Spring Break 2010—Part Deux

I flew from College Station to Houston to Atlanta the day after I came home from Los Angeles, so Thursday got pretty much lost in airports.I had packed my handy-dandy little netbook for this part of the trip, so I happily spent a lot of flight time finishing off Part Une. That pretty much took care of Thursday, and I could use the netbook as a diary for the rest of the trip, which explains why Part Duex appears in present tense.

Friday
The second half of this spring break isn’t off to such a very good start. I was really looking forward to making the trip to Georgia (because I’ve never been here before), I’m thrilled to be here with Soldier Son for his graduation from Army training (because I’m proud of him), but I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach almost since my feet hit the ground because I bonked the front end of my rental car on a car-lot fence before I even got off the airport property. This sucks.

On top of that, I had put SS’s laptop computer in my carry-on luggage specifically so I could be very careful about the way it was handled, forgetting that both of the planes I took (from College Station to Houston and Houston to Atlanta) were too small for my carry on to go on board. Consequently, when I opened SS's computer to see if it’s still working after about 4 months of disuse, I discovered that the screen is cracked for about 3 inches on the right-hand side. It’s still easily usable, but I feel sucky about that, too.

I don’t know how bad the damage to the car really is, and I hope we’ll find an auto parts store tomorrow that can at least help alleviate it some, but I don’t feel good about it. I know all the lines about how shit happens and I know that it’s only money and I’m doing fine in that department, but I still feel as if I ought to have SNAFU tattooed across my forehead right now. I hate this.

Graduation this morning was actually pretty cool. I remember going to Number One Son’s graduation from Navy boot camp years ago and wishing that somehow he would have been a winner at something, just because he needed the chance to feel good about himself. He turned out to feel good enough about having finished the course, and that was okay with me.

When I went to SS’s graduation from Army Reserves boot camp about 6 years ago, I was proud of him for finishing, especially because I knew his reason for joining up had been to serve not only the US military but also the Iraqis whose country was in dire need of our help after the war we started.

This morning, he had sort of coincidentally been assigned to the “hoo-ah” squad, a group of soldiers who ran out onto the drill field in full battle dress gear to show off the weaponry the modern infantry is using.  I had sort of accidentally managed a seat that was about as close as I could have gotten to his position on the field, and I thought when I saw him that he looked a whole lot like RoboCop to me—maybe more than any of the other soldiers in his squad. I was tickled to see my little boy looking like such an important man.

During the later parts of the ceremony, I was amused to hear the announcements of the outstanding soldiers and the statistics about this group: they ranged in age from 17 to 43 (SS is 27), about a fourth of them are retraining after previous assignments (SS is one of those), and more of them qualified as expert marksmen and fast runners than in any previous group (SS barely missed qualification as a sharpshooter, which put him at the top of the lowest group of shooters, and he barely passed the required run; as I told him at lunch, I considered him the anchor that made all those other guys look good). Still all those other guys were bunched up out on the drill field, and SS had been on the front line with only a few other guys at the start of the show—and I couldn’t have been prouder of him!

After the ceremony, I needed to pick him up to take him back to the hotel, and I was impressed by how quickly and easily we were able to get out of the parking lot and back to the post to drop off three buddies who hadn’t moved their stuff out of the barracks yet. We found our way back to our hotel and a steakhouse where we had some pretty good steak (for him) and chicken (for me). The small loaf of bread they brought us was to die for. I’ll need a month to work off the calories.

We both were pretty shot by the time lunch was over, so we piled into bed at the room and took much-needed naps. SS was all set for a movie when we got up, so I made my third trek to Alice in Wonderland (I had taken NOS the weekend it came to town at home). Good thing the kids taught me to like Johnny Depp; I liked it all three times.

I confessed to SS on the way home from the movie (before we even discovered the broken computer) that I have been feeling really sick about the car and even more miserable about the fact that I feel abandoned somehow (because I struggle with what I feel about any kind of supreme being), and he reminded me that if I’m feeling that way, it may be that I haven’t taken proper care of my own faith. He’s probably right.

But it’s late tonight somewhere—and I’m still not sure whose time I’m on—so I’ll shut this down tonight and see how it goes tomorrow.

Saturday

The second day of spring break was ever so much better than the first. I’m still unhappy about the rental car, but I have come to terms with the fact that it’s only money, and I’ll figure out a way to deal with that.

Besides, I convinced SS to take me to a car parts store, where I bought a bug-scratcher sponge and the store manager lent me a bottle of cleanser, a couple of screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers. SS fiddled with the loose screws and managed to pop the little one out, but we determined that yes, I’m probably going to have to pay for paint on the bumper, but the remaining screw is holding the thing on well enough. Not at good deal, but only money.

We’re pretty good at spending money, too. Our stop by the auto parts store was really on the way to look for a ginormous bag for SS to pack for his tour of duty in Germany, and we made two or three stops (including a somewhat accidental trip to the post because SS wasn’t paying close enough attention to my Garmin) before we found one he could buy with a coupon that made it about 20 bucks less than the next one.

