Oh I done drove five-hundred miles…

Okay.  I drove.  It sucked.  I’m serious.

I dropped Chicken off in San Diego– we arrived Monday night, and I was reminded of the sleeping habits of the young.  We got into the hotel room and I set everything down and put on my nightgown and brushed my teeth and my hair and set up my computer and plugged in my phone and set my alarm and…

And by the time I wondered how I was going to wind down for five minutes so I could go to sleep?

Chicken had crawled into bed fully clothed and crashed.  OMG.  I’m surprised she remembered to take off her shoes.

The next morning, we got there, got briefed on rules and regs (which her roommates immediately broke that night–she texted me with, “All that stuff about not drinking or smoking was BULLSHIT!” and I’m like, “Well, you managed to use your good sense in high school, I’m going to trust you here!”) and then moved her boxes in.  I was going to ask her if she wanted help unpacking when she turned to me and said, “Time to go!”

I was like, “But–“

“No, no, I’ll be fine.  You need to go, mom, I’m gonna bond.”

So I hugged, cried, left, held it in until I found my way back to the hotel in the strange city, and THEN cried even more.  Then I realized, oh horror of fucking horrors, the obnoxious brat had FORGOTTEN HER PHONE CORD.  I’m not even playing.  There it was, right where it had been plugged in that morning.  So after all of that angst and crying, the next morning, I dropped off the phone cord.  And four bags of groceries, since, after kicking me out and assuring me that she’d get food, she had Chick’n’Biscuit crackers for lunch.  I included a giant box of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies as some sort of passive aggressive revenge.

And between those two visits, I went to Rhys Ford’s house (she’s a lovely writer– has a new book, Dirty Secret, coming out, huzzah!) and talked to her and her sister and generally enjoyed chatting about sci-fi with my brethren.  (I cannot thank them enough for this evening–it was fun and normal and I got to pet their crazy assed dogs and I needed it after the drama of ditching my baby in an alien place.)

And then?

And then?

I drove five hundred miles.

It was horrible.  I-5 has not improved with age.  Government water restrictions have sort of screwed the farmers on this stretch of land, and the results aren’t pretty. The boredom got so bad, I actually bought an e-book, and the only thing of remote interest to me was Elliot Gould, narrating Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.  All I can say, is damn, did Phillip Marlowe slap a lot of women around.  And he wasn’t that fond of homosexuals for a guy who seemed to have a voice-fuck thing going with the ultimate bad guy.  And that sometime, I’m going to have to listen to the last three CDs, cause I’m sort of curious to see what happened to Vivian Sternwood-Regan’s husband.

Oh yeah.  And Elliot Gould is A. A fucking genius, and B. Could put a hyperactive first grader on a double expresso into a dead coma.  I had to turn him off for some Bruce, or I might have found out what happened to Mr. Regan’s–the trip really was that fucking long.

Oh– but for all of the longness and the boredom and the are-you-fucking-kidding-me-this-is-my-view?

Yeah.  I still ran into weirdness.

In the same rest stop, I ran into this sign:

And for those of you who read Keeping Promise Rock and thought I was bullshitting about the snake thing, NYAH FUCKING NYAH!!!!  (No.  That wasn’t very mature, but are you SEEING THIS?)

And I also ran into a perfectly lovely woman, dressed nicely and nattily in a pair of black lace up ballet shoes and a matching set of capris and tasteful tank, with distinguished silver hair, blue contacts in her blue eyes, a demon cat from hell, and a sign that said, “Going to Woodland.  Need a Ride.”

o.o  0.o?  0.0

I tell you, if the cat hadn’t been crazy, (or she was crazy and made the cat sound like Tengu the black demon from hell) I might have let her hitchhike.  As it was, I could only see the headlines: