missroserose | Jul. 1st, 2012

Jul. 1st, 2012

More highlights from our vacation, both positive and negative:

• Getting over that goddamn cold. It ended up taking about three days for Brian and I to get past the worst of it, and even for a few days after that we were coughing up (to quote my mother's least-favorite kids' song) great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts. Frelling viral infections. We didn't make it out to Seward like we'd hoped, but fortunately we had enough energy to get around a bit before leaving Anchorage.

• Finding my guitar. Big props to Mammoth Music for not only having better service and a bigger selection of instruments than anywhere in Arizona, but also actually living up to their "lower-than-online" pricing guarantee. I have no idea how they manage it, given the additional shipping costs and other hassles that are endemic to an Alaska-located business, but they do. And the lack of sales tax doesn't hurt either. Now to spend the next decade getting to be as good a player as Kalia deserves...

• Making it out to Potter Marsh with my grandmother. It wasn't the most wonderful timing ever (it was cloudy and cold with that constant Arctic-style wind blowing), but the scenery there is gorgeous no matter what the weather, and there was a family of beautiful Sandhill Cranes showing off their graceful food-seeking ballet for the tourists along the boardwalk. The chick especially was the prettiest shade of red-brown and looked so fluffy and snuggly. Well worth the hunching down against the wind for. (I've got some pictures of the scenery that I promised my brother I'd send him...perhaps I'll post them. We'll see, though; they're just iPhone pictures, so not fantastic or anything.)

• Truly and honestly throwing out my back for the first time. And I don't even get an awesome "I was lifting a car off of a small child" or "I was dragging a generator along an icy mountain path and it slid down and hit me" story to go with it; I was just coughing so badly with that damn cold that, on my first day up and out of bed, all the muscles around my lower back and diaphragm started twinging and then seizing up when I tried to use them. Fortunately the worst was over after the first day, but it's been intermittently sore since then, and the lugging around of baggage as well as a three-mile walk Friday to get Brian some medication combined with schlepping my guitar all the way down concourse C of Sea-Tac yesterday seems to have gotten one side of it especially bad again (only one minor seizure, but still). I've got a massage scheduled for Tuesday, and I think once it's better it's back to daily yoga again. Because, seriously...ow.

• Visiting bookstores. Lots of bookstores, especially used-book ones. We have one in town, but it's really not very well managed, and this area of Arizona isn't exactly what you'd call literary, so there aren't many other options. I was especially amused because I'd brought along my Nook specifically because I figured it'd be good for traveling, what with not having to pack along heavy physical books and all...and then I ended up buying so many physical books that I had to mail them to myself to save on luggage weight, and didn't end up using my Nook at all. I guess I'm ultimately just a book troglodyte. Sigh. Highlights include Title Wave in Anchorage, which has grown from a tiny location in a strip mall to damn near B&N size since I first started going there in high school; Left Bank books in Seattle, which specialized in anarchist literature and therefore had some very entertaining "yes we know, property is theft, but please do not steal" signs; and the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, who had a great staff and one of the most entertaining organizational systems I've ever seen - I had no idea that there was an entire subcategory of food mysteries, or that they could be broken down to sub-sub-categories (wine mysteries, baking mysteries, chocolate mysteries, you name it).

amanda_lodden, I recommend stopping in if you haven't been there already.

• Playing guitar with my mother. Even though I can't yet do much more than strum out basic chords. There's just something primally satisfying about inter-generational art creation, I think.

• Seeing our friends Chris & Jeanne for the first time since leaving Juneau. Their son, who was barely a few weeks old when we left, has grown into an absolutely adorable blonde-haired blue-eyed cherub. (Seriously, I don't even think of kids as "cute", and even I was like "Damn, you guys need to rent him out to Hallmark or something.") It helped that he was also surprisingly quiet and well-behaved, though I wasn't too surprised on that front - when I first met Jeanne, she'd recently adopted Sadie, a half-wild three-year-old yellow-lab mix who'd come from a bad home and had numerous behavioral issues; since then, Jeanne's worked with her tirelessly and patiently, and now she's one of the most loving, polite, and well-behaved (if still enthusiastic) ten-year-old dogs you can imagine. So it's probably not surprising Jeanne's kid would be equally well-trained.

