) My parents got married on the Fourth of July (my dad was able to get a day off from his Air Force training), and so to celebrate their anniversay we (my parents, my sister and I and my dad's parents) went to a baseball game down the street of the minor-league team that holds a giant fireworks display afterward. When they shut off all the lights and started sending off fireworks and playing Tom Petty, I had to keep myself from crying. It was a good last night, but it just filled me with that sadness again.

It's the same way I felt when I was hugging people good-bye on Thursday night, after the ceremony that morning at the Air Force Memorial and the reception outside D.C. and the grill-and-beer party at the house that night. I hugged people in the cul-de-sac where they parked, in the dark, grateful because they couldn't see me tearing up a bit. I'm sort of proud I didn't cry at all this trip, but I came very close, and tomorrow is the plane ride home. I've been known to sob in the stalls of airport bathrooms before.

The Late Pony

In case you didn't know, my father retired from the Air Force (27 and a half years, whew) this week, so I'm at the homestead in Virginia for five days, reveling in food, friends, family, television, and weather that's in the 80s. I'll write another post, maybe tomorrow, explaining all of that, but I just wanted to try to quickly sum up tonight, since I haven't seen a situation this absurd in a while.

My parents saw this artist about a year ago who makes life-sized pony statues out of horse shoes, welding them together, marvelous stuff. They really wanted one and saw retirement coming, and a house with a yard someplace, so they had the artist make one for them and paid it off over the year, so it could be delivered this summer before they move. Now we know the statue will end up in Texas, but the big problem was getting it delivered here.

The artist arranged to have a private shipping company--a guy and his 18-wheeler--pick it up from Florida, the artist's home base, and have it dropped here in Virginia, just south of D.C. Projected delivery was last weekend, the last weekend in June, and it never came . . . the delivery guy's voicemail was full and he never picked up the phone . . . it never showed . . . my mom was so excited and so anxious . . . it was tense. She was convinced the delivery guys had stolen it, like everyone wants a giant metal horse.

Yesterday we got a call that it would be delivered around two this afternoon, this afternoon being Friday, July 3. Then around 11 a.m. we get a call saying, no, wait, probably around five. Around seven we get a call saying, "Can we deliver it at 1 a.m.?" Of course my parents say yes, since they just want the damn thing over with, and so the guy said he'd call when he's an hour away.

I guess I should explain my parents and their normal schedule. They're usually in bed (and asleep) by 9:30 p.m. and up by 4:30 a.m. Midnight came, and we expected a call any minute, and then around 12:20 a.m. there was a call from the delivery guy saying he was in Richmond, which is about 90 miles south of us. We sit, we wait, my mom and I watch TV shows and keep ourselves up, my dad snoozes with the cat. I'm ticked as hell, because I just can't understand who the hell delivers something at 1 a.m., much less any later than that. What kind of fucking business is this? This is not a crate of Uzis and Columbia's finest.

Finally 3 a.m. rolls around--it should have been plenty of time for the guy to drive from Richmond--and my mother calls them to say, You know what, leave it in the front lawn, we're going to bed. He says, But we're exiting the highway now.

So we wait, the delivery guy arrives with his giant rumbling truck in our cul-de-sac, and my dad and mom and I go out to meet them. (A side note: This may be the only time my sister has ever gone to bed before the three of us.) They're super nice, never give an explanation, but unload the thing, unwrap it in our garage, and we give them some sandwiches and sodas and tell them to have a good night.

It's not much of a story, I'll admit, it's just so freaking strange. A horse statue dropped at our house in the middle of the night, a mere hour or so before my parents (and other working people in this area) get up? It's a Friday night/Saturday wee morning, so it's not like we have anything to do, but seriously? Like I said, I don't know what kind of business that is.

Now I'm freaking exhausted, since it's going on 3 a.m. Central time (10 more minutes and it's 4 a.m. here), and that's pretty late for me. I'm a grown-up now, I guess, and I like to be asleep by about 2 a.m. on weekends. Geez.

