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Jul. 5th, 2002 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckThe last few weeks have been pretty busy. There's a lot I'd like to write about, but I'll have to settle for hitting the high (or low) points.
I've been feeling a bit better. The nausea that was plaguing me has abated for the most part. I'm still have problems some evenings, but I'm mostly back to being able to eat regularly. I've dealt with a few things that I think were giving me a lot of stress (apparently more than I thought they were). I've been taking simethicone to bolster my prescription antacid, and that seems to be helping too.
The biggest event was a trip down to Knoxville to retrieve some things from the house my parents are currently trying to sell. LunarGeography graciously consented to drive me down and back if I paid for the gas. That being an infinitely better deal than trying to take the bus, I naturally accepted. It's about nine hours from Ann Arbor to Knoxville, and we could have made the trip in one day, but we decided to take it easy and take two days going down.
We stopped over night at a Red Roof Inn in Lexington. The room had one of the largest king size beds I've ever seen and not much else. We forgot to ask what time check out was, so we were near panic when we awoke at quarter to ten. As it turned out, we had till eleven, but…
I let the diet go for most of the trip. I was still kind of counting servings, but I ate what was available rather than what the diet called for. I don't think there was anything I could have eaten at the Shoney's we stopped at the first evening otherwise. We stopped at a Bob Evans the next morning for breakfast. It was food.
We arrived in Knoxville a lot earlier than we'd really meant to. It was Sunday, and my mother was running an open house. (She'd asked that we not come Saturday because she didn't want us messing up the nice clean house by staying there.) The house they're selling is an Arts & Crafts style place with five bedrooms (one of them two connected rooms) and three full bathrooms (one shower and two huge bathtubs). I covet the place but would never have the energy to keep it up.
Potential buyers started arriving at the house about a half hour after we did, so we vacated. I'd hoped we could go to McKay's, a used bookstore that I really like, but it wasn't open on Sundays. We decided that we'd try driving that way to see if we could find it, just for future reference, and promptly got ourselves thoroughly lost. Mom had provided us with a Knoxville street map, but, although we could generally manage to figure out where we were on it, we couldn't seem to use it to navigate. We saw a lot of old houses and a lot of foliage and wandered around until we figured it was safe to return.
Then we went to a Korean place for dinner. It wasn't the Korean place Mom had intended to take us to; that one turned out to be closed for the month of June. But this one was nearby, and she'd eaten there before. Two of the dishes we got were at the edge of my spiciness tolerance, largely due to the presence of peppers, so I focused on the dish I'd selected. Jop chae. Yum.
When we got back to the house, we started pulling boxes out of the attic. Sorting the books went pretty quickly. There were a number that I'd have liked to take, but my step-father has been fussing that taking the books for small children robs my brother of his history. Never mind that Sam's 23 and not very interested. Never mind that I'd give them to him (even years from now) if he asked. Never mind that many of them were mine or Laura's before they were Sam's. It wasn't worth a family fight right then.
I did take all of the books that I bought during high school with the vague idea that Sam might want to read them. They were all books I'd read during my elementary and middle school years and loved, and I thought at the time that he might enjoy them. No Flying in the House. Secret Agents Four. Twenty-one Balloons. They're all a lot more battered than I recall, and some are now missing covers. That saddens me because I know that it's only the result of moving; no one's read them since I bought them.
I also took an old doll that belonged to my mother when she was young. It's cloth (not soft enough for me to call it "rag") and very battered, but it looks like it was once quite elaborate. The costume's rather gypsyish. I also got a Victorian ribbon quilt; I don't know what I'm going to do with it since I think it's too brittle to walk on and I don't have wall space for it, but… I'll figure out something.
I was a little depressed to discover that both Laura's and my senior pictures were buried in the attic. I didn't see Sam's, but it wouldn't surprise me if his were as well. There just seems to me to be something a little wrong about that.
We unearthed some of my elementary school era artwork. LunarGeography insisted that we should bring it back with us because she thought Scott would like to see it. I asked her what he was supposed to do with it then, and she replied that that was his problem. We ended up bringing back two pieces, one crayon and watercolor and the other one of those black paint over crayon with a scraped picture (I can't explain it properly, but I'm sure you'd know exactly what I was talking about if you saw it!).
The next day, we did more book sorting. That house several crawlspaces and attics, and we had to check all of them. I'm not convinced that we found all of the Nancy Drews and the like, but if any others come to light, Mom can ship them to me.
Then we made a trip to McKay's. I spent much more than I'd intended to, of course. Mom wanted to go along to look for some CDs because her car has a CD player but she'd forgotten to pack anything to listen to. It's twelve hours from Baton Rouge to Knoxville, and she was traveling alone.
That evening, we ate a place that specialized in salads and vegetarian fare (while still serving meat). With an eye toward my protein allocation, I ordered hummos as an appetizer; it was thoroughly awful. The chick peas weren't fully ground up, and the spicing was... odd. I was the only one who persisted in eating it (I really wanted to get some protein because I knew I'd regret it if I didn't). The salad I had was actually pretty good, but I think Mom and LunarGeography were a little disappointed with their dishes.
