Blessed Elephants

Here is me being blessed by an elephant in India. I finally got my act together and got the photo and got it scanned and am now actually getting it up on waywardprincess. I'm hoping to get Halloween photos up soon too.

If you want to read about what was going on with this here elephant, check out my June postings. Specifically June 12, but you have to go to the June posts link first.

Oh me so boring

My interest in and involvement with cyberspace has flagged of late. I'm not really dealing with e-mail, projects I'm involved in that involve the web or web research and, as you can tell, haven't been all that up on the blog posting thing. I also just joined "My Space," which is an online "community" of sorts. A bit like Friendster, but it seems to be more advanced. I don't really know though as I hardly ever go on Friendster and then with My Space joined and promptly started ignoring it. In fact, I can't even seem to log on to My Space. So really I know very little about either and you should ignore anything I say about it. I did put a link to my little corner of My Space over on the right here, so feel free to explore it and learn about it for yourself.

This ambivalence about computer time is probably due to being in lovely, lovely Palm Desert and reinforced by the computer room being very dark and lacking natural light or airflow. Why would I spend ANY time closeted inside when I could be out walking around in the sunny, 73 degree day, lounging by the pool or simply admiring the stunning beauty of the mountains that surround us? I also am exceedingly boring right now so have very little of any interest to report. I could talk about going to the art store this morning. Or maybe how I painted my toes the other night. Or the bloody nose I got from the dry air. But really, you don't want to hear abou that. The only thing coming close to entertaining might be tales of how my mother is on steroids. True story actually. Very intense, little woman. About 5' 1", around 95 pounds and one of the most intense people out there even when she isn't on steroids. She has a lung problem that was exacerbated by something in the desert and had to start taking this daily inhaler. I guess it has steroids in it and she claims that she has more energy and hits the ball harder when she plays tennis. So mamma's on the juice. That's about the end of the story. Even that one wasn't terribly exciting.

So yes, my day-to-day is rather boring, so I'll stop blabbering and go now.

Happy Day

Today was a great day. Simple, but great.

I was exhausted and so went to bed pretty early. Despite finding the bed torn about and pajama pieces flung across the room, I don't remember a restless night and woke around 7 feeling quite rested. It is actually rather common for me to stir about, talk, laugh, walk around, drink water, go to the bathroom, take clothes off, put additional clothes on and so on during the night with absolutely zero memory of it in the morning. The most amusing - to me - is my constant adjusting of the firmness of the matress at my parents' house in Oregon. They have one of those Sleep Master Beds (I think that is what it is called) where you can adjust the firmness of each side seperately. I was baffled by how the "firmness" settings would get so whacked out. It sort of made sense to me that it might vary slightly due to temperature or if it hadn't been set for a while (I don't really know how it works) but often I would find the setting way below or way above what I had set it for the night before. All was revealed one evening when my brother was in the hallway and said he heard me adjusting the settings over and over and over (it makes a noise when it is adjusting.) It makes me terribly curious to know what else I might be up to in the cover of darkness.

But ANYway, back to waking up feeling nicey.

I did my little morning yoga routine, had an easy breakfast of cereal (due to lacking the supplies for anything more interesting!), caught up on e-mail and then read an amusing book for a while while Intermittently admiring the bright and sunny day.

Around 10 I called the Honda place in Auburn (about an hour away) to see if there was any chance they could fit me in today so I wouldn't have to loiter around Penn Valley until Monday and then have to deal with morning rush hour AND car stuff AND an icky drive all the way to Palm Desert via evening rush hour in LA. (*side note: Tuesday evening the "check engine" light on my brand-new-to-me car went on with a resulting verdict of a many hundreds of dollars repair being needed. Ugh.) Good news was that they could. I would have to lurk around the joint for three or four hours, but they would get it done that day.

That was some fairly cheery news.

And it was followed by some VERY cheery news that the very expensive repair was actually being covered by Honda as they'd had problems with this part in many cars and extended the warranty to 150,000 miles. Woo Hoo!

