Ah, home. It’s good to be home. Received one rejection (boo), a package of prezzies from Anwyn in Australia (a calendar of Australian animals, a butterfly windchime, and a rock-and-roll hamster), an herb magazine I ordered (article about rose beads), and a bunch of submissions for the GWW art contest. And a bunch of other mail I haven’t bothered to really look at. Bills, crap.

Eostre and Grimoire are clinging. I tried to look at the TV Guide and they both came up to me and stared pleadingly and lovingly at me until I sighed, put down the TV Guide, and gave them more scritchies. Note that Ken had been lying on the loveseat for goodness knows how long, but no, I am The Scritchie Goddess as far as the cats are concerned. Eostre has worried away a patch on her neck so she’ll be going to the vet tomorrow. She’ll be doubly pissed at me, then, because in the afternoon Charlie will appear… The plan is for Charlie to live in the master bedroom and bathroom for a day or two, so they all know there are other cats and have time to get used to the concept.

Tomorrow we’ll also be teaching a corset-making workshop from noon until gods know when (5 or 6 at least), and then Sunday is “free”, which means we’ll have the day to start working through the stacks of things that languished in our absence.

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Yesterday Ken worked in the a.m. and finished up all he had to do, then went to lunch with a colleague, and then came to pick me up. We packed the bike, and stopped at a Subway so I could grab a quick lunch (and he mailed postcards while I ate). Portland was having record high temperatures, oh joy. We stopped in Grant’s Pass for a flurry and a shake at McDonald’s; in Yreka for startlingly good sandwiches for supper at an almost-closed ice cream shop; and in Redding for the night. We were going to stop in Yreka or the Shasta area, but going farther meant less of a journey today. Unfortunately, it means we missed the gorgeous mountain pass, but we did see Mount Shasta glowing preternaturally in the deepening twilight (either the aliens or the Lemurians were responsible). If it hadn’t been for the Big Dipper, I would have sworn we had been transported to another planet, because I could not find a single other constellation I could recognise (not Orion, nor the Pleiades…not even Cassiopeia, which I could find when blind drunk in college).

We had a 7 a.m. wake-up call, but slept until 9. It was obvious we needed the sleep, and it was going to be a long day. We ate fruit bars and got on the road, because timing-wise, we were in Williams in time for lunch at [cue chorus of angelic—oh, you know the routine] Granzellas! My Reuben was even better this time, and we bought a jar of chopped pickled things (olives and peppers and asparagus tips and such) (I know you were thinking much worse) to put on salads. We had an orange and a banana in some small town, and supper at a Burger King near the base of the Grapevine (the pass between the San Joachin Valley and LA). The rest stop was swarming with the Senior Class of 2003 from Medford, OR, which allowed us to watch socialization in progress. While Ken ordered the food, I sat at a table with our gear and picked out the table of the popular kids/Prom-and-Homecoming Court, the band and/or smart geeks (who laughed intelligently), etc. The four glowering, although reasonably attractive, girls mystified me, though. And then we wound our way home, arriving at about 9 p.m.

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Random things, some of which should have been mentioned earlier:

When we had dinner with Lev and Gayle, we walked to the restaurant, and in a ditch/creek near their house live a colony of nutria. Don’t know what nutria are? Neither did we. They’re pretty much like beavers, only with skinny tails. The babies were adorable. There were 13 of them that we counted. They pissed off the ducks.

Triquint, where Ken was working, want him to come back for two weeks and do training. Yay! He’ll be writing up a proposal probably Sunday, and given that the last week of June and first week of July are fairly free, he’ll probably go up then. We can’t ask folks to take care of the cats for that long and can’t really leave all our various projects languishing either, so I’ll stay home. Maybe take frequent flyer miles to go up for a long weekend, and we can drive through the stunning Columbia River Gorge.

The graffiti in the bathroom at Powell’s made me want to live there. Yes, some stupid stuff, but also a quote from Shakespeare, the Pythagorean Theorem, and other such intelligencia. Where else?

My headache is finally, completely, totally gone.