Our next stop—which also turned out to be pretty circuitous because of his resistance to Garmin—was a Best Buy, where he priced netbooks to replace his laptop. I felt bad about that, too, until he told me the broken computer actually gave him a pretty good excuse to buy the netbook, so he was really pretty cheerful about it. Besides, Uncle Sam had been dutifully depositing green in his checking account, so he was in fine shape for buying a new machine, and I was willing to spring for the remote disc player/burner that would allow him to play movies on it. The one he found is called “red,” but I’d more likely call it “copper” or a coppery maroon, which is pretty much his favorite color since he’s a graduate of Texas A&M.

After making the first loop through Best Buy, we stuffed ourselves with hamburgers at a Chili’s that was close to the theater, so off we went to see Repo Men, which was nothing if not weird. (We were both pretty sure we would have preferred to see Diary of a Wimpy Kid or one of a couple of other flicks, but March is clearly not the best month for movies, at least not in Georgia.)

The movie and stops in a couple of other stores gave SS time to decide that Best Buy really was the best buy for the new machine, so we cycled back through to make his purchase.

Back at the hotel, I unwrapped all the new toys and got them parked in his cute little computer case while SS sorted his gear into the bag to send to Germany. He managed to stuff the bag to its gills but to leave room in his carry-on for a change of clothes to wear for his last day on pass, his netbook, and a couple of other items.  We fired up the netbooks and settled in for the evening; I might as well finish my consulting jobs so I can pay for the car damage.

In many ways, he’s a child after my own heart: a netbook, a net connection, computer games, and television, and we’re pretty much in business.

Sunday

The first thing in my email this morning was a set of pictures from a high school friend of Texas on the first day of spring—Irving, Texas, with snow on the ground! I had heard from a friend in Lubbock that she had gone from shorts to sweats in a day and was piling on more clothes to keep warm, and I had texted NOS last night to bring in the plants at home against the near-freezing weather the weatherman expected there.

Georgia doesn’t seem to be seeing the freeze (although the weather here has been close to the same as the weather at home during most of SS’s training), but by the time the housekeeper rattled our door this morning, rain was pouring off the roof so she couldn’t hear me tell her we were fine. SS and I were burrowed under the covers, netbooks in our laps, where we stayed for most of the day. He ventured out around noon to scratch up lunch at the local Taco Bell, but that was about the extent of our activity until late afternoon; neither of us had even bothered with a bath yet.

Around 4 o’clock, SS informed me that if I had plans for a shower, I needed to get with it if I wanted to go get supper with him because he would be leaving at 5. I shut down my netbook and jumped in the tub, wishing I had more time to luxuriate in uberhot hotel water and still be ready for whatever it was he had planned. He took longer than I did in the shower, but then we went two towns over to eat supper and watch the Aggies play their March Madness round. We lost it by a point or two in the last two minutes of overtime; I don’t think the score had ever reached more than a six-point split for the whole game, which means it was a tense one, even if SS and I were the only two people in the restaurant watching it.

SS is nothing if not philosophical; he noted that we had played a great game, and if we had held our lead for that other two minutes, (a) he would have had to find a way to watch the next game from his new duty station in Germany and (b) we’d have gotten creamed by Duke in the finals, anyway. I’m just fine with the idea that Purdue could go ahead and win it all; that will say we lost to only the very best.

Knowing we had a big Monday ahead of us, we piled back into the hotel room and dug out the netbooks. SS determined that he had to download a huge software file to make his DVD driver work, and eventually he gave up and set it to install over night. By the time we plugged in netbooks and cell phones and lamps and whatever other toys he had going, I was glad I had put extension cords on the shopping list.

I still had nightmares about the rental car; my mental calculator said it needed about $50 worth of repair (it was bruised but not broken), but I could easily see the car agency increasing that by an order of magnitude. As SS said, it was only money, and if I couldn’t part with a couple of hundred bucks to take care of a stupid accident, I might need to rethink my spending. I considered calling my insurance company to see what they might do for me, but then I realized that if I had done the same thing to my own wheels, they would smile and let me pay the first $500 myself, anyway, so I might as well let it go.

Still, SS still seemed to me to have too much stuff in his gear bags and too little not yet packed, so if I let go of worrying about the rental car, I was in fine shape to worry about how his stuff would survive the trip to Germany.  It was a long night, even with the wake-up call coming at 4:30.

Monday

So here I am, back on a plane, this time headed west again, back to central time and my own bed and dogs and NOS to fuss over me.

I got up when the alarm went off at 4:30 and got SS up a few minutes later. I shut down his netbook while he dressed and threw gear into his bags, and somehow we crunched everything in. He made a wrong turn on the way from our hotel in Columbus to Fort Benning, but that gave him a chance to stop off for a Dr. Pepper before his trip; since I’m not sure he’ll even find Dr. Pepper in Germany, that was probably just as well. We arrived at the barracks before probably anybody else, and I got a few pictures of him in his Army gear. (When I was his age, those were fatigues; when his aunt was in the Army, she called them BDUs; I have no idea what the camouflage get-up is called today.)

