Thursday 13: Thirteen Places I’ve Traveled to This Year (or Will in the Next Week or So)

(meaning I spent the night somewhere other than home)

1. Upland, CA
   
2. San Diego, CA
   
3. Lincoln City, OR
   
4. Plattsburgh, NY
   
5. Hillsboro, OR
   
6. San Francisco, CA
   
7. Midway, UT
   
8. Salt Lake City, UT
   
9. Hot Springs, AR
   
10. Saratoga, CA
    
11. Keene, NY
    
12. Tampa, FL
    
13. Las Vegas, NV
    

Can you guess how many of these were for Styx shows? LOL

Tripping the light fantastic

So we just took my car in to get serviced. Nothing major, just hadn’t really been serviced since I bought it last year, and we thought there might be a minor coolant leak plus some other bits and bobs. I mention it here because it’s a Saab, and we found an independent automotive place that specializes in Swedish cars.

My mechanic has a Swedish accent, wears clogs with white socks, and smokes a pipe, and this pleases me more than I can possibly explain.

~ ~ ~

The other reason we took the car in this week was because we’re going on a trip. Yes, another trip. No, we hadn’t really planned this one, up until a few days ago…

Ken needs to do a couple of day’s work in Oregon. We’ve been apart way too much this year, plus on Monday we attended a funeral for one of his cousins, and as funerals tend to do, it reminded me that life is short (and so is Tommy). I’d been waffling about whether I should go with Ken, because any trip involves some stress, and the cats will be miserable, and it always takes time to prep for the trip and catch up after the trip, but this clinched it. I can work on the road, after all, and we decided to make a vacation of it.

So we’re leaving the day after Thanksgiving and taking extra time to get to Oregon, stopping at the Oregon Caves and a big cat sanctuary and a birds of prey sanctuary (multiple squees!) on our way.

Then a couple days of work (for both of us), dinners with various friends (still setting those dates up), and Powells, before heading back out. But just to shake things up and keep it interesting, we’re not going home! We have Things To Do and People To See in Las Vegas over the first weekend of December, so we’re just going straight there. That’ll be two Shaw/Blades shows, Bite, seeing Julie & Jim (not to mention all our Styxfan peeps), much frolicking at the Stratosphere and elsewhere. Then we’ll go home!

~ ~ ~

As for Thanksgiving itself, the usual folks we hang out with are scattered, and the family invitation came too last-minute. We’d already decided that we were going to lounge in front of the TV, eat junk food procured from the TGIFridays and Claim Jumper frozen foods sections, and watch all three Lord of the Rings movies, because Ken’s been listening to the unabridged versions on his iPod during his various rallies). And I’m going to get a bunch of handwork done. There may even be pictures. And hot tubbing. But there won’t be pictures of that.

Another sale!

This time to Circlet Press' Like a Myth anthology, for "One Thousand," a story based on the Kuhimo myth that turned surprisingly tender, for all the Kuhimo is supposed to be pretty evil...

But I think that's typical of me: always wanting to find the romance at the core of things.