Well, this was a pretty unprecedented day. Elisa and I had breakfast with Karen and her very charming young son Jeremiah. Lingered over breakfast and a walk along the shores of Lake Mendota. Then we left Madison and things started to get weird.

First there was the house. We did get offers, including one very good one indeed which we're taking. We only get to keep a fraction of it, of course - you don't build up much equity in three years - but the house is going to sell for half a million dollars. I'm still trying to get my head around that. I couldn't imagine it being worth what we paid for it three years ago, couldn't believe it when our loan officer said we qualified to borrow that much money. The whole thing's just absurd. And of course it didn't help that Elisa was trying to work out all the details of the various offers over a cellphone in our car while I was navigating our way across rural Wisconsin. Of course when someone offers you half a million dollars for your house, it can only be so bad. There's a kind of calamity ceiling there.

Not so with other things. Lazslo had been quite the little travelling cat since we left. Despite Elisa's fears, he proved pretty adaptable. He didn't like going in his bag and riding in the car, of course. But he'd just complain off and on for a while and then settle down and go to sleep. He even seemed to take instantly to the in-laws house while we were in Akron. I was quite proud of him.

Today, not so much. I guess today his tolerance just hit bottom. He freaked. He howled and didn't stop howling, he started trying to claw his way out of the carrier. He bit Elisa. Now you have to realize, this cat loves Elisa as much as I do, and I think she may love him more than she loves me. They have quite a bond. He must have been utterly out of his mind with kitty panic to do something like that. It did happen after we decided we had no choice but to give him the tranquilizers we'd been holding off on because he seemed to be doing so well. I guess he was both frightened and drugged by that point.

Eventually, though, the drugs took hold and he zonked out. The rest of the trip was better. We made it to St. Cloud Minnesota (flat land, straight streets, hearty Norwegian farmer stock), where we're staying in a b&b called the Edelbrock House. It is indescribable, albeit in a charming way. It's packed to the gills with historical memorabilia, from old clothes and glassware to pictures and advertising ephemera. Basically it's like one of those old Victorian houses that looks like a bomb has gone off inside a flounce warehouse. And of course it's a minefield for Lazslo, with a thousand different potentially expensive antiques for him to knock off a dozen different surfaces as he explores. So far we seem to have dodged that particular bullet, although I took the precaution of removing the oil lamp. (Not in use thank god - I can just see the journal entry for that one: "Everything was going okay until Lazslo burned down the bed and breakfast...")



Then, to top it off, we discover a message on our home number from ABF, the people that dropped the big trailer in our driveway last friday, saying in effect, "uh, hey, so can we pick up our trailer? We kind of want it back."

Given that the trailer was supposed to be picked up on Monday, and this was late Wednesday afternoon, we freaked out. I bit Elisa and she had to force a couple of kitty tranquilizers down my throat. But ultimately I decided there was no good cause for alarm. Yelling at them wasn't going to suddenly make the truck have been picked up on Monday. Besides, since we're taking a few extra days in various places, it was going to be waiting for us when we got to Vancouver. Now it will just wait a little less. Still, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. What if they decide to ship it to Vancouver, Washington, instead of Vancouver, British Columbia? What if they forget about it entirely and someone comes across our stuff and figures it's lost and found? Even though no serious harm seems to have been done, it's not that great.

Basically, as I observed to Elisa over dinner, while we went through the 16 page contract for our house (on one really long scroll of fax paper with a long pink stripe down it), aside from the part where someone gave us half a million dollars, today pretty much sucked.