I drove back to the hotel, called for a wake-up call at 9:30, peeled off the outer layer of clothes, and crawled back into bed. This time I had two additional concerns nettling me: getting up and finishing a job in time to email it out before I got kicked out of the hotel room, and getting out of the hotel in time to get to the airport before my plane left. (I’m hugely anal about getting to airports. In L.A., I typically miscalculate on the wrong side so I wind up racing for the door before the plane takes off; in other places, I don’t dare do any sight-seeing at all lest I miss that flight.)

Turning the t.v. on to cartoons at least distracted me enough to doze for a bit before SS called me around 7, when I was too groggy to find the phone still in the pocket of my jeans. It had stopped ringing by the time I found it, so I dialed back in case he had come up with some emergency I needed to handle before his bus left. My call went to voice mail, so I determined that this wasn’t a crisis and crawled back under the covers.

I woke up on my own a little after 8, tried to call SS again, and decided to fire up the computer for a bit instead of fighting for sleep. I was well into finishing the job when the 9:30 wake-up call came in, and I finished it completely about the time housekeeping asked to come in and clean my room. When she saw I was still in it, she excused herself, and I started packing stuff out for the airport.

SS had left a duffel bag full of odd uniform parts—mostly, he had explained, from his reserves duty—that we had agreed might as well go to GoodWill. I packed it up and headed for the front desk to check out and get directions, when the hostess told me my Discover card had been rejected. I knew I had reached my personal caution point (Discover had emailed me to tell me my balance was high enough for this month), but that left me lots and lots of credit on the card. Not to worry, she told me; it probably had something to do with the 2-cent difference between the amount estimated the day I checked in and the amount billed today. She even rejected the 2 cents in cash.

After I dropped the old uniforms, I took off up the road toward the airport and stopped along the way for a Coke and a couple of gallons of gas, just to be sure I didn’t run dry on the way. I stuck the Discover card into the pump, only to be told to check with the management on it. I stomped inside the somewhat ratty Shell station, where the managers told me the problem was more likely with their pump than my card, then stomped back out to get my gas. While I shopped for Coke (what? A Shell station without a fountain machine? What is this place?), I called Discover to see what was up. Sure enough, the problem had been the 2 cents (apparently the hostess had tried to charge me 2 cents instead of crediting the previous amount and setting up a new charge for the new total) and the pump; the Discover card was fine.

Five bucks got me plenty of gas to get to the rental car place, even with a sort of erratic detour on the way into the airport (Gracie Garmin is good but not perfect, and when she has to sit on the seat or my lap instead of her handing little mounting post, she’s a little hard to follow), and as I wound my way into the return area, a cheerful worker named Kim hopped up to the car and asked me how I was doing. I told her I had scratched up her car, and she popped around to take a look. When she finished, she told me to give her the keys, collect my stuff, and catch up with her at the checkout booth.

“We can take care of this now, or you can work it out with collections,” she said brightly.

“How much is it?” I asked, hopeful that her tone meant I wasn’t driving myself to the poorhouse

“$85.”

$85? Is that all? I had worried all weekend about not having paid for insurance when in fact the total damage had come to 3 dollars less than if I had? I wanted to hug her—and suddenly everything that had been miserable about this trip all went away.

SS managed to call me at a couple of inopportune times as I was getting situated—while I was juggling stuff at the rental agency, when I was crossing a busy driveway going into the terminal, while I was piling my stuff into tubs for security—but when I finally got to a place where I could connect with him, I invited him to make his way to my concourse (because he had less stuff to carry and his plane was leaving later) for lunch. He didn’t tell me he had already feasted at the McDonald’s (another one of those last-things-till-who-knows-when) as he ordered bite-sized burgers at the Chili’s 2 Go, but I enjoyed a few more minutes to sit and visit with him, to catch him up on the positive outcome with the car, and to take a couple of pictures before we both had to go.

Neither of us could choke down more than a single burger, so I closed them back up in their box to head for Texas and turned to collect my goods. He commented that he thought he needed to get back down to his boarding area, and by the time I turned around to hug him one last time, he had disappeared like smoke. But that’s my soldier.

So here I am on a plane home. All in all, it’s been a crazy, wonderful couple of weeks, and life at home is looking pretty ordinary by comparison. I have a big lump in my throat over having the phone lines cut between here and Europe (although I know he’ll find ways to call when he can), and I have a love/hate relationship with the notion that the daughter in Los Angeles might finagle a move back to Texas.

But I’m so proud right now of all three of them that I think I could just about pop.

Spring Break 2010—Part Une

I’m on a plane now somewhere between College Station and Atlanta, on my way to Fort Benning, Georgia, for Soldier Son’s graduation from Army boot camp. This alone would be a fine spring break, but it turns out to be only the second half of the break that began about this time last week, when I flew to Los Angeles to see the latest lighting project Drama Daughter put together at the Pasadena girls school where she works.

When I left LA yesterday, DD was trying to cope with the fact that I had been in her town for a week but she had hardly made time for me. This wasn’t the first time that I had made a week-long trip of it, but the last couple of times have been broken up by visits to Irvine, where one of my college chums and her wife live. So this was just the first time I had spent so much time at DD’s digs in a while.

