here’s some stuff that happened to me

I have some delightful things to tell you, as well as some other less delightful things.

Dad, NW, BF and I went on a hike on Thursday morning. Dad and BF were huffing and puffing the whole way, but I did the California trails less than a month ago every damn day for my breakfast, so I was fine. It was a nice hike, I thought. Dad later made fun of me in front of the other Thanksgiving guests by saying I “needed to commune with the earth”, which made me feel sort of shitty, when after all he was the one who took unwilling lil’ me on Kentucky hikes when I was a lass.

Speaking of feeling shitty, Dad also uncovered a box of papers of mine from when I was younger that I leafed through and decided eventually to leave behind for another time. They included some icky stuff from middle school – if you weren’t catty when you were in middle school, you must not have been a girl – and a huge sheaf of postcards Dad wrote me from his deployments. Huge. I think of these letters and postcards often with the kind of shame generally reserved for Catholics, because I almost never wrote him back, and he spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make me feel loved while he was away (for large chunks of my childhood). Seeing these postcards, flipping through and seeing his words to a nine-year-old girl a hemisphere away from him, I felt it like a knife to the gut. It was absolutely horrible. And one detail I’d managed to forget: he signed every single letter and every single postcard the same way. “I love you. I miss you. You are a wonderful girl.”

I know I was just a girl and it’s no real surprise that I couldn’t keep the kind of attention on him that he could keep on me, but I still feel…the way I feel defies description, it’s so terrible. Suicidally bad.

Don’t have any more information about the potential kid. (Early test was positive, so who knows.) If I get some more, y’all will be the first to know.

On our hike, we had a guest. There was a little dog curled up behind one of the SUVs in the lot near the trail, and we figured she was owned by someone who’d gone on a hike and left her behind. As soon as we started walking into the woods, the dog leapt up and followed us, and she ended up going along with us on the entire hike, all the way up the mountain and all the way down. It wasn’t until the very end as we were leaving, when we ran into a woman with a beautiful golden retriever, that we found out something more about this little dog. The woman advised us to read the tag, and said that the dog lived nearby. I picked up the tag, and read this:

MY NAME IS TILLIE.
I AM NOT A STRAY.
I LIVE NEXT DOOR.
LET’S GO FOR A HIKE!

This delighted me so deeply that I had a hard time getting the smile off my face for a good while. A dog that was being put to use as a buddy for local hikers, who was so friendly and well-behaved that off she went with anyone who didn’t mind having her along. (She never barked once, despite other dogs and lots of us talking.) I for one loved having Tillie with us, since I, you know, REALLY WANT A DOG, although I think Dad mostly just found it funny.

I managed not to get my father onto a yoga mat the whole time I was there, which also made me feel a little bad, as I was hoping to put at least a little space into his back, and hoping to show him just a bit of what he paid for. Just a half hour. But no luck, he balked and I didn’t want to force him. Sometime I will.

I have some other good yoga news, though. This thing panned out after all, and I am teaching a (paid?) class on Sunday mornings starting next week. I hope I’ll get some people, and I really look forward to it even if I only get a few. I have no idea about the pay situation but I hope to find out next week. Yay me! Two classes a week in December!

Thanksgiving itself was not really of note. The stuffing was made from frozen, pre-prepared stuffing-in-a-bag; NW mashed the potatoes until they were particulate, and hence tasted like the dehydrated flakes out of a box; and the vegetables were out of cans and totally unspiced. It was quite a change from the gourmet Thanksgivings I’ve gotten used to with BF’s family, and I felt like a real snob, but there it is, the food was really, really ordinary.

All week I ate a good deal of fast food on the road, and sandwiches and chips at Dad’s house. I’d sort of forgotten that the normal American diet has virtually no vegetables in it compared to the way I’ve been eating for the past year and a half. Ironically, I think I lost that pound again. WTF?

Maybe it was because I spent almost ten hours of every day I was there sleeping. BF and I just felt like catching up, I guess, because we went to bed at 9-10 and got up at 7:30-8. It was ridiculous but felt wonderful.

On the way back, there was something of a snowstorm in upper West Virginia and way-western Maryland. It was a little slippery, but the traffic was so light that I could go 55 without getting run over. Even though the consequences of snow are something I can’t forget easily enough to enjoy snow, I’ve always liked the look of snow flying at my windshield in a flurry or a storm. It was warm enough today that it wasn’t really a problem.

And tonight, we went and got sushi for dinner, after eating obscenely large burgers at Hardee’s for lunch (OMG so delicious). The fortune cookie I was given had the absolute best fortune I have ever gotten:

About time I got out of that cookie.

That’s all the news I have, except that I braved the evening of Black Friday at Target in the hopes that I’d get some money off an iPod Classic. I didn’t, but I did get the iPod, and also The Dark Knight for $3.99. Their sale is still happening tomorrow, if you’re interested. I’m not a Black Friday fan, or a fan of that kind of consumerism in general, but I would have bought both of those things anyhow.

So there you are: a successful trip and a happy weekend arriving. And a new iPod to boot. Hope you’re all well, too.