• Going out for sushi at Seong's. Man, I've missed good sushi. Plus we went with Monica, whom I don't really talk to often anymore - she refuses to learn to use a computer, and I don't really do phone conversations aside from the quick "hey, where are you, let's meet up" sort, so it was good to see her again. Even if hanging out for a while only served to illustrate how we've grown apart - she's very much a happy-go-lucky small-town kind of girl, perfectly happy to live with her parents and keep working the same job she's worked since high school, secure that tomorrow will generally be the same as today. (Which is not to cast aspersions on her many good points - there's a reason she was probably my best friend for the years while I was living in Juneau. Her sweetness, compassion, and generally cheerful demeanor are all beyond reproach, and while she and I would occasionally get into arguments about her lack of discernment with regards to taste or people, it does mean that she's one of the least-judgmental people I've ever met. And there's something to be said for that.)

• Seeing Justin again, and having him invite us over to his apartment for dinner. While planning is admittedly not his strong suit, what his meal lacked in cohesion it made up for in enthusiasm. Appetizers: Olives, cheese, bread, artichoke hearts and...blueberries? Sure, why not? And who needs ice in their drinks anyway?

• Learning to play Spoons at our wonderful friends Robert and Olga's lovely home. Brian still owes them a poem, though I doubt they'll ever manage to collect. He's like a conversational ninja at avoiding things he doesn't want to talk about.

• Realizing I'd lost my keys, panicking about getting the car back (we'd left it at Adam's, who was going to be in San Diego the weekend we came back, so he'd given me one of his apartment keys so we could go in and get the car key), and calling Adam to work something out only to discover that was going to be in town anyway so he could give us a ride back to his place and save us the $60 on cab fare it would've taken to get to his apartment from the airport. Then, when we actually got there, having him hand me my key ring, which had apparently fallen out of my bag when he took us to the airport in the first place. (So instead we spent the $60 on chicken and waffles, his late-lunch of choice.) Great-friend award handed out promptly.

• Getting Brian's father's rifles back. Not realizing exactly how lax Arizona's gun laws are, he'd left them with Chris & Jeanne, who were kind enough to keep them stored rather than sell them on - especially kind, given both how tiny their old house was and how valuable the rifles were (one's a fairly high-end Remington with a very nice scope on it, and the other hasn't been produced for nearly half a century - Brian thinks it belonged to his grandfather). Being the wonderful people they are, they were happy to let us take them back with us; and while getting them back was a cast-iron pain in the ass (we had to buy a gigantic locking rifle case, and declare them with TSA, not to mention the extra piece was enough to tip us over from "can pretty well carry the baggage on our own" to "need to hire a Sherpa guide", my least favorite way to travel) the sentimental value was enough to make it worth it. Also, it led to an amusing exchange at Sea-Tac; we were in line to speak with a customer service agent when their screener (quite a smart position to have, by the way - she was questioning people who were waiting in line and directing the lower-maintenance ones to check themselves in at a kiosk, for instance) came by and asked "What are you folks needing?" Ticking the points off on his fingers, Brian replies "Flying standby, checking bags, and checking firearms." (I helpfully add, "Yeah, we're those people.") She sort of blinked for a moment, then laughed and went "Yeah, okay, you're in the right line." On the other hand, the agent herself was friendly and quick and surprisingly enthusiastic about helping us with all of the moving parts of our trip - she was all "I love working with organized people!" I shudder to think what sorts of travel nightmares she must deal with regularly.

• Returning to find that our house-sitter had managed to keep the house clean and all three cats and our plants alive and happy, our landlord had replaced the flooring in the kitchen and master bath, and Dexter hadn't even gotten all depressed and fat like he has the other couple of times we've been gone for two weeks. (Having two younger cats to chase him around the house probably helped a lot.)

• Really, it's good to be home. I have missed the cooler weather and green in the PNW and I think we'll probably move there soon, but traveling wears on you after a while. And there is that perverse part of me that just adores the heat and all the sun, even though it means slathering on the sunscreen before you go out. But mostly I think it's just nice to be in our wonderful home surrounded by our things. Even if the cats seem absolutely determined to remind us that they were hiding in the bushes when Bast handed out brains. (No, Leo, just because there's another bird outside does not mean that the glass door has magically disappeared and you can pounce on it...sigh...)