But I had planned for that. The reason to book the trip for a full week was to take advantage of cheaper air fares I found by flying on Wednesdays, and since I knew DD would be working much of the time, I had lined up plenty of projects to keep me busy—in fact, I’ve got one on the desktop now that still isn’t done.
Still, I have to say that in my own way, I had plenty of fun with my two weeks. Ultimately, I got a lot more exercise than I usually do, and I enjoyed just being away from home. Here’s how I remember it:


Wednesday
I flew fairly directly from College Station to Houston to Los Angeles (the shortest way I’ve found to make the trip by air), arriving a a time that was horrible for DD or her Prince Charming to pick me up at the airport. I’m a strong proponent of public transportation, though, so I was fine with a chance to check out the system in LA.

I got myself from the baggage pick-up area to the loading zone for the bus with no trouble, and I soon struck up a conversation with a gentleman a few years my senior who was on his way home to Pasadena from a trip to central Texas, including an opportunity to visit one of his former professors from Baylor and a friend who lives in Marble Falls, where my brother lives. Turns out this gentleman worked his way through school picking cotton in the Brazos Valley for a family named Scarmardo, whose kin no doubt were in school with me and my siblings and our kids.

The wait for our shuttle was supposed to have taken about 20 minutes, but instead we waited nearly an hour and then took what seemed to my companion to have been a rather roundabout route to Union Station, where I was to lug my two pieces of baggage onto a train to get closer to DD’s apartment. After I stood in line for a day pass, I discovered I could hop the train for a dollar and a quarter, which I had already sealed into an envelope exactly for that trip. I hauled my gear down to the platform, only to discover that instead of taking the right to the platform, I was supposed to have made a left to buy my ticket.

Several helpful Californians pointed me back up the stairs, a jaunt I wasn’t in a hurry to make with a suitcase I knew weighed 49.5 lb, until one finally pointed me to an elevator that made my life much easier. Up I went, across to ticketing, and back down the escalator to the platform.

Sure enough, a train pulled in a few minutes later, and I hopped on as soon as the other passengers had stepped off. The doors closed behind me, and a man made his way from several cars forward to tell me I wasn’t to board the train until everyone else got off. Since I was the only person I could see for two cars forward and two cars back, I sort of thought I had done that, but apparently my perception wasn’t clear enough. The man disappeared toward the front of the train, the doors opened, and I got off. The doors closed behind me, then almost immediately reopened, and all of the other passengers and I hauled ourselves back on board. The conductor apparently was better satisfied with our performance, and the train lurched forward.

Other than apologizing to about a million other passengers for the bulky suitcase they were tripping over, I had an uneventful ride to the station nearest DD’s apartment, where I dragged myself and my baggage up to the elevator and asked rather generally how to get to the bus. A man who appeared to be in his forties or so, dressed neatly if you discount his ponytail and the bicycle he was rolling along beside him, smiled and said, “Ask me. Whatever you need, just ask.” He led me to another elevator (so I wouldn’t have to balance the bags on the up escalator to ground level), pointed me to the right place to meet my bus, and wished me a good visit to LA.

I dragged my gear across the street to the stop he had pointed out to me, arriving about the time DD called to see how my trip was going. I sort of hoped she was in the neighborhood so she could get me the rest of the way home, but I wasn’t willing to wait in the chill night air with all my luggage for the 20 minutes she estimated before she’d be able to get there. Later I decided that 20 minutes might have been the time to finish the job she was doing; I was in her apartment for closer to an hour before she or PC finally got there.

But the fun wasn’t even over yet. When the bus finally got there, the Whoopi Goldberg look-alike driver sort of growled at me that her bus didn’t stop at Hoover St, the closest I could get to DD’s apartment, but she’d drop me at the stop before or after. I hauled the suitcases onto the bus, pulled out my second envelope of change, and the bus launched into the traffic. We whizzed past several blocks to a busy intersection, where the driver barked that I could get off there or at the next one, but she couldn’t stop at Hoover. I was pretty intimidated by the busy corner with my large load that I knew I had to drag uphill anyway, so I declined that stop and took my chances on the next one.

The driver hauled back into the traffic, drove a couple of blocks into a construction zone, and started flailing her arms wildly and saying something I couldn’t hear over the roar of traffic and my own heartbeat as I wondered whether I had made the right decision or not. She squealed to a stop a couple of blocks farther up the road, and I asked how far back I had to walk to Hoover. I could almost have sworn I was looking at Whoopi as she gaped at me and said, “Didn’t you hear me telling you that was Hoover back there?” I tried again to pay her for the short trip, but I was afraid she was going to roll me and my baggage onto the sidewalk, so I cleared out as fast as I could and tried to figure out where I was.

