Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Mom in the guest room at their house in Austin not long after we got them moved in...making decorating plans...for the dollhouse!

"...we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience and reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of our everyday buisness."

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel writing about the escape value of the ordinary hotel room

I am sort of unwilling to get up at a reasonable hour. I'm finally up just before eight. I think the sleep I lost the other night working on the Internet connection caught up with me. I have to get up bright and early in the morning to drive with my dad for Thanksgiving. So I gave in a little.

I am going to have lunch with SuRu in the neighborhood so I go out in the cold to the gym to get exercise out of the way. The next two days I won't have a gym so I'll be reduced to maybe a walk or a few sit-ups in the room. If that. Then I'll have to drive back from Dallas alone. That always makes me tired. There goes Saturday.

All I really have to do today is pack and make a spinach casserole. Packing for two casual days with relatives is pretty painless.

I do my stationery bike riding while starting a new novel by Richard Russo. Or, I should say, an older novel of his I haven't read yet.

Then I do my upper body exercise.

One woman looks over at me from another machine and says, "I don't want to be here." Oddly, I do want to be here!

Another woman bustles in and says, "I shouldn't be here, but I said 'just thirty minutes." She went on to talk to someone else about the recent Rolling Stones concert (in San Antonio? I don't know) and how she'd heard the other woman went, too. "I love them!" she exulted. She went on to tell her companion about her Thanksgiving plans. Drive to Abilene, make a big dinner and take it to the ranch.

On the way home I run an errand for FFP.

At home I shower up and go to lunch at Upper Crust with Dad and SuRu.

Back home, I pack, get together some little emergency things for Dad to take along on his trip and get together things that I want to take with me on the trip. This entails sorting through my travel drawers and gift closet. I need to clean these out thoroughly. Soon.

FFP sends me over to get the West Austin News. I've got a 'guest columnist' byline on the column FFP usually writes. I put together a package of some of the papers to send to the woman I wrote about. I send a death claim form out for Dad. I help FFP layout our holiday mailer.

I bake a spinach casserole to take tomorrow refrigerated to Dallas to reheat for my Thanksgiving contribution. It isn't much but it's the thought that counts. Isn't it?

We decide to go out to eat, something we haven't done in a while. FFP phones Zoot and reserves a table.

At Zoot it is quiet. Too quiet really. The eve of a holiday is a rough time for fine dining. In spite of, or perhaps because of, our long absence, they give us two 'bonus' courses...a tiny portion of steak tartare and a huge portion of duck confit with a frisee salad. Then we have the white bean soup with a garnish of smoked beef and the swordfish with the carrot/ginger/dried tomato thing and we are stuffed. Especially me because I had two glasses of wine.

The only thing that breaks the quiet in the restaurant is the arrival of the eight top from Odessa which is really a six top and moves to the coveted alcove. As they come in one says to another, "Are they going to keep their place on the ranch?"

We don't have a ranch. Never have. Oh, yeah, I grew up on a farm as did my dad and mom. But, ranch? No. It's a theme today, though. I think George W. is over at his ranch too, isn't he?

I'll post in a couple of days after a foray to big D. (Little a, double l, a, s.)

JUST TYPING
Today I didn't want to rise.
I wanted some lost sleep back.
And.
I didn't feel uncomfortable in bed.
I could have stayed a while.
But I didn't.
I have principles.