LunarGeography managed to get Mom talking, which is not an easy task, by asking about Louisiana law as it applies to women. Mom talked about that for quite a while, and we all shook our heads over the fact that, at least until Sam's next birthday, under Louisiana law Mom and Tim can't disinherit him. If they both died tomorrow, he'd get everything Tim owns, one third of what Mom owns, and two thirds of what they own jointly. Then Mom talked a bit about the work she did when she lived in Wisconsin with the Hmong and the cultural disconnects faced on both sides there.
When we got back to the house, we had to scramble to clean up because it sounded as if someone wanted to come through the house right then. As it turned out, he'd come the next morning. LunarGeography and I agreed to be on our way back to Michigan before he arrived, so we packed the books, got the boxes into the car and set the alarm for 7am.
It didn't take us all that long to get up and out on the road the next day. We actually thought we might try to get home by evening. Sadly, that was not to be. Remember that hummos I said was odd? At least I think that was the culprit. I ended up with gas and other… hm… intestinal discomforts. LunarGeography was simply tired, not having slept all that well the night before. We ended up surrendering and looking for a motel just after Dayton. It took us a lot longer to find a place than we expected, but we ended up at a Holiday Inn Express at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
At LunarGeography's insistence, I took a nap. I hadn't expected to sleep, but I did. I believe she did too. We got up around 7pm and started thinking about dinner. We ended up going to a place called The Coldwater Café. The food was excellent as was the service, but we kind of got cornered by an obnoxious man who seated himself at the next table. He talked to anyone and everyone without considering whether or not any of us were interested in his life story. He mentioned at one point that he'd been drinking that day and provided a rather impressive list of mixed drinks, so I rather suspect that alcohol had something to do with his behavior. Nevertheless…
Before he showed up, LunarGeography had been threatening to make me share a dessert with her, but we were both too eager to escape to consider such a thing. We walked a few blocks to let things settle and get a little bit of exercise and then headed back to our room. We went to bed fairly early because we expected to get up early (there was a continental breakfast included if we could make it downstairs by 9:30) and because LunarGeography had a headache.
We got back to Ann Arbor by about noon, and LunarGeography and I carried the boxes into our living room (Scott and I hauled them to the basement after he got home). She and her husband had plans for that night as did Scott and I.
That was our ninth wedding anniversary. It doesn't seem like it's actually been that long. We went out to dinner, and we talked, and we generally enjoyed ourselves. Scott had half a dozen roses waiting in the living room when I got back from the trip. Such a sweet gesture.
î
I've been feeling a bit better. The nausea that was plaguing me has abated for the most part. I'm still have problems some evenings, but I'm mostly back to being able to eat regularly. I've dealt with a few things that I think were giving me a lot of stress (apparently more than I thought they were). I've been taking simethicone to bolster my prescription antacid, and that seems to be helping too.
The biggest event was a trip down to Knoxville to retrieve some things from the house my parents are currently trying to sell. LunarGeography graciously consented to drive me down and back if I paid for the gas. That being an infinitely better deal than trying to take the bus, I naturally accepted. It's about nine hours from Ann Arbor to Knoxville, and we could have made the trip in one day, but we decided to take it easy and take two days going down.
We stopped over night at a Red Roof Inn in Lexington. The room had one of the largest king size beds I've ever seen and not much else. We forgot to ask what time check out was, so we were near panic when we awoke at quarter to ten. As it turned out, we had till eleven, but…
I let the diet go for most of the trip. I was still kind of counting servings, but I ate what was available rather than what the diet called for. I don't think there was anything I could have eaten at the Shoney's we stopped at the first evening otherwise. We stopped at a Bob Evans the next morning for breakfast. It was food.
We arrived in Knoxville a lot earlier than we'd really meant to. It was Sunday, and my mother was running an open house. (She'd asked that we not come Saturday because she didn't want us messing up the nice clean house by staying there.) The house they're selling is an Arts & Crafts style place with five bedrooms (one of them two connected rooms) and three full bathrooms (one shower and two huge bathtubs). I covet the place but would never have the energy to keep it up.
Potential buyers started arriving at the house about a half hour after we did, so we vacated. I'd hoped we could go to McKay's, a used bookstore that I really like, but it wasn't open on Sundays. We decided that we'd try driving that way to see if we could find it, just for future reference, and promptly got ourselves thoroughly lost. Mom had provided us with a Knoxville street map, but, although we could generally manage to figure out where we were on it, we couldn't seem to use it to navigate. We saw a lot of old houses and a lot of foliage and wandered around until we figured it was safe to return.
Then we went to a Korean place for dinner. It wasn't the Korean place Mom had intended to take us to; that one turned out to be closed for the month of June. But this one was nearby, and she'd eaten there before. Two of the dishes we got were at the edge of my spiciness tolerance, largely due to the presence of peppers, so I focused on the dish I'd selected. Jop chae. Yum.
