Home Again...

Sans Frank Wildhorn (or Linda Eder, for that matter), but it's an appropriate title regardless.

I've recently finished unpacking from the Washington trip. We arrived back in waterlogged Indiana this evening after dodging (in Mom and Dad's case) or flying right through (in mine and Mark's) a bank of nasty storms through the middle of the country. Indiana is still dangerously flooded in some areas -- in fact, I have a friend working to rescue stranded animals from flooded houses using flat-bottomed boats -- but miraculously, all of our houses seem to have avoided the worst of the water. My basement is a little damp, but that's to be expected since my property is divided by a creek that drains a good portion of the township to the south.

Yesterday being our last day in Seattle, we did some walking and shopping. We ended up back at Uwajimaya (I had to go back to buy a sweet red bean bun for Laura, along with every volume of Kuroshitsuji that has been published thus far -- can you tell I'm enjoying the manga?) and Pike Place. We returned to the hotel to watch the Belmont Stakes (an amazing leading run by Da'Tara!), and then had dinner at Ivar's Acres of Clams. I had the honey-glazed salmon over wilted arugula and spinach. Mmmmmm.

This morning we got up ungodly early (it was really only 6:45, but the people in the hotel room directly above ours started a wild, noisy party at 12:10 a.m., so some of us didn't get much sleep...) and drove a rented car to SeaTac. Mark and I were booked on a different airline than Mom and Dad, so we went to our gate and watched a couple of episodes of Code Geass (almost... done... with... first... series...). On the flight to Denver, I busied myself scrawling a longhand translation of chapter 4 of Kuroshitsuji on the backs of receipts and flight confirmations. This was for Mark, who wanted to read the manga but does not read Japanese. (There are fan translations of the first three chapters available online; he had already read those.)

We hit a whole lot of turbulence flying into and out of Denver and over Illinois; I later learned that this was due to a major storm system covering most of the central U.S. On the second flight I translated the rest of the chapter, though the ride was so bumpy that at times I practically lay on my tray table in a futile attempt to keep it steady so I could write.

Mom and Dad got in late -- their nonstop flight from Seattle to Indy was rerouted over Texas to avoid the storms -- but after we'd all found our luggage, we called Laura and Jon and met them for dinner (none of us had had a chance to eat, since airplanes no longer serve food or snacks). We ate around 9:30 local time, which was only 6:30 body time. Ah, jetlag...

Upon returning to my (musty, humid, sweltering, stuffy) house, I was mobbed by a couple of muddy Velcro Dobermans and yelled at by a couple of cranky cats. The cats live in a big two-story kitty house in the basement, but they didn't appreciate the water that had crept into the floor of their residence...

The air conditioning has been on for a couple hours, and the house is gradually returning to a vidable climate. Valenzia is passed out on the bedroom floor (the cool hardwood is apparently preferable to her fabric beds), and every once in a while she squirms and kicks and grumbles, trying to make the hard floor more comfy. When that doesn't work, she comes over and does a cute chin-rest on the edge of my mattress, hoping that I'll invite her up on the bed. It's really too hot to snuggle with an animal that has a 102-degree body temperature, but since I've gone two weeks with no dogs... she might make it up here after all. :)