Actually, I was sorry I wasn’t really more familiar with the neighborhood, but grateful for the construction zone; instead of having to cross four lanes of traffic on Beverly Drive in Los Angeles, I only had to cross two. I was near a 7-11 store and a couple of Laundromats, and while I was pretty sure I didn’t know how to get where I was going, I figured I ought to get moving from where I was.
A couple of blocks later, I recognized the Laundromat where Puppers and I had knocked out some washing on my last trip west, and recognizing that I still had my bus money in my hand, I stopped in next door and treated myself to a Coke. I wasn’t thrilled to be in a dive of a convenience store at night, but with Coke in hand, I felt energized enough to haul up the hill to a place where I could park the suitcase and not have to move it for seven days. I knew Richard Simmons would be proud of me for getting my heart rate up a long time before I got to the top of the hill, but I also knew I couldn’t report that I had done it without any warm-up effort at all. Just as well Richard wasn’t really interested in my personal wellbeing.

DD had carefully set the door code to something she was sure I could remember: the date of Texas independence. Which would be better if I didn’t continually mix up independence (1836) with statehood (1845). Or if I could remember that the # goes before the number, not after it. I tried a half-dozen approaches to banging on the numbers before I finally broke down and hit the # key first—about the time I figured out that I could have looked this up in her text message on my cell phone.

Puppers was happy enough to see me, and for once managed to greet me without piddling on the carpet, although she seemed pretty disappointed her Grammy didn’t want to take her for a garden stroll in the dark. Grammy just wanted to sit down somewhere where it was warm. After everybody settled in for the evening, Puppers happily curled up under the blanket with me on the couch, where we slept pretty soundly except for a few seconds when I looked up into PC’s eyes, looking quizzically at me from the adjoining sofa where he seemed to wonder how one of us had gotten there; somehow one of us had missed the memo about his sleepwalking.

Thursday
Thursday was at least interesting as “court day.” When DD took over as apartment manager about a year ago, her first new tenant was a young artist who claimed to make her living as a photographer. She had talked a good line, dad had cosigned the rental agreement, and life seemed pretty good. That lasted until about November, when the artist—who was already becoming something of a nuisance—stopped paying her rent. At first she had had a string of excuses and promises, but ultimately she had become somewhat surly and seemed to think the complex owed her a place to stay.

The complex seemed to think otherwise. At the very least, management had filed for eviction, and Thursday was the chick’s day in court. Since DD had been the one dealing with this problem, she had to show up, just in case the artist did; management seemed to doubt that she would.

She did. And she claimed that she had a lawyer, which meant either the two lawyers had to negotiate an agreement or the case had to go to court. DD had left me at home for the morning to work on one of my projects, but she took the noon break to come and get me and take me to the court house; the artist had asked not only for an extra month to vacate the apartment, but also for a couple of grand to tide her over as she looked for a new one. Since she already owed the complex more than that, management wasn’t willing to negotiate.

By the time I got there after lunch, DD had already had her eyes opened as to how important every mark she made on the paperwork really was, but she was about to pop over the gall the artist was showing in demanding that the complex take care of her.

Since I was working on a project that didn’t require a net connection, I planned to sit in the hall and work on my laptop for as long as I had a battery while DD and the lawyers put their case before the judge. The management rep had gone to his office to get the official record of payments to try to strengthen the case to get the artist out post haste, but the judge had called the case to court before he got back. I shoved my laptop off on DD, raced out of the building, snagged the paper, and ran it back upstairs while the management guy parked his car. Since the judge didn’t actually get to the courtroom for another 15 or 20 minutes, my “heroics” were something less than significant, but I had fun with my "mini-hero" time, anyway.

When the trial finally ended late in the afternoon, DD was furious with the judge, the lawyer, and the artist. The judge had granted the artist 35 days to vacate the apartment (I heard something about a requirement for her to pay something, but apparently not four months of back rent), the lawyer had made some brainiac statement about this being a “case of economic hardship,” when in fact it was a baldfaced case of a grifter trying to take the complex for everything she could get, and the artist for lying right and left about how pitiful she was. (PC went upstairs later in the evening to check on another problem and spotted her bailing out of a taxi with her arms loaded with shopping bags—not exactly symptomatic of a penniless darling with no way to survive). And DD was pretty sure that her aspirations to add law school to her future would not include civil cases like this one.

Friday
Friday was play day. DD got up and off to work in the morning, and I stayed home to work on my projects. After a while, I took a break and walked Puppers around the neighborhood. I found the busy intersection where I could have gotten off the bus, and I decided that it would have been a good stop if I’d had less luggage. The hike would have been steeper uphill, but it would have been shorter, and that’s probably a plus. (With my 50-lb bag and computer loot, I’m thinking the route I took was at least close to the best option, after all.)

Puppers and I found ourselves on about a hometown block of a busy street without a sidewalk, but the road is wide enough that I felt safe, and I found a walwayk to an old gate that looks like a lovely place for a secret garden to hide. I also have a mental note to check out the parking lot to the hospital near the apartment: Does the walkway from the hotel nearby go to the hospital lot? A puzzlement, to be sure.