When we got back to the house, we started pulling boxes out of the attic. Sorting the books went pretty quickly. There were a number that I'd have liked to take, but my step-father has been fussing that taking the books for small children robs my brother of his history. Never mind that Sam's 23 and not very interested. Never mind that I'd give them to him (even years from now) if he asked. Never mind that many of them were mine or Laura's before they were Sam's. It wasn't worth a family fight right then.
I did take all of the books that I bought during high school with the vague idea that Sam might want to read them. They were all books I'd read during my elementary and middle school years and loved, and I thought at the time that he might enjoy them. No Flying in the House. Secret Agents Four. Twenty-one Balloons. They're all a lot more battered than I recall, and some are now missing covers. That saddens me because I know that it's only the result of moving; no one's read them since I bought them.
I also took an old doll that belonged to my mother when she was young. It's cloth (not soft enough for me to call it "rag") and very battered, but it looks like it was once quite elaborate. The costume's rather gypsyish. I also got a Victorian ribbon quilt; I don't know what I'm going to do with it since I think it's too brittle to walk on and I don't have wall space for it, but… I'll figure out something.
I was a little depressed to discover that both Laura's and my senior pictures were buried in the attic. I didn't see Sam's, but it wouldn't surprise me if his were as well. There just seems to me to be something a little wrong about that.
We unearthed some of my elementary school era artwork. LunarGeography insisted that we should bring it back with us because she thought Scott would like to see it. I asked her what he was supposed to do with it then, and she replied that that was his problem. We ended up bringing back two pieces, one crayon and watercolor and the other one of those black paint over crayon with a scraped picture (I can't explain it properly, but I'm sure you'd know exactly what I was talking about if you saw it!).
The next day, we did more book sorting. That house several crawlspaces and attics, and we had to check all of them. I'm not convinced that we found all of the Nancy Drews and the like, but if any others come to light, Mom can ship them to me.
Then we made a trip to McKay's. I spent much more than I'd intended to, of course. Mom wanted to go along to look for some CDs because her car has a CD player but she'd forgotten to pack anything to listen to. It's twelve hours from Baton Rouge to Knoxville, and she was traveling alone.
That evening, we ate a place that specialized in salads and vegetarian fare (while still serving meat). With an eye toward my protein allocation, I ordered hummos as an appetizer; it was thoroughly awful. The chick peas weren't fully ground up, and the spicing was... odd. I was the only one who persisted in eating it (I really wanted to get some protein because I knew I'd regret it if I didn't). The salad I had was actually pretty good, but I think Mom and LunarGeography were a little disappointed with their dishes.
LunarGeography managed to get Mom talking, which is not an easy task, by asking about Louisiana law as it applies to women. Mom talked about that for quite a while, and we all shook our heads over the fact that, at least until Sam's next birthday, under Louisiana law Mom and Tim can't disinherit him. If they both died tomorrow, he'd get everything Tim owns, one third of what Mom owns, and two thirds of what they own jointly. Then Mom talked a bit about the work she did when she lived in Wisconsin with the Hmong and the cultural disconnects faced on both sides there.
When we got back to the house, we had to scramble to clean up because it sounded as if someone wanted to come through the house right then. As it turned out, he'd come the next morning. LunarGeography and I agreed to be on our way back to Michigan before he arrived, so we packed the books, got the boxes into the car and set the alarm for 7am.
It didn't take us all that long to get up and out on the road the next day. We actually thought we might try to get home by evening. Sadly, that was not to be. Remember that hummos I said was odd? At least I think that was the culprit. I ended up with gas and other… hm… intestinal discomforts. LunarGeography was simply tired, not having slept all that well the night before. We ended up surrendering and looking for a motel just after Dayton. It took us a lot longer to find a place than we expected, but we ended up at a Holiday Inn Express at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
At LunarGeography's insistence, I took a nap. I hadn't expected to sleep, but I did. I believe she did too. We got up around 7pm and started thinking about dinner. We ended up going to a place called The Coldwater Café. The food was excellent as was the service, but we kind of got cornered by an obnoxious man who seated himself at the next table. He talked to anyone and everyone without considering whether or not any of us were interested in his life story. He mentioned at one point that he'd been drinking that day and provided a rather impressive list of mixed drinks, so I rather suspect that alcohol had something to do with his behavior. Nevertheless…
Before he showed up, LunarGeography had been threatening to make me share a dessert with her, but we were both too eager to escape to consider such a thing. We walked a few blocks to let things settle and get a little bit of exercise and then headed back to our room. We went to bed fairly early because we expected to get up early (there was a continental breakfast included if we could make it downstairs by 9:30) and because LunarGeography had a headache.
We got back to Ann Arbor by about noon, and LunarGeography and I carried the boxes into our living room (Scott and I hauled them to the basement after he got home). She and her husband had plans for that night as did Scott and I.
That was our ninth wedding anniversary. It doesn't seem like it's actually been that long. We went out to dinner, and we talked, and we generally enjoyed ourselves. Scott had half a dozen roses waiting in the living room when I got back from the trip. Such a sweet gesture.
î