At least the statue is pretty cute.

Kind Of Like Jail

Last night I was in my fridge, rummaging for dinner, when I was struck by how bare the fridge looked after sharing one with two other people for the past four years or so, both here and in Boston. It was shameful. I love living alone, I have to admit--it gives me a chance to indulge all my weird tics. For example, these are the contents of my fridge:

Four bottles of beer

One bottle of riesling

Two big bottles of Diet Coke

Milk

Tub of ground coffee

Tub of margarine

Tub of sour cream (although I don't eat it, Dan does)

Bottle of basil pesto

Bottle of tomato pesto

Bottle of salsa

Bottle of spaghetti sauce

A few kiwis

A few handfuls of tortellini

Bowlard-boiled eggs

Wedge of Gouda

Container of goat cheese

Slices of American cheese

Pack of shredded mild cheddar

Wedge of sharp cheddar

Round of Camembert

I know, I know, that's a ton of cheese. I get it. But it's because cheese is awesome, and I live near Central Market.

But anyway, living alone just exaggerates one's tendencies, I think, and it makes me think about what happens to someone's personality if they were in prison, living in an isolated cell or something. (That's a stretch, I know. But you can't argue that being alone makes a person kind of goofy.)

There are other things about being alone that I like. I don't have to share the TV with anyone--mostly because I don't have a TV, but if I did, I could watch what I wanted. I don't have to worry about all the dishes being dirty once I'm halfway cooking dinner, and so I don't have to eat out of Tupperware or something stupid because all the plates are in the sink. I can spread all my assorted crap (hair bands, makeup, brushes, sticks of deodorant, etc) out over the whole bathroom counter. I can make sure no one ever, ever leaves dirty dishes in the living room.

(Yeah, there's always the classic example of walking around in your underwear or naked if you want to, but I always leave the blinds open on the windows partway so Fenway can sit on the sill and watch the birds, so I don't do that.)

Westward Migration

My dad officially retires from the Air Force after a 27-year (I think) career as an officer, primarily as a pilot, on July 2. Then it appears my mom and my dad will be packing up their stuff from the DC suburbs and coming to the ridiculously hot sprawl of North Texas. Holla!

Dad got a job offer from L3 Communications, based in Greenville, which is north of Dallas, and he's finishing negotiations and details right now, but it looks like he and Mom are poised to come back here later this summer. I never lived in this area prior to going to TCU, and my parents haven't lived up here either (although both spent a good amount of their growing-up years near San Antonio, which is where most of the extended family is). I'm really looking forward to having them nearby but not too close--I think they'll be a bit more than an hour away, which is just dandy by me.

In Fort Worth, everything with the apartment has more or less settled down. The AC is still going strong, the roof doesn't leak anymore (which is great, because some recent thunderstorms have been brutal), and they retreated the floors with stuff for the smell. It only kinda helped. I bought some cat urine neutralizing stuff from Petsmart, but that only kinda helped too. Dan and I even cleaned behind and under the fridge (soooooo gross) and I scrubbed down the kitchen. Eh. I just live in a kind of funky smelling apartment, I guess. There's worse things, like the fire ant fiasco at the last place. Fire ants that crawl up the wall and into your bed? So not cool.

I fly home in two weeks for the retirement ceremony/celebrations, and I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to getting shoes back on the pony so he can be worked again--Topper's been doing well, but I want the po worked back up and fit so I can lease him out and not deal with all this stress over juggling two horses and a full-time job.

One thing I'm not really looking forward to is the insane summer heat, which is already coming on strong. It's supposed to be 98 for a few days this week, and next week too, and I'm afraid it's only going to get hotter from there. When the coolest days are in the low 90s, there's something wrong. Who knows, my parents may move here and I may move away searching for a better climate. I figure no matter where I go, I have a fair shot of getting a journalism job with chances of getting laid off. If I can't have job security, then I need to not have a place where you need to run an AC unit or risk heat stroke and death.

Anyone in Oregon looking for a roommate?