Favor & Road Trip Report

Anyone local who has some time free this week, would you please drop me a line at [email protected]? Thanks 🙂

sam­bear, shad­owkatt and I spent that guy’s birth­day in Charleston, and thanks to the most hug­gable and gen­er­ous hlyn­na and pope­fe­lix. We are now the proud own­ers of Uncle Aber­nathy, our very own land yacht. He’s mar­velous­ly pro­tec­tive, he is, and very prac­ti­cal, just like the Ridge Run­ner for whom he is named (as Stars & Garters vets may remem­ber). I cred­it him with my sur­vival from a mis­ad­ven­ture and trust him to pro­tect Katie when she’s dri­ving on her own if he has­n’t gone on to oth­er missions.

I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened to the pic­turesque place I saw on my hon­ey­moon in 1985, but it was­n’t this place. I guess I was blind in more than one way back then! I was in much bet­ter com­pa­ny this time and saw some very inter­est­ing sites. 

I per­formed a Stu­pid Cyn Trick with not eat­ing or remem­ber­ing to stay hydrat­ed or take my meds or keep my glu­cose meter with me, then got real­ly real­ly lost, and had only a new cell phone with tru­ly WRONG rout­ing on it, so nobody could actu­al­ly call me and I only got hold of Sam once when I called him. I was real­ly, real­ly lost. Charleston isn’t that big, but it goes in spi­rals. I swear it. 

Sam and Katie were dri­ving around try­ing to find me, and we were nev­er in the same place at the same time, although with the amount of time spent and space cov­ered that does­n’t real­ly seem pos­si­ble. Sam had called the police, and they had nev­er seen me, either. A ter­ri­fied sub­ur­ban white lady, dri­ving an old land yacht, in the, well, the slums, who made sev­er­al wrong-way turns on the crazy one-way streets and end­ed up back­ing up try­ing to fix things. A lady who obvi­ous­ly was­n’t accus­tomed to tak­ing gang bangers and obvi­ous drug deals in stride. Some­one who cer­tain­ly had not acci­den­tal­ly annoyed not one, but two dif­fer­ent entre­pre­neurs, while try­ing to turn around in alleys. (I’m sure they pay tax­es, and their cus­tomers just pre­fer open-air expe­ri­ences to hotels. Snow­birds prob­a­bly want to enjoy the mild Geor­gia Decem­ber.) Any­way, maybe I looked fair­ly nor­mal or they fre­quent­ly get peo­ple lost that way or lose lots of vis­i­tors to the streets or whatever.

I believe that I actu­al­ly drove into a Nan­cy Collins nov­el, based on some things I saw. I nev­er spot­ted seraphim, or Son­ja her­self (pre­cise­ly), but oth­er­wise, it was def­i­nite­ly her world. Turn­ing a cor­ner to find six police units sur­round­ing one guy on foot in the lot of a board­ed-up gas sta­tion, the cops seem­ing bad­ly out­pow­ered and ner­vous, just because of some­thing about the guy, and the boy just stand­ing there, doing noth­ing and look­ing nor­mal, but not ner­vous at all—well, I want­ed to see what hap­pened, but even in a real­ly bad place phys­i­cal­ly I had enough sense to haul ass out of there, know­ing it was­n’t like read­ing safe­ly and enjoy­ing shiv­er­ing over Collins’ text. Nope. Trig­ger-hap­py cops and spooky dudes who make cops ner­vous are to read about, not hang around and watch.

We got to watch Seren­i­ty in our hotel room on Christ­mas Eve, so I’ve final­ly seen it! Yay! It was worth the wait. I expect to watch the DVD many more times. I love Riv­er, but I have to say that Katie did Riv­er fash­ion before Riv­er did, okay? So there. If, how­ev­er, any­body knows where to get boots like River’s, the girl wants some, and I haven’t had time or ener­gy to track them down.

Sam and I used our walkie-talkies to game most of the way back from Charleston, while the girl napped, read, and played with the lap­top. Yes, we gamed. We ran into chan­nel over­lap sev­er­al times, usu­al­ly with kids play­ing with new toys. Once I’m sure we heard tod­dlers gig­gling on a nurs­ery mon­i­tor, which made me think of Kelthaven. Once it seemed to be kids on dif­fer­ent cord­less phones all telling each oth­er to go get their par­ents to pick up the phone, argu­ing about who would go get their par­ents, while some exas­per­at­ed adult was try­ing to con­vince them to just hang up so he could call back. We mys­ti­fied all of them (except the hap­py tod­dlers) before we switched channels.

Any­way, I had lots of good time with Sam and Katie, I got to meet two new, sweet peo­ple with great hugs, and we have anoth­er car.

Sam does­n’t go back to work ’til next week, which is an OW mon­ey-wise but hap­py time-wise.

We’ll have our “real” hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tion for Imbolc, I think. A real­ly great Imbolc. With cards and every­thing. It’s more appro­pri­ate, any­way con­sid­er­ing our par­tic­u­lar ded­i­ca­tions. It’ll con­fuse the heck out of the extend­ed fam­i­lies, but when haven’t we done that? They’ll be so shocked by cards from us, that they may just assume they’re late Christ­mas cards. What’s Imbolc, anyway?

word­can­dlemage, we need lots of can­dles. Real­ly. And I may have a stu­dent for you, but I’m leav­ing it to her to con­tact you, to see how seri­ous she is.

I hope you’ve all had a great what­ev­er you celebrate 🙂