DD picked me up late in the afternoon to take me to the play, which was its usual frustrating experience: the set designer always does an outstanding job, and this set was no exception; the design was impeccable, and the lighting DD added gave it just the right atmosphere. The acting, however, left a lot to be desired. The director has a right idea that the plays shouldn’t consume the lives of girls in a general-studies high school, so leaving it short of perfection is not a big deal.

He has the wrong idea about too many other things, though: every play, regardless the story line (which is likely as not to be at least odd for an all-girl high school), is always laden with slapstick, lines are “reinterpreted” for reasons unknown, and much of what is said turns out to be somewhat intelligible. The same set and the same lighting on a college campus could have been incredible. With this cast and directing, not so much.

Saturday
Saturday was another play day, but this time I didn’t really feel a need to sit in the theater again because I’d already seen it once. I hauled along my laptop and put in more time on my projects, which was really quite fine with me. Besides, the acoustics in the control room were better for me than in the theater, and I managed to hear lines that had completely escaped me the day before.
Afterward, we went to a party at one of the kids’ friends’ house, and I got to meet—and laugh with—several of them, a couple of whom I had heard about before but had never seen. One of the housemates kept refilling a bowl of homemade hummus, and as I was leaving I stopped and asked her how it was made. DD got a chuckle out of her quaint way of describing it: “the equivalent of a can of garbanzo beans,” preferably already pureed, “about an espresso cup” each of tahini and lemon juice—monitor the lemon juice so you don’t put in too much—a couple of cloves of garlic and a little salt to taste.

We were still there at two past the morning, when everybody took a break to set their watches forward, except for me, who finally gave up on trying tocalculate what time it was where I was because my watch was still two hours ahead on Texas time. This way, I got to set it backward one hour to get to the “new” California time, where it stayed until Wednesday, when I set it forward two more hours to catch up with the new Texas time, and today, when I pushed it ahead another hour to get myself on track to be on Georgia time.

Sunday
Sunday DD and PC challenged me to a round of Frisbee golf. I’m no Frisbee golfer—or any other golfer for that matter—and I’m not one to go out and play when staying at home seems so warm and cozy (and I can always find work to do). But I’m willing to go along when somebody gets behind and pushes me, so off to golf I went. DD hooked me up at first with probably her best disc, which I was no good at throwing. We had practiced a little on the neighborhood soccer field last summer when she was home, but somehow playing among the trees on the hills in a place called Elysian Park in Los Angeles changed the game remarkably. I was horrified at the idea of having to chase my disc down the side of a mountain (which in a couple of places looked mostly like a cliff to me), so I was relieved when she switched the discs and I developed a throwing style that limited me to really, really short tosses, but they went fairly straight and flat and didn’t roll down the hill so much.

I also got to where I could eyeball the general spot where they landed and stumble upon them with reasonable accuracy, unlike a parasite we picked up on the first hole and couldn’t figure out how to lose. When we first came up, I was pretty sure he was playing with a group in front of us, but when they moved on, he lingered behind. DD and PC suggested several times that he go ahead and play ahead of us, and when he lost track of his discs a time or two, we told him we were moving on and he could catch up. He somehow managed to catch up with us almost immediately every time—no way he was going to take a hint.

DD and PC had made plans with another couple to go to Alice in Wonderland that evening. We somehow managed to mix up on the connections with them, but the three of us piled into the Mini and took off to the show. I was startled by the cost of tickets since flicks are cheap back home, but I was surprised to see that large drinks and popcorn both came in giant tubs (for a proportional price, which I found reasonable under the circumstances), and both earned free refills. I probably got all the Coke I needed for a month in one of those buckets, but I’m going to have to go to rehab somewhere to break this habit, I think.

Monday
Monday was pretty much on-my-own day, so worked for a while in the morning, then took off with Puppers in search of lunch. DD and PC had lost the little container that stored sandwich bags for picking up Puppers’ poop, so I ducked into a couple of little ripoff joints in search of a suitable replacement. I found a container of something that called itself some sort of “replacement grippers” or something that looked like little plastic replacement cleats. I don’t think the real bag holders from the pet store cost much more than the $5 price tag on these things, so I was surely not willing to pay it, although I really liked the sturdy little plastic container with its screw-on top that could hang easily from a hook. I also knew I was in a ripoff store, so I asked what they wanted for it. Cleats and all, I walked out for a dollar.

Puppers and I were aimed toward a Winchell’s where we knew they served tasty sandwiches (I had had bacon and eggs on a croissant there on Sunday), but I was a little skittish about leaving her outside while I went in to order, and the Tommy’s Original Hamburgers was only about half as far from the apartment, had two walk-up windows, and would let me have all the Coke I could fit in my cup. I decided I could have lived without the chili, but then I wouldn’t have had the “original Tommy’s” experience, so I grinned and bore it. We found a back way back to the apartment, interrupted only briefly when another little dog ran out into an intersection to say hello. DD and PC seemed delighted to have a replacement bag holder that has potential to be even better than the previous one.