That was then followed by further cheery news when they called my name after a mere 90 minutes of waiting (vs. the 180 to 240 minutes they had estimated.) So I paid not a penny and had my little car spruced up and ready for continuing the southward journey. They even washed it for me!

I caught the USC v. UCLA game at my neighbor's, came home for a nice bath and had dinner (more reconstituted soup, but it was pretty yummy) while watching a silly Adam Sandler movie. I didn't have high hopes for it - 50 First Dates - but actually really loved it. A lot. It made me feel all happy and amused. It really is funny and also pretty sweet. Not the lame-o creation I was anticipating at all. Well, it may still be lame, but it was right up my ally tonight. I'm actually resisting the urge to watch it again right now.

So yes, today was a happy day.

Perils of the Road

Driving can really suck.

Yesterday I drove from Portland to Penn Valley (a bit Northeast of Sacramento.) This is a drive that can be rather pretty, but isn't ever "great" as it is at least 9 hours even if you don't stop to stretch, pee, get gas or run into any traffic, detours or inclement weather.

I was a little tense before leaving as it is December and there is one significant mountain pass along the way with several smaller passes before and after. The weather report was showing some pretty foul weather all through Oregon with snow in the mountains, in the Columbia Gorge and maybe even in and around Portland. Wednesday night there was snow in Southern Oregon towns and while it was supposed to warm up slightly Thursday, there was still a chance it could turn icky. I contemplated waiting a little while, but after Thursday it was supposed to get truly nasty for several days so I figured I'd try to sneak through that little window on Thursday where it was supposed to be a warm 40 degrees and just raining.

The weather in Oregon definitely wasn't great. It wasn't as bad as it could have been so I was feeling fairly optimistic. Despite a couple of hours of foggy, misty, rainy, grey in which I could barely see the car 20 feet in front of me (never mind anything looming ahead of that) I was feeling okay. Even when I was driving up the icky mountain pass at 35-40 mph in a torrential, foggy, downpour that I couldn't see through I was okay. I just kept thinking, "I'm almost through it, I'm almost through it." Just a little while longer and then it will be an easy drive the rest of the way.

WELL... a bit South of Redding, right around sunset and right around the time I had to start navigating off I-5 along the circuitous route of back highways and back roads that would bring me to Penn Valley, the weather got friggin' ugly. I'd been on the road over 7 hours already and still had 2 or 3 hours ahead of me (and that was if conditions were fine) and here I was on strange roads, at night, with buckets and buckets of rain pouring down and large swatches of fog that would pop up out of the rain and unexpectedly reduce your visibilty to nothing. I couldn't see a thing, the roads had several inches of rain covering them in places, I didn't know where I was going and the traffic going the opposite direction was blinding. Later I learned that there were severe weather alerts for just about all the areas I was driving through, winds up to 45 mph along my route and as much as 3.55 inches of rain in places. Fun fun fun. When things got really bad I resolved to pull over and wait or find a motel to stay in for the night. However, the reports on the radio made it seem like it was going to get worse through the evening so pulling over didn't seem to be wise and since I was in the middle of nowhere I hadn't the foggiest notion of where I might be able to find a place to stay for the night. So I kept driving - sometimes as slow as 20 or 25 mph, despite speed limits of 55 or even 65 mph - and amazingly I didn't get lost. I was already super stressed and I don't know what I would have done if I'd gotten lost on top of it all. I probably would have cried.

It felt like it took forever but eventually I made it to Penn Valley where I found a very cold house with nothing but dried, packaged soup to eat, no hot water (the water heater had been turned way low) and the cable TV gone. Whoo hoo. I feel much better though after a long sleep, a sunny morning and a quick stop at the grocer. Now all I have to do is unpack, do laundry, take care of businessy things (relating to my car and massage), re-pack and then get in the car tomorrow morning for another 9+ hour drive to Palm Desert. Ugh!