Tuesday
Tuesday got off to a really early start—4 a.m, in fact, when I woke up to feel the whole apartment shaking. I had experienced buildings shaking before; I grew up just a few houses from a railroad track, and I knew houses near it often rattled a bit as trains rumbled by. And I’d been in small buildings when large trucks pulled up nearby. But DD’s neighborhood doesn’t have any trains, few big trucks roll by her hill, and her apartment has 21 units made primarily of concrete and cinder blocks. I thought at one time that I heard a picture slide off the wall, and I knew no vehicle could have rattled the building that hard: I had experienced my first earthquake. I found out a few hours later that the quake was centered about 12 miles from Los Angeles and had been rated at 4.4.

Later in the day, Puppers and I got even more adventurous. I had seen commercials for a taco salad at DD’s favorite Mexican food place, and I determined we could hike to one in a little over a mile in either of two directions. I figured that a city as focused on the outdoors as LA would have a way for me to order without going in, so off we went. At one time I thought maybe we had already gone too far, but we finally got to Alvarado Street and turned right, just a couple of blocks from our destination.

I watched the traffic roll through the store for several minutes and decided I just didn’t have the heart to leave Puppers outside while I went in to order. I crossed the street to stroll through a dollar store and try to garner more courage, but that never came. A couple of street vendors tried to get me to buy fresh mango or papya, but as good as it looked, I knew it wouldn’t handle my hunger. A block or so in another direction, I found a taco wagon where I could buy any of several Mexican dishes, so I went for the veggie chalupa. Turned out to be a good choice—not as big as a salad, but definitely tasty and fewer calories.

We picked a different route back to the apartment, passing MacArthur Park and a neat church on our way back to Hoover. Hoover cuts Beverly at an angle, and several other streets angle off it back to Beverly, too. I chose one rather at random in search of the 7-Eleven where I was hoping to restock my Coke supply at the house, and was tickled that I picked the right one. Carrying two big Cokes up the hill wasn’t too much fun, but not nearly as painful as hauling the luggage, and at the top of the hill was a nice warm bath and a project to finish: not only had I read a paper that needed to go back to its authors, but DD had pulled out a stack of jam pants that needed to be taken up. Her old sewing machine isn’t in great shape, but I managed to find the marks we had made the night before and follow the dotted lines to make them meet her specifications.

That job took the rest of the afternoon and some of the evening, but DD had promised me dinner out to celebrate an early Mother’s Day. (She set me up with my first cell phone several years ago and has always paid the phone bills, so as far as I’m concerned, she never, ever owes me a Mother’s Day gift.) She was determined that we needed to do this, and she had a coupon for a really good restaurant, so we all dressed up and off we went.

The dinner was more than I could have hoped for: she ordered a salmon plate with the best salmon I’ve ever eaten, but I didn’t think it held a candle to my tilapia. From there, we went to a bar named Edison’s that looked like terrific fun, but it was closed for some reason. The alternate back-up plan was a rooftop bar at The Standard hotel, where the décor is crazy modern (DD called some of the seating “mushroom waterbeds,” which is a pretty good description) and features a swimming pool, right there on the roof.

DD had told me the rule is that women can swim there naked, but men have to wear suits. As I walked down one side of the roof to try to get a better look at another building, a middle-aged fat guy dropped his drawers and flashed the city—less than elegant, but one of the funniest things I think I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty sure he didn’t expect me to be there, but his face suggested he was too far gone to undo what he had done—ir, for that matter, to recognize it. If he hadn't so much reminded me of a couple of people out of my past, it might not have been so funny, but he did, and it was.

Wednesday
Wednesday was going-home day. I went to work with DD, where I set up her brother’s hard drive to copy some files from hers, and she finished work in time to trim my hair for me before we had to leave. We found a spot in Pasadena to get some really tasty fish tacos (who knew I’d actually like them?) before heading for the airport, then got me to the airport just in time to potty before I boarded the plane. I was tired of projects by that time, so I used the flight home to catch up on crossword puzzles.

Once home, I dumped stuff out of my suitcase and rifled through the one I had prepacked for Georgia, then slept somewhat fitfully in expectation of getting on the road again.

So it’s already Thursday, I’ve made it to Georgia, and Part Deux has already begun. But more on that later.

Being the mom of YUCKIES

The word of the day on a New York Times blog a couple of weeks ago was YUCKIES—young unwitting costly kids, which is apparently an update of KIPPERs (kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings) in British slang.

I had heard of KIPPERs before, but YUCKIES was new to me and a hoot because it so describes my life right now. I’ve been helping Drama Daughter with the college loans for years (no longer officially—I'm off the payroll with Sallie Mae), Number One Son with college bills and rent and a couple of other financial issues, and Soldier Son with dog sitting—complicated that week by the fact that I had mindlessly given his dog Tank a handful (6? 8? 12?) of grapes Saturday, then realized that the bunch I had laid on the bathroom counter was missing a few minutes later.

Something in the back of my head reminded me that grapes can be toxic to dogs (although I'm sure our previous dog used to eat them, but she had a cast-iron stomach, and we already knew Tank does not), so I surfed the web and found out that they could do anything from nothing to renal shutdown. I had plenty of time to tie my stomach in a knot before most of the remaining bunch showed up on the couch in the living area, transported there by one or another of the four-legged critters, but apparently not too much the worse for wear.

Still, when Tank had a really, really nasty stool Monday morning, I hauled him off to the vet, who said he did seem to have some sort of infection (we did a week’s regimen of amoxycillan) and to keep an eye on him. He couldn’t have his vaccinations while he had diarrhea, so I had to take him back next week for new tags—and bring along a urine sample to see how he was doing on the grape reaction. (He was fine, but grapes are officially off his diet forever.)

So if that wasn't enough fun for that day, after I had gone out to get a visual inspection of the runny stool, he came running up to give me a kiss and whacked me in the lip and knocked me down. I love this animal, but I do have to watch out when he's coming—he has no idea how big he is, and when he's feeling his vinegar, he has more than his share! My lip hurt for the rest of the day.

And then somewhere in the confusion of trying to gather up dog and school supplies to do the vet on the way to the office (fortunately, I didn't have to take Tank to class!), I dropped my cell phone, which decided to tell me it was charging (when it was plugged in), but that's as far as it went. I wanted to get to the vet before my class, so I stuck the phone on the charger and crossed my fingers that it would eventually start to work again. After I got home from work, the phone still wouldn't do anything but announce that it was charging; fortunately, NOS stuck with it long enough to determine that it had somehow gotten shut off. He pushed several combinations of buttons to bring it back to life again, but I could have kissed him for doing it.

I made it to the vet and the class and hit a little actual work time before time to cycle back through the vet shop to the house, where Tank and Alpha Bitch set up a chorus of “oh, look, we have a bunny nest and we want the bunny to play!” Usually, when we tell Tank it's time to come into the house, we open the door and jump out of the way; I had to haul my butt out twice with the leash to drag him back inside that evening. I need to find the bunny a new home....

SS had been great about calling in fairly regularly during his time at Army boot camp, but not too good at sorting out what's up next in his life. Consequently, when he called that evening to tell me he would “graduate” from basic/advanced/whatever training this is next Friday and it wasn’t a big enough deal for me to be there, I scheduled my spring break trip to LA to see DD so that I flew out last Wednesday, went to her play on Friday, and will fly back next Wednesday. That plan let me take advantage of cheaper tickets by flying Wednesday to Wednesday and have a couple of days left to relax and enjoy some time with the dogs before I have to go back to school.

Surely by now you can see where this is going: I got my flight arrangements all set about the time SS told me he thought he was going to have about a 5-day leave. That would let him come home, tell the family in town goodbye, and gather up some stuff he wants to take with him on the flight to his next duty station in Germany. Super; now I had, like, two days of quiet until SS would come home. Then SS called and said that no, he didn't think he'd have the 5 days off, so no, not to plan on his coming home. Then he called and says they're having some special ceremony as part of the graduation where parents/spouses/whoever can pin on their “blues,” which I think is some sort of cord for their uniforms. No idea what that's about. So could I come for the ceremony and bring him the stuff he wants to take to Germany?

Not being one to miss a chance to (a) see my kid or (b) help him have what he needs to be comfortable, I assured him I'd check it out. Turns out that I had plenty of miles to pay for a trip to Georgia without cash, so I set up the paperwork to rent a car in Atlanta for a ridiculous (high) price to drive to Fort Benning; turning 60 will give me a break on the cost of a hotel a few miles up the road from the base. He agreed to pay the baggage fee to get his stuff to Georgia, and if I have to bring other junk home, he can pay for that, too.

The day after I got my flight set up to fly from Thursday before the graduation to Tuesday after it, SS called to tell me that without the 5 days of leave, he would have to be back on base on Monday, so I should change my flight plans to Sunday or Monday. Since I had set up the flight less than 24 hours earlier, changing it was not a problem.

A couple of days later, he called to say he was going to have leave after all, so could I just cancel that flight? No, because too much time had gone by. Ready to show that he could fix problems, he got my confirmation number and called the airline to see whether his military status would allow me to change my plans on his behalf. No, but the cost to cancel the trip would be a lot less than the cost of the hotel and the rental car, but I still wasn’t quite willing to make that call.

Shortly after I landed in Los Angeles, I got a text message from him: “Have you canceled your trip yet?” No. “Good.” No leave? “Undecided.” When he called a couple of hours later, he explained that he could take a weekend pass to stay with me in Georgia, or he could used 5 days of earned leave to fly home, but his weekend would count as two of those days.

So I found myself signed myself up to fly to California for just about long enough to get used to being on Pacific Coast time, fly back to Texas long enough to sort out the California pile of clothes from the Georgia pile, reload the suitcase, and fly into yet another time zone to see David graduate. Just to add to the confusion, this weekend was also the start of daylight savings time, so the progress I was making toward gearing myself up to California time has already been confused again.

I can't possibly make the “pinning” ceremony in Georgia because that turns out to be scheduled for Thursday morning, and I can't get there from here. But I can see him “graduate,” and I can take him out to dinner, and I can get to hug him goodbye before he flies halfway around the world.

I'm planning to take an extra couple of days off on the other side of spring break to try to figure out what